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Oh, 2022!

Back in December of 2016 I took a look at what the next year held in store for us. It spanned three blog posts and ended happily in a nuclear barbecue to put us all out of our misery: start here, continue with this, and finale: and the Rabid Nazi Raccoons shall inherit the Earth.

It is now early 2022 and I clearly wasn't pessimistic enough.

About 15 years ago, when I was working on Halting State, I came up with a rule of thumb for predicting the near-future setting in SF. Looking 10 years ahead, about 70% of the people, buildings, cars, and culture is already here today. Another 20-25% is not present yet but is predictable -- buildings under construction, software and hardware and drugs in development, children today who will be adults in a decade. And finally, there's about a 5-10% element that comes from the "who ordered that" dimension: nobody in 2010 expected Elon Musk's SpaceX to be flying astronauts to the space station in a reusable, privately developed spaceship by 2020, nobody in 2005 expected Donald Trump to be elected POTUS in 2015, and so on.

More recently, 2016 prompted me to rethink this rule of thumb. Global climate change, accelerating technological developments in various fields (notably AI/deep learning and batteries), and political instability (in large part a side-effect of social media) made everything much more unpredictable. We're now up to about 20% of 10-year-hence developments being utterly unpredictable, leaving us with 55-60% in the "here today" and 20-25% in the "not here yet, but clearly on the horizon" baskets.

COVID19 is clearly part of the 20% "who ordered that" collection. Nobody in March 2019 imagined that by March 2020 the UK would be in lockdown and they'd be storing corpses in refrigerator lorries in New York and Milan. It's not entirely a black swan; anyone who knew about the history of pandemics knew to expect something like it in due course, and indeed Laurie Garrett won a Pulitzer prize for her book, The Coming Plague in 1994, which predicted more or less exactly what we're living through today. What she didn't predict in 1994 (writing in 1991-93) is almost more interesting than what she did— nobody in the 20th century imagined that within just two decades we'd be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later. If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.

Luckily both SARS and MERS are far less contagious than COVID19, but don't count on this continuing. Those viruses still exist in animal reservoirs, and we know COVID19 circulates between humans and other species and can hybridize with other viruses. The worst easily-imaginable COVID19 variant would be a MERS/COVID19-Omicron hybrid—call it the Omega strain—with the lethality of MERS and the contagiousness of Omicron, which is worse than the common cold, somewhere around the same level as chickenpox. (We don't remember how awful chickenpox was because (a) we're generally vaccinated in infancy and (b) it's not a killer on the same level as its big sibling, Variola, aka smallpox. But the so-called "childhood diseases" like mumps, rubella, and chickenpox used to kill infants by windrows. There's a reason public health bodies remain vigilant and run constant vaccination campaigns against them, despite these campaigns being so successful that deaths from these diseases are so rare, leading perversely to an upswing in vaccine denialism.

Remember, this isn't a simple pneumonia bug. It's a virus that attacks the RAAS/ACE2 system, in particular all the epithelial tissues, and any other cells that express ACE2 receptors on their surfaces. It can mess with your kidneys. It can mess with fat cells, changing their response to insulin. It apparently shows up in brain tissue. Viral RNA can be found in all of these cells many months after recovery from the acute infection: it may have long-term sequelae, like Shingles, which only show up years to decades later. We do know long COVID effects up to 15% of people who are diagnosed with an infection, and can last months to years. We know that immunity is short-lived, and people can get repeat infections (currently mostly by new strains, but reinfection with an old strain is not impossible).

A different "worst case" isn't that we all die of a horrendous Omega strain with the lethality of the Black Death and the infectiousness of the common cold. Instead, we get hit by a new wave every 6 months, and all of us get it sooner or later, and each time you roll 1d6 and if you come up with a 1 you get organ damage, cognitive impairment, and chronic fatigue lasting for years: after a decade, half of humanity are walking wounded.

However. I didn't come here to bore you with COVID19—you can get all the news you want in the media, mass or social. My only COVID-related prediction is that it's here to stay until we develop a temperature-stable, cheap, broad-spectrum coronavirus vaccine that is patent-free, and get round to vaccinating the entire human population, before yet another strain comes along that exhibits immune escape. This may or may not happen before Omega emerges—remember, viruses do not inevitably evolve to be less lethal, they merely obey selection pressure to not kill their hosts before they have infected new hosts. But if we're lucky? We'll dodge the Omega bullet, and by 2030 we might be getting past COVID19 and its long-term consequences.

In fact, let's ignore COVID19. What is the world of 2031 going to look like, bloated graveyards and chronic fatigue clinics and high-profile public health campaigns aside?

The mRNA vaccine technologies that gave us the high profile COVID vaccines are spin-offs of a breakthrough that was creeping hopefully towards deployment years before COVID19 fired up the afterburners and hurled it at a cost-no-object wartime deployment. One of the target diseases for the new vaccine technology is now in advanced human clinical trials: it's HIV, and by 2031 there's a very high probability that HIV (the causative agent of AIDS) will be going into the cocktail of childhood vaccinations that Christianist preachers like to rail against, along with HPV. If we're really lucky the campaign to develop a genuinely broad-spectrum anti-coronavirus vaccine will give us a cure for most strains of the common cold, with influenza on top. Influenza is a real killer, although we tend to forget about it these days, taking it for granted as endemic. We're going to see a lot of research into antiviral drugs and stuff to do with RAAS/ACE2, which incidentally implies possible curative treatments for Type II diabetes and essential hypertension.

Looking further afield: it seems likely that the end of internal combustion engines will be in sight. Some countries are already scheduling a ban on IC engines to come in after 2030—electric cars are now a maturing technology with clear advantages in every respect except recharge time. Once those IC cars are no longer manufactured, we can expect a very rapid ramp-down of extraction and distribution industries for petrol and diesel fuels, leading to a complete phase-out possibly as early as 2040. As about half of global shipping is engaged in the transport of petrochemicals or coal at this point, this is goin to have impacts far beyond the obvious. Toyota in the UK are proposing to remanufacture EVs up to three times in a decade—probably by replacing/recycling the battery systems—which implies a major disruption both to after-sales service for cars, and to the second hand market. Expect a boom in leasing, including cheap "refurbished" cars with 1-3 previous leasing cycles in their logbook, and a sharp decline in the regular second-hand market and car dealerships.

In space ... well, SpaceX seem likely to fly a prototype Starship stack to orbit in early 2022. Whether or not they go bust the next day, by so doing they will have proven that a designed-for-full-reuse two-stage-to-orbit design with a payload greater than a Saturn V is possible. I don't expect them to go bust: I expect them to make bank. The next decade is going to be absolutely wild in terms of human spaceflight. I'm not predicting a first human landing on Mars in that decade, but I'd be astonished if we don't see a crewed moonbase by 2031—if not an American one, then China is targeting crewed Lunar missions in the 2030s, and could easily bring that forward.

Climate: we're boned. Quite possibly the Antarctic ice shelves will be destablized decades ahead of schedule, leading to gradual but inexorable sea levels rising around the world. This may paradoxically trigger an economic boom in construction—both of coastal defenses and of new inland waterways and ports. But the dismal prospect is that we may begin experiencing so many heat emergencies that we destabilize agriculture. The C3 photosynthesis pathway doesn't work at temperatures over 40 degrees celsius. The C4 pathway is a bit more robust, but not as many crops make use of it. Genetic engineering of hardy, thermotolerant cultivars may buy us some time, but it's not going to help if events like the recent Colorado wildfires become common.

Politics: we're boned there, too. Frightened people are cautious people, and they don't like taking in refugees. We currently see a wave of extreme right-wing demagogues in power in various nations, and increasingly harsh immigration laws all round. I can't help thinking that this is the ruling kleptocracy battening down the hatches and preparing to fend off the inevitable mass migrations they expect when changing sea levels inundate low-lying coastal nations like Bangladesh. The klept built their wealth on iron and coal, then oil: they invested in real estate, inflated asset bubble after asset bubble, drove real estate prices and job security out of reach of anyone aged under 50, and now they'd like to lock in their status by freezing social mobility. The result is a grim dystopia for the young—and by "young" I mean anyone who isn't aged, or born with a trust fund—and denial of the changing climate is a touchstone. The propaganda of the Koch network and the Mercer soft money has corrupted political discourse in the US, and increasingly the west in general. Australia and the UK have their own turbulent billionaires manipulating the political process.

COVID brought this problem to the fore by generating a demand shock and also a labour shortage. It gets little news coverage but we're seeing the biggest wave of labour unrest in the USA since the 1930s. In the UK it's muted because the economy also took a battering from Brexit—an estimated 6% contraction since 2020—which COVID provides a convenient scapegoat for. But eventually the bills will come due. We may be entering a pre-revolutionary situation, or the ramp-up to a dictatorial clampdown (the latter is clearly in an advanced stage in both China and Russia). By 2031 it's likely to be resolved in one direction or another; I can only hope, with a minimum of bloodshed.

But this is all predictable. (Except for COVID19 which was wide-screen WTFery, like the second world war—September 1st 1939 was not in fact predictable from September 1st 1929, for example: all that was predictable was that another European war would sooner or later see France and Germany at loggerheads.)

What are the unpredictables of the past couple of years? Not the big stuff like a global pandemic, but the utter WTFery that would give texture to an SF story set ten years out? Here are some recent headlines, just by way of a baseline:

  • Counterfeit Kamov Helicopter Ring Busted: Moldovan police last week shut down a factory in Cruileni allegedly making unauthorized copies of Russian Kamov-26 coaxial rotor utility helicopters. More than 10 helicopters were under assembly in the covert factory when it was raided on June 30. (Charlie notes: yup, the Transnistrian mafia were involved.)

  • Man Upset That Hackers Stole His Bored Ape NFTs: Hackers tricked a man who was selling three NFT images of apes into giving them up for free on Saturday, according to the man, who claimed that the stolen NFTs were worth "over a million dollars." Alternative headline: Everybody loves unregulated derivatives markets until their imaginary wallet full of monkey jpegs gets stolen. (None of this would have made any sense to anyone in 2011)

  • Quantum bible changes: fundamentalists remember reading something in the King James Version, when they try to look it up it isn't there, so obviously something something quantum indeterminacy something woo woo Satan edited the Bible under us!!! because oh I give up. If you thought fundamentalist Christianity was feco-chiropteroid crazy, wait until you see what fundamentalists do when they misunderstand the Many Worlds hypothesis. See also the Mandela effect. As RationalWiki comments, with masterful understatement, "Mainstream, peer-reviewed publications have not explored the Mandela effect, and the claim that some false memories are caused by parallel dimensions going berserk is, shall we say, difficult to falsify."

Anyway, I hope you now understand why I do not believe in 2022: it's only January and it's already too silly for my willing suspension of disbelief.

2355 Comments

1:

If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.

My father was an epidemiologist. When SARS was happening and the local Chinese press was freaking out we had a long chat about what SARS actually was and how it spread, and I remember him saying if it spread by aerosol transmission it would be horrible, but as it was it just required careful isolation and tracing to contain. And as it turned out, he was right.

So yeah, we got really lucky there.

(he was also right about the political system learning nothing from a prevented epidemic, because you can't prove that your preventative measures succeeded. As witness the slow starvation of our health care system, or the closing of infectious disease monitoring units…)

2:

"Omega"

Is this a hidden reference to the Charlton Heston movies from around 1970 where a plague wiped out most everyone. And turned most of those left into creatures of the night?

3:

Is this a hidden reference to the Charlton Heston movies from around 1970

No.

Our current strain of concern is o-micron (small-o). A plausible worse version would be o-mega (big-o). See also Variola major and Variola minor.

4:

great post. i feel like if corona came a decade earlier we'd have sorted the problem out fine without a vaccine because there were much less social-media fuelled culture war brain rot. [citation needed] 65-70% vaccine uptake in the face of a killer disease is pretty abysmal. where do you get your conclusion of waning immunity? it's nowhere near an open and shut case yet. t cells in bone marrow is ~95+% after almost two years or something (+-5%). antigens are a distraction. (my speculation only)

what do you make of phil thunderfoot mason's sodium, sodium hydorxide fuel additive idea that emits aerosol and captures co2 into sodium carbonate? youtube video hl3azgw9xzm warning for annoying presentation style. manufacturing cost and major corrosion related engineering difficulties notwithstanding. cooling the planet down by some tech-bro solution seems appealing, but i don't know much. old man shouting at clouds, but because there aren't enough of them this time.

5:

Looking further afield: it seems likely that the end of internal combustion engines will be in sight.

Hyundai (Kia) just announced that most of their IC engineering teams are being transferred to EV development. Those left in IC are for regulatory changes and incremental improvements of the current designs.

Personally we were looking to replace our 11 year old Hyundai after it got totaled in Oct 2020. After looking around we decided to deal with what we have (6 year old Civic and 13 year old Tundra) until more hybrid and/or EV choices are available.

I find it interesting all the rants I see about how EVs will not work as no one wants to spend 20 minutes charging at the "new" gas station. They can't get their head around the concept that there will not exist most gas stations. Unless you drive 200 miles a day you'll charge at home. Apartments are an issue to be solved but ...

Then there are those 99 year leases. Maybe it's a US thing.

Politics

In the US, and from what I can tell in some/most of Europe, the population wants politicians who can roll the clock back to a time that never existed and can never be re-created. What happens when they realize the truth. Or will they never accept the truth and be like "true" libertarians who claim their systems never succeed because they are never done correctly.

6:

Omega - Obviously the last letter of the Greek alphabet, used for identifying "variants of concern" as mutations of SARS-NCoV19. Obs. It also being a reference to the film title is clearly coincidental.

Actually, my original serious thought was that the virus might prove lethal enough to help with AGW and, indeed, with the housing bubble.

7:

Everybody loves unregulated derivatives markets until their imaginary wallet full of monkey jpegs gets stolen. (None of this would have made any sense to anyone in 2011)

Still doesn't to me, except as vindication for Keynes' adage that markets can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

8:

I love these kinds of posts! I would, however, caution about thinking that the end of ICE car manufacturing will be dictated solely by government diktat. It will most likely come earlier and more chaotically because of manufacturers being unable to source parts and components to continue making those cars.

The auto industry is basically a pyramid where OEMs [ie the car companies] depend on module/system [Tier1] suppliers as well as component suppliers [Tier 2] and Parts suppliers [Tier 3]. Those relationships are built on contracts that span out to five years and beyond. Today, contracts are being negotiated for 2025-2030. Those contracts, if happening at all, are being done for much lower quantities of units. After all, an EV does not need a cast-aluminium gearbox assembly. The manufacturers within those tiers are highly competitive among themselves and they know they need to find alternative to manufacture and remain viable well in advance of 2030. For OEMs this means trouble finding components, and paying much higher prices for those than they used to [ie the suppliers are costing in the risks]. This means that ICE car prices will skyrocket at the same time that EV prices go mainstream.

9:

On the subject of bored apes (kinda).

Tether is exposed as a massive fraud and Bitcoin goes to zero.

or

Ransomware bandits fuck up a really important piece of US infrastructure (They came close with the recent pipeline shenanigans). The US authorities go batshit crazy and a wave of wet jobs, drone strikes and extraordinary renditions is launched against the ransomware gangs.

10:

As you say. Most of the things that have happened were predicted, with the problem is that the future is a random walk. It's relatively easy to predict the type of change, but the timescale and details are guesswork. And then there is the WTFery, like NFTs.

I would predict that most of the changes will be adaptations to things you mentioned. Given the utter pig's ear our governments are making of them (no, I will not bore you with my EV rant again), including not taking hard decisions about how to live with endemic COVID and (Cthulhu save us!) the climate, I am not expecting fun.

I am also expecting that the USA and UK will be full-blown fascist oligarchies by 2030, with the options of civil war and (probably) anti-Muslim pogroms thrown in. Sinn Fein will take Northern Ireland and possibly Eire this year, which I am not expecting to go well.

History does not lead us to believe that kleptocrats retiring to fortified islands will save them when the shit really hits the fan. It's quite likely that, by 2030, the world's financial Ponzi scheme will have fallen apart because climate change will have crashed the sources of the world's actual wealth. The problem is that the suffering will spread from the bottom up :-(

11:

Note: Your Rabid Nazi Raccoons link points to the 2nd installment instead.

12:

Toyota in the UK are proposing to remanufacture EVs up to three times in a decade—probably by replacing/recycling the battery systems—which implies a major disruption both to after-sales service for cars, and to the second hand market

One article on this

The interesting thing is that are that Toyota don't limit it to their as-yet-non-existent electric vehicles. (Although Toyota is famous for the Prius, their CEO Akio Toyoda apparently took a lot of convincing, and their first EVs are only due this year.)

13:

i feel like if corona came a decade earlier we'd have sorted the problem out fine without a vaccine because there were much less social-media fuelled culture war brain rot.

I don't know about the rest of the world but 2010 was ObamaCare and Tea Party. I can't imagine a sane response.

14:

I'd slightly disagree about the viruses, and add one thing you forgot.

First, about coronaviruses in general. It's worth remembering a few things: In November 2019, there was an international "wargame" around the response to a novel coronavirus escaping a lab in Europe. Basically, by that point, a lot of public health/epidemiologists were seriously worried about coronaviruses. And it turned out, they had extremely good reason to be concerned. Had a novel poxvirus shown up with everybody watching coronaviruses, we'd have been hosed.

Second point: the vaccine crowd was also freaked out by coronaviruses, to the point that there was an experimental SARS virus available in 2012. It was shelved because SARS had disappeared by that point. Similarly, mRNA vaccines had undergone decades of development, had produced a working horse vaccine some time in the teens and a working Ebola vaccine a short time before Covid19 hit. The bottom line (something In the Pipeline stresses repeatedly), is that we benefited from decades of groundwork that made our Covid19 response amazingly fast. And we also got lucky. Vaccine trials usually create a workable vaccine about 5% of the time. When Covid19 hit, ~130 vaccine efforts got underway. About 90% of them fizzled. We got very lucky indeed that the mRNA vaccines worked as well as they did and that they were first in line. We're also lucky that there's 8-10 other vaccines out there with decent potential.

Third point: mRNA vaccines are not universal. Pfizer's attempt to make an mRNA vaccine for the flu failed dismally (per Pipeline). I don't know whether mRNA vaccines have a 95% failure rate like the others, or whether (hopefully!) they work on some families of viruses (coronaviruses) and not on others (influenza), or whether in fact the influenza failure was not a class failure but a fixable design problem.

Fourth Point: I'm not so optimistic about HIV as all that, although I will be thrilled to be wrong. As I understand it, the problem with HIV is that the virus capsule (the normal target of vaccines) is shaggy with oligosaccharides (short-chain sugars). These little sweethearts cover the binding sites for antibodies the way seaweed covers rocks, and for whatever reason, antibodies don't target oligosaccharides the same way they do proteins. I'd love to be wrong, but apparently this is why it's so effing hard to get a vaccine for HIV. We know what it's covered with, and what it's covered with is reportedly seriously annoying.

As for a thing you may want to kick yourself for missing, I suspect there's going to be radical sturm and drang around CRISPR-CAS9 and its brood, because that tech will start maturing in the next few years. Do we accept corn with engineered heat shock proteins (Corn is C4)? What's the cost of saying no? What's the cost of saying yes?

Now if you want a fun thing, it's likely that there's going to be increased pressure in the UK and elsewhere to shut down the peat industry. Peat and peat bogs are the UK's major carbon pool, and burning the stuff, or even harvesting it, mixing it into soil, and letting it decompose and outgas its carbon there, is a Serious Problem. So there are probably going to be chants of "Bog Sphagnum Down! Keep Peat in the Ground!" at protests around garden stores and garden shows around the country. And Greg Tingey will be seriously nonplussed.

And if you want real irony, a high latitude drought may dry out bogs and peatlands to the point where they start burning mess up Scotland's air quality, you poor bastages.

15:

Laurie Garrett did not predict that the supposedly-competent "authorities" wouldn't have a fucking clue & would spend their time false-messaging the pubic for short-term political gain ...

Generally speaking, "Climate Denial" is a bust - yes, loads of rich shits are screaming that it's a "hoax" but I'm not sure anyone believes them any more. The problem is that these shits control a LOT of our present resources, even as "electric everything" is expanding enormously.
It's going to be very close-run, with some "interesting" fights along the way.
*We may be entering a pre-revolutionary situation, or the ramp-up to a dictatorial clampdown (the latter is clearly in an advanced stage in both China - Russia - AND the USA). * - Articles in today's "Grauniad both saying this & also, very tellingly, that both Putin & Xi have bet the farm on Trump "winning" in'24.

"Karnov Helicopter ring" - now are these people plausibly-deniable Ru agents, working for Putin, or ditto, working for Ukraine, or - what?
NFT hackers
Oh dear, how sad, can I start giggling now?
I point-blank refuse ( for now) to go anywhere near "Quantum bible changes"

16:

In addition to my comment about Hyundai, Chevy and Ford are all in with EV trucks. Pickups not lorries. And Chevy has stated their EV tech is modular. Which is an indication that much of it will transfer to passenger cars. And Chevy tech is GM tech.

Also didn't Volvo announce they are all in on EV?

As to pickup trucks, they are a huge part of the US market. And Ford and Chevy together dominate that segment.

I also understand Chrysler is head to EV.

Basically they are not waiting on governments.

As to the second tier suppliers, they are going to be in a world of hurt if they don't find new things to build. EV vehicles have much lower parts count in the drive train than IC.

17:

5 para 4 - Your argument assumes that no-one wants to drive more than about half their car's range from home in a single tag. Or, even if they do, they accept the limitation that they can never do more than $range without finding a charging point that they can use, is operational, and is at a location where they might happily remain for possibly several hours.

Even if they accept that constraint, what about if they get snowbound? At best, they have to use all their remaining charge on keeping warm.

18:

Most driving in the US is under 50 miles per day. Which can be handled via home charging.

And yes we will need a way to deal with longer trips. But not nearly as many gas stations as we have today.

For the last 10 years 99% of my driving time is less than 100 miles in a day.

And the folks I know who bought into EVs when 70 mile ranges where a thing made it work. Although one fellow said he wife was a bit miffed she couldn't have heat on the way home from the movies one February.

19:

Ahem, cough cough.

As the owner of a Chevy Bolt EV, I recently got hit with the discrete little ad (sarcasm) for the brand new Chevy Silverado EV" (warning, BS Chevy adsite). Yes, a four-door pickup EV, with allegedly 400 miles of range, base price $40,000. A bit big for my taste, but if they went bloated to put in more space for the batteries, that might make sense.

This actually has started me non-sarcastically thinking: it's unlikely we're going to get better car batteries than lithium any time soon (damn it!). It will be ironic if this limit turns out to favor pickup trucks (Hulk Carry Big Battery!) and eBikes (light, long range, and suitable for sideswiping little old people in crosswalks and outrunning cops). Meanwhile, the sedans I prefer get squeezed out aside from short-range urban commuters. Probably wrong as usual, but it does seem that the bigger EVs have the better ranges.

20:

Wyvernsridge
ICE vehicles - minority problem: People with older &/or reliable or "classic" cars. There's a large market for thes in specialist ( low-volume) manufacturer + "enthusiasts" keeping them going.
Expect a few ICE vehicles to go on for a surprisingly long time, simply because people using them DO NOT WANT a "new" or "modern" car. Apart from the Great Green Beast, things as diverse as the Triumph Herald & the Reliant Scimitar are likely to go on ...

EC
USA - very likely. UK not so sure - I think Bo Jo9n-Sum has already blown it & the longer he hangs on, the likelier it is we will emerge from this shit heap. ( I hope )

H
And Greg Tingey will be seriously nonplussed. - No, I won't - haven't used Peat for about 10 years - I recycle Horse-manure into the ground. If I want a peat substitute, I'll use Coir instead.

Oh yes - "Tether" ????????????

21:

Ransomware bandits fuck up a really important piece of US infrastructure

Or a lot of small things. One client's managing partner is all in with me on isolating their NAS. None of this anyone with a web browser can access needed files. If you're not on our VPN certificate list tough. Not perfect but at least he's paying attention. Unlike one of the junior partners who is all in with security unless it is inconvenient.

22:

One vaccine possibility I see you haven’t mentioned: a more effective malaria vaccine. Now there’s a basis for Afrofuturist stories!

23:

I've read several articles now about how our battery-intensive future will create a high dependency on rare earth elements that are mostly or only available in China, giving it an even more outsize international influence. OTOH I'll concede it's entirely possible such articles are seeded by fossil fuel interests. If anybody has insights on this I'd be interested to hear them.

24:

Expect a few ICE vehicles to go on for a surprisingly long time, simply because people using them DO NOT WANT a "new" or "modern" car.

I expect to keep my 2016 Civic and 2008 Tundra for 5, 10, or more years. (1.5L and 5.7L) But my next auto will likely be an EV.

As for H's comment about range. Yes. It is hard to put 5 people into a tiny car with enough battery to go 300 miles.

25:

I've read several articles now about how our battery-intensive future will create a high dependency on rare earth elements that are mostly or only available in China, giving it an even more outsize international influence. OTOH I'll concede it's entirely possible such articles are seeded by fossil fuel interests. If anybody has insights on this I'd be interested to hear them.

My insights, for what they're worth: A. Yes it's a problem. However, China's been a world player for thousands of years, so them regaining their place may not be the end of the world. Or it may be.

B. Rare earths aren't particularly rare, they're just generally abundant in low quantities. If China gets too stupidly greedy about exploiting their mines, they may just push everyone else to recycle junk, build to last, and prospect more.

C. Oil made empires in the 20th century, lithium and rare earths (and sea level rise, killer heat waves, etc) will shape politics in our century.

D. With batteries, things like lithium iron phosphate may be good substitutes. Problem is, that's a substitute for cobalt, and what you're worried about are the rare earths in motors and electronics.

E. Speaking of lithium iron phosphate, I wonder when the looming phosphorus shortage will start slapping people around? We've been remarkably stupid about our phosphorus use this last century, and it's going to bite us in this century.

Probably useless, but those are my thoughts.

26:

create a high dependency on rare earth elements that are mostly or only available in China, giving it an even more outsize international influence.

China decided to corner the market a few years back. And they did it by keeping their costs low by making their mines a toxic mess. And wiping out the health of folks working in the industry.

There are lots of rare earths around. We just have to decide on money or health when extracting them.

27:

enthusiasts

hand

My daily driver is a tool, barring catastrophic mishaps it will last me to 2030 and by then we'll have to see if there's still petrol available so it will likely be the last ICE car I own. Trading it in will be a function of when its value (being an increasingly impopular ICE) really starts dropping off and/or when it becomes too uneconomical to keep filling that tank at whatever price petrol does by then. by then used EVs of reasonable range should be in my price range, and I'm entirely fine with that.

But yeah, my 30 year old motorcycle will stay. I'm assuming there will still be a market for petrol of some kind, indeed fueled by the classic car market which is at least partly a rich people game who will be "displeased" when their megabuck "investment" become static artworks. How big the heart attack is going to be when I have to fill that 35 liter tank is anyone's guess though.

28:

Yes, a four-door pickup EV, with allegedly 400 miles of range, base price $40,000. A bit big for my taste, but if they went bloated to put in more space for the batteries, that might make sense.

They are aiming for the "work" pickup truck market. When I was looking for my own pickup 4 years ago these were all over the used marketplace. AM/FM basic radio, all crank windows, etc... The kind of truck contractors buy.

Their initial EVs are aimed at this market. With a nice inverter built in allow contractors to skip the haul around generator or two and it's 10 gallons of gas per day each to run all of their table saws and whatnot. If they do it right, they WILL have a hit.

They have to make a truck that can get to most job sites with 1 to 5 workers then power their electrical things all day then get them "home". And be re-charged and ready to go at 5AM or 6AM the next day. Which requires enough batteries to spec out a 400 mile range but really be 100 miles after a day of inverter use.

29:

The big problem is that a lot of US short range commuters live in apartments or other shared domicile situations that don't have accommodation for charging a car. Convincing those in the outer suburbs or further out that they can maybe consistently make their round trip commute is a bigger ask.

Definitely need a massive investment in charging stations, or improvement in battery capacity

30:

And then there's the question of the ability of the decaying US infrastructure to support a massive increase in electricity demand. And where does all that electricity come from, anyway?

I am deeply cynical of the US ability to come together to do any large projects at this point, unless it's fighting a new war.

31:

Convincing those in the outer suburbs or further out that they can maybe consistently make their round trip commute is a bigger ask.

People who currently have EVs with 200 mile ranges don't have a problem with daily commutes from the burbs. Who are these people who commute 100 miles each way? I know there are some but that means 3 hours at speed on interstates with empty roads. If they really are commuting those distances they are spending 5 or 6 hours on the road each day.

32:

Thinking quite a bit about this piece, and how lucky in many ways we are. In terms of your 2031 predictions what I really wonder about is whether we will see the last two years as a call to invest heavily in public health and medical care? Or will it be sticking our head in the sand until the next pandemic hits? That I think would have a huge impact in how the world develops.

But you know what won’t change? Travel. Planes will still fly at the same speed, like they have for the last 59 up years.

33:

I don't commute 100 miles plus, but I do make 8 to 12 200 to 400 mile tags a year, mostly including a requirement to be at this point by that time, and can only afford one car.

34:

Try a predicted bit of the future that's probably going to serve up some "Who ordered that?" by 2032: Surveillance Capitalism.

We know it's going to get worse in America and Brexitstan.

But how much worse?

There's only so much that can be ignored, or de-emphasised in media coverage, or grudgingly accepted as attitudes shift.

Admittedly, 'so much' is a lot, and it could turn out to be far more than you or I would ever believe.

Nevertheless, there's a limit. Like revenge porn, facilitating hate groups, and hacking a murdered schoolgirl's phone for profit...

Let's skip past asking 'how bad' and ask "What does popular rejection look like?"

Mass boycotts and cancelled accounts?

The Butlerian jihad?

Or something in between - but not European-style data protection law, in a defective polity where half the legislature is terrified of what social media (and mass-media) Dark Arts can do, and the other half are delighted with what their campaign donors' tools of surveillance and opinion-manipulation can achieve.

Cory Doctorow is trying to explore the possibilities but, somehow, it has the ring of missing something that will be obvious in hindsight.

Your thoughts?

35:

I still see no reason not to expect that it will always be more practical for me to build a biomass cooker in my back garden so I can make my own ... probably best just to call it "liquid fuel", than to buy any kind of electric vehicle with significantly more range than my mobility scooter. I mean bugger it, even the mobility scooter would be too much if its 1.2kWh of battery capacity was made of lithium cells rather than lead-acid as it actually is. I don't see anything in Charlie's predictions to reassure me that we might eventually see the back of the current situation of electric cars being dependent on one utterly vital component which will never ever become cheap. Rather, the implication to me is that the situation will get even worse, not better.

Even if it does become transformed for the better, there remains that I am one of the people who as Greg says DO NOT WANT a "modern" car, no matter what powers it. The options would then be to get some kind of electric car and then either rip out every trace of anything with any semiconductor content and replace it with something I have built myself and so know it does exactly and only what I want it to, or use its battery and motor again with my own control system to replace the engine and fuel tank in my existing car, and scrap the rest.

It is very possible that even the cooling fans in your computer these days have a 32-bit ARM core in them. Some of the cheapest and most basic low power brushless motor control chips for computer fan motors are made of ARM - the kind of chips a designer is almost certain to pick because the cost and parts count are so much less.

36:

The auto industry is currently investing in quantum cryptography. This is because the cars they are designing now will start being built in about five years and will last for another fifteen years at least, by which time they expect current crytography to be broken by quantum computers, which means they will need quantum-secure ways of protecting their software updates. There could be interesting consquences if they get this wrong. There will presumably be other risks from the development of quantum computing; not necessarily for future systems but older encrypted data, that is not being actively maintained, may be at risk.

37:

The difference between the USA and UK is that the politics in the former is well on the way to fascism, but the (legal) groundwork for fascism in the latter is almost complete.

Imprisonment without trial or declared reason? Tick.

Kafaesque trials with no appeal? Tick.

Arbitrary removal of citizenship and expulson? Tick.

Arbitrary censorship? Tick.

Ability to call in private/foreign armed forces? Tick.

Ability to suspend normal governance sine die? Tick.

If we continue a gradual, genteel decline, nothing much will happen. But, if things for rapidly and badly wrong, and there is public revolt, we shall see how many of those powers they use.

38:

Your comment is one reason that EVs will be a disaster in the short term in places like the UK - the USA is not alone. The other is that they are being used as an excuse to avoid facing up to our fundamental transport problems (e.g. simple lack of space).

39:

Re vaccine developments--I haven't the technical expertise to evaluate the claim, but Walter Reed Army Institute of Research is apparently well along on a multivalent vaccine for coronaviruses, a "soccer-ball-shaped protein" with 24 faces that can be used to attach spike proteins from several different coronaviruses at once. DefenseOne.com

40:

"Quantum Bible changes"

Who's saying it's limited to the Bible? The internet is stuffed with people who obviously don't remember watching the Time Lord mind wrestling scene in The Brain of Morbius from the original broadcast, and talk a load of impossible crap about that and The Deadly Assassin. Someone's been messing with the route of the GW150 special that got stuck on Dainton. The publication dates for the early Hitchhiker's books are all fucked up. Trivial, perhaps, but there's a list of things like this as long as your arm and a remarkable number of them show up a few years around the time when the first obvious pair of hosts or whatever you call them appeared in Downing Street and the White House. La Polynomielle has had a few things to say about other aspects of this same cluster. Trying to maintain full consistency on that sort of scale is hard, and there are a lot of pink mountains with SEP field generators on.

41:

Re politics

It's interesting that almost every politically conscious person (and you strike me as such) predict, for the future, the victory of the other side and an oppressive nondemocratic nightmarish regime.

I think that you will find it amusing speaking with conservatives. The predict for the USA to become a "woke" oppressive regime and they, too, predict they will be "boned".

Reading this article it feels like that part is a bit like that - a scare-induced bleak prediction for the future. Let me tell you: conservatives are as scared as you are and if you could speak with each other you would probably find a lot of common ground.

42:

Excellent recap of Covid - thanks!

EV - I had to get a new car and decided to lease instead of buy because I didn't want to get stuck with an unsellable car. Also figured that in 5 years' time, most of the gas stations would probably have been switched over to EV recharge stations.

EV - Large truck fuel usage is often omitted/not shown as part of fuel used for driving. It's at least as large as for cars but I haven't seen much to suggest that large truck manufacturers are serious about going the EV route.

Go-Local Agriculture - I'm seeing more local news stories plugging the community and home garden - great but no where near enough to reduce reliance on imported/shipped foods. I'd really like to see large-scale commercial produce gardening done within or at least near major urban areas. Since I also think that at least 10% of pre-Covid urban jobs are unlikely to exist in the next 2 -3 years, that leaves a lot of empty office space most of which could easily be converted to growing produce (heat, water, air circulation, temp regulation already built-in).

DT 2024 - Unfortunately I think it's likely that he and his son (as his 'personally acclaimed' VP candidate) are going to try for this election. We'll know soon enough later this year once the current senate elections are done. Player with biggest potential clout to upset the current narrative - SCOTUS. So far the public and both parties seem to accept SCOTUS rulings - if this changes, then the odds of a civil war go sky high.

Viruses, cancer cures, etc. - As you said, the mRNA vaccines were in development for over 10 years before COVID-19 hit. The number of open access papers since then has been enormous - a great boon to all the other researchers! However, the rush to publish has also exposed some problems, esp. how the media -- because most don't have specialist PhD's on staff -- can get things wrong when they paraphrase the results in their reporting. (Then again - media has sports experts for every major sport, so expecting them to afford the same level of knowledge/expertise in their science reporting really is not a stretch.)

US brain drain - you haven't mentioned this but I think it's already in progress. Not sure whether the UK is similarly affected. Basically, this started with DT and has been increasing because most folks either don't know or choose not to know that one of the USA's biggest strengths has been its reputation based on its funding of leading-edge research therefore its ability to recruit top students/researchers from other countries including places that some Americans now deem hostile.

Kazakhstan - treasure trove of really useful raw materials (including uranium) that any of the three of the old powers could use.

43:
  • media has sports experts for every major sport, so expecting them to afford the same level of knowledge/expertise in their science reporting really is not a stretch.*
    Can you actually even do a Batchelor's, never mind a Doctorate, in USian Hand-Egg? ;-)
44:

Meanwhile, the sedans I prefer get squeezed out aside from short-range urban commuters.

I think it's just a matter of the market being tested and a variety of configurations being tested. I thought it was cute that the first image of that truck is being loaded with solar panels, and this "mid gate" thing is new to me (the first image demonstrating it seems to be a genuine Water Rower rowing machine, something that I wouldn't have thought the usual pickup truck market would instantly recognise but on second thoughts, in this case that isn't the primary target market, the target market is probably pretty much me, albeit they won't be available in Oz anytime soon). I actually like this... I once owned a lightweight single-cab-alloy-tray Hilux, it was more economical to run than you'd think with no load on, just not that comfortable for moving older relatives around (leaf spring rear suspension for instance). It looks like, in the fallout of abandoning the Holden brand, Silverado Utes are the only vehicles GM currently sells in Australia, though not the electric version (maybe obviously).

In terms of sedans, leaving aside the Telsa and friends, it seems like everyone is coming to the party. See this offering from Volvo's subsidiary Polestar, which I imagine is auditioning tech destined to find its way into Volvo's regular fleet in due course. I'm intrigued more in terms of the view on what will happen in the middle size range, where it's possible to tow a small caravan or a decent sized boat. 1500kg ATM works for me, and I'm keen to see what companies like Subaru, Toyota or Mazda end up offering in that class (that is, more affordable but relatively respectable).

45:

Couple of thoughts ...

Those counterfeit helicopters - was there anything technically wrong with them other than who was building them?

I understand about it being the Russian Mafiya & maybe they were selling them to sketchy buyers & funding other criminal enterprises in addition to ripping off the Kamov Design Bureau's intellectual property ...

But were they following the designs closely enough to produce a reliable, airworthy product?

The article said Moldova is one of the poorest of the former Soviet Republics. Maybe if the demand is there some legit Moldovan company could license the design & help lift the country?

And if THEY ban IC engines what's going to happen to all the classic cars?

There are thousands of MGBs still on the highways here in the U.S. (because you could literally build one from scratch using parts manufactured by British Motor Heritage) ... and it's not just MG, just about anything produced by what eventually became British Leyland can be restored and made driveable because of them.

And that's not even counting old USAin, French, German or Italian classic cars ... or old Japanese cars that have lasted long enough to obtain classic status. I know someone who's almost finished restoring a Lancia Fulvia Coupé and it's beautiful. He's already driving it - legally licensed in California - but he says there's still work to be done to return it to showroom new condition.

I support efforts to combat climate change from greenhouse gases, but I'd hate for the world to lose all those classics.

46:

Can you actually even do a Batchelor's, never mind a Doctorate, in USian Hand-Egg?

Yes but it is indirect. Sports management. Sports medicine. Etc...

47:

David L
They are
The US, generally has ZERO public transport options.
"Metro" & rail lines are hated by everybody else who does not benefit directly, so nothing ever gets built ( almost)

EC @ 38
SPOT ON
Reducing aviation/landing duties & deliberately avoiding going for electric railway traction ... one place where Scotland has got it right.
... ... @37
Could you point to those in the UK? I thought that was all "Patel's proposals, not actuality.

Pigeon @ 40
SPECIFY ..
I really cannot be arsed to trawl through the shitgulls rantings

shmarik
NO
Some of us are old enough to have been born in the direct shadow of WWII ... the "conservatives" are NOT - they are fascists - I can tell the difference between the two. I (now) disagree with the former, but am deadly afraid of the latter.

SFr
"GoLocal Agriculture is HARD WORK - ask me how I know this?
"SCOTUS" - let's not forget that a wrong SCOTUS ruling made the US civil war inevitable.

48:

The Raven @ 22: One vaccine possibility I see you haven’t mentioned: a more effective malaria vaccine. Now there’s a basis for Afrofuturist stories!

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

I'm guessing that would fall under the "20-25% ... not present yet but is predictable -- buildings under construction, software and hardware and drugs in development," ...

It would be great if it happened sooner than 10 years.

49:

David L @ 24:

Expect a few ICE vehicles to go on for a surprisingly long time, simply because people using them DO NOT WANT a "new" or "modern" car.

I expect to keep my 2016 Civic and 2008 Tundra for 5, 10, or more years. (1.5L and 5.7L) But my next auto will likely be an EV.

As for H's comment about range. Yes. It is hard to put 5 people into a tiny car with enough battery to go 300 miles.

My 2003 Jeep will probably be the last car I buy, unless I can find a street legal small van similar to the AxiamPro e-Truck with a range of at least 100 miles. The AxiamPro has a range of 80km (50 miles) and I need something nearer to 70 miles (112km) to make the round trip to the VA Hospital over in Durham (because I couldn't drive it on I-40 & NC 147, so I'd have to take back roads).

But the AxiamPro has the cargo capacity I need to haul guitars & amps to a jam session or cameras, lights & ... to a photo shoot.

Presuming Covid ever goes away enough I get to attend another jam session or do a photo shoot.

Finding something I could afford to buy would be a bonus.

50:

The auto industry is currently investing in quantum cryptography. This is because the cars they are designing now will start being built in about five years and will last for another fifteen years at least, by which time they expect current crytography to be broken by quantum computers, which means they will need quantum-secure ways of protecting their software updates. There could be interesting consquences if they get this wrong. There will presumably be other risks from the development of quantum computing; not necessarily for future systems but older encrypted data, that is not being actively maintained, may be at risk.

I don't dispute that the automakers are investing in QC. However, I'm not sure your model is right. I know, for the Bolt, the dealer at least was talking more about a lifespan of 5-10 years when we got it. His point was that the battery would need to be replaced, which requires disassembling the car, so when we got to 80% battery, why not get a new car?

Are they still on that model? Not exactly. They screwed up the battery assembly, so Any Day Now, we'll get called in to get the battery replaced on their dime. But still, replacing a battery is harder than replacing a gas tank or even an engine, so it's not clear that EVs are being built to have the same lifespan as ICs.

As for cryptography, GM has this interesting system of updating the firmware: we make an appointment, take it to the dealer, and get the firmware updated and a tuneup. Whether it's less hackable or not, I can't say. I can say that I unsubscribed from their data plan after a month because it was slower than the cell towers at the time.

Finally, about quantum computing, there's what might be an interesting problem: helium is currently produced from natural gas, primarily natural gas in certain fields in the Southern Plains of the US. And we urgently need to phase out natural gas production. Does that mean helium production will also disappear? It might! Or it might not (pump up natural gas, extract helium, pump natural gas back into ground).

However, if quantum computers need to be supercooled, they need a supercoolant. Helium is ideal. If it becomes too expensive, I'm not sure what replaces it. Liquid hydrogen? STP superconductors? It would be ironic indeed if the quantum AI deep learning neural net thingie gets shut down because there's not enough helium to let it keep its cool.

51:

My "who ordered that?" Covid prediction is that the ten year mortality rate is 100%.

(No, probably not, we'd expect to see signs of that already, but the ability to get good stats on Long Covid is pretty clearly actively absent. I doubt the actuaries have a grip on this yet. And the people who are least unlikely to have good stats raised my life insurance premiums to 160% of their previous level this year.)

Besides batteries, we've got methanol-air fuel cells, aluminium-air, alkaline fuel cells (probably with NH3), and various strange things with pump-able charged electrolytes. The sticking point is military; power rests on oil. As soon as someone gets serious about zero-fossil-carbon fighter aircraft, then we see something.

Any workable solution has to keep working with a relatively tiny industrial base, because we have no real expectation that we're going to get sea level rise that's slow enough to cope with in as much as the port infrastructure goes. (E.g., US refinery infrastructure on the Gulf; it's not something you can either move uphill or wrap in sea walls, because the ground it's on is porous.) This is going to reduce manufacturing capability to what you can get your single city to build.

52:

Greg Tingey@ 48: David L
They are
The US, generally has ZERO public transport options.
"Metro" & rail lines are hated by everybody else who does not benefit directly, so nothing ever gets built ( almost)

That's not entirely true. Public transit outside of metropolitan areas is sometimes hard to find, but things are a lot better than they used to be. Not by any stretch of the imagination good enough, but they have been improving & I expect they will continue to improve, even if only in fits & starts.

53:

Incidentally, the 1970 Charlton Heston movie was based on the book "I am legend" (aka "The Omega Man") by Richard Matheson published in 1954.

54:

I don't know if this matters about Hacker News readers hammering your blog, but Outage Report & PSA: Publishing supply chain shortages both show up as still open for new comments.

55:

Well, these boys from Hacker News are pretty smart, they've managed to inject a few vulns (like NOSCRIPT not working no more on the site) and so on. Could be just the local machine, but hey.

Problem is: we do Wet-ware, not fucking silicon.

For Host: not even close. SpaceX and so on is akin to the old CCCP stuff. It's gaudy, it's good for PR, it doesn't solve anything[1]

Look: here's a list[2] -

The sound of a cat's footfall The beard of a woman The roots of a mountain The sinews of a bear The breath of a fish The spittle of a bird

1) Well, we've seen enough dead Cats thrown to see and hear the footfall, haven't we?

2) It's 2022 - if you're not into Trans* stuff, just hit Twitter (TODAY!) for the woman with a beard (PCS?) who got lazer treatment! See? Happens to XX Women as well, dears

3) Really? She's a really lovely woman, all of 5'4", married to GOT's "Mountain" who is large, strong and Icelandic (oooh, nice tie-in there). Her being "rooted" (Aus slang) is... kinda a given

4) Whelp, now then: Bears have Sinews. It's kinda a given due to being a mammal. But to honour the intent, Russia and LNG. LNG is their Sinews in Geopolitical terms, and well... if you missed it, the Bear's Sinews are important.

5) Easy one that: look up Aquariums and the massive ecological damage they've done. If one wants to get technical, blowing bubbles is .... (no, really) a Clown Fish thing[3]

6) Spittle of a Bird? Whelp. Strangely enough, here it is: Human case of bird flu detected in the UK https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1479107218683224064 6th Jan 2022

Point being: No. Apes and so on are merely Capital's sweaty balls.

Our kind of Chaos?

Bachman Turner Overdrive - You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet 1974 Video Sound HQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cia_v4vxfE

p.s.

Love the Twitter catching up to the Baldur's Gate 3 Gith stuff... way after we noted it. Love ya, you big bald bear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_(spacecraft) Hi! You might want to know more about this stuff!

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleipnir

[3] http://www.reefsanctuary.com/forum/index.php?threads/clown-fish-blowing-boubles.64813/

56:

Ah.

Missing list due to parsing errors:

The sound of a cat's footfall The beard of a woman The roots of a mountain The sinews of a bear The breath of a fish The spittle of a bird

57:

As to predicting the future.

15 years ago yesterday/today depending on time zone, Apple / Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. On stage at times were the heads of Google (as a close partner), Yahoo (as THE company of the Internet with the largest base of email users), and the head of Cingular (a leader in US cell service at the time). My how times have changed for these folks/

And with all the wizards and experts (pundits and heads of cell phone companies) who thought the slab of glass concept was just plain stupid. On top of the stupidity of a non replaceable battery. It will be a total market failure according to those wizards and experts. And I personally know some of them who still feel it's a failure. (Not sure of what their metric actually is but ...)

Oh yeah. Many of those same wizards and experts also claimed a 3.5" diagonal phone screen was absurdly too big.

Let's check back in 5 or 10 years with EVs. They may have flopped but then. Or not.

58:

@Mods - genuine weirdness. Can't post those things. Remove the last one. Or be a bitch and count a double-post as our # limit.

The sound of a cat's footfall The beard of a woman The roots of a mountain The sinews of a bear The breath of a fish The spittle of a bird

Silly boys: björk - it's oh so quiet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htobTBlCvUU

Do a grep to ChristChurch, providing you live premonitions of it: This Time, We're Doing it Real Style not little boys holding guns.

60:

Also, a level3.net router in Frankfurt(?) has been dropping packets. FWIW I just noticed that (at least one) old pages have lost some formatting in the comments, e.g. newlines (as rendered in firefox and lynx, at least). The old html had "<br />" tags where a newline was supplied by the comment writer, and the new html is missing those tags. (There are a few more apparently-markdown-related problems.)

61:

Robert Llewelyn (played Kryten in Red Dwarf) has a YouTube series called Fully Charged covering renewable energy and EVs. It’s been going about a decade, which is also about how long he’s had his Nissan Leaf. It was actually one of the U.K. press launch vehicles which he was so impressed with that he persuaded Nissan to sell to him.

Fast-forward to 2021 and yes, the battery was slightly degraded[1] even though the rest of the car was fine. Fortunately there was a company in the Netherlands who swapped it[2] for a newly new 40kWh battery from a written off Leaf, so now he has a 10 year old car with a (much larger) 1 year old battery. I believe his old battery then got repurposed as a grid storage unit (in conjunction with a bunch of others obviously).

The video covering this also had a throwaway reference to a company he’d covered previously - Ubitricity - who do an on-street charging solution using lampposts. Basically if you replace sodium lampposts with LED lampposts, then since they use less power you can install a type-2 charging port in the lamppost and people can charge their cars! Just one of the many solutions to the oft claimed insurmountable problem of “But what about people who don’t have a driveway, how will they charge their cars?”.

[1] See also that taxi firm in Cornwall who had a Nissan Leaf taxi that did >100k miles in the normal amount of time for a minicab, was mostly charged on rapid chargers and didn’t have the battery die. [2] And this process didn’t cost as much as buying a replacement Nissan Leaf either!

62:

Using lampposts as a charging solution is a great idea which needs a little extra thought in some places. Such as how to stop people living in Kensington from using the road next to it as a permanent parking space for their third SUV. They'll get there eventually.

63:

are we really likely to have the lithium available for this wholesale replacement of the ICE car fleet which everyone is so sanguine about? i realize there's quite a bit in afghanistan once things are stable enough there for mining operations to commence (cough), though i'm sure the chinese have some ideas i don't see the electricity supply keeping up either the whole renewables business looks to be desperately dependent of fossil fuels for construction, maintenance and eventual replacement it needs huge backup facilities (gas, realistically) for those calm, cloudy days which crop up and then of course u have nuclear, the only real potential source of baseload power if ur serious about going zero carbon, which private companies are somehow reluctant to jump at unless governments promise to cover all manner of future liabilities we built out our civilization largely on cheap energy steadily increasing energy prices mean economic contraction afaict

64:

46 adjunct - I'd argue that a Lancia Fulvia is less polluting than a Honda Insect, Toyota Pious, or even a Tesla Model 3, simply because the Lancia is at least 50 years old, so the manufacturing energy is written down so well. Same argument applies to any classic MG or Triumph you care to name.

48 re 38 - Absol-frelling-lutely, and we have plans for more of the more heavily trafficked lines to be electrified too. Less certain there's so much advantage in doing the "West Highland lines" North from Craigendorran, since they typically see 3 or 4 passenger movements each way per day, and I think similar numbers of freight movements.

64 - I just looked out my window and counted. There is maybe one lamppost between 3 mixed semi-detached and detached houses along my street. One of the neighbours typically has 5 or 6 vehicles "resident"; another one has 4. And a couple of hundred m away we go to 4 story flats. Presuming 1 vehicle "resident" they don't have enough streetside to all get parked.

65:

ah right, u need to put in paragraph breaks explicitly

never mind

66:

Somewhere between "predictable" and "who ordered THAT?!" would be:

Elon Musk Becomes President

In January 2025, shortly after Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 election, Elon Musk founded his "Forward America" party, bringing a new meaning to the term "machine politics". Forward America engaged in laser-targeted political campaigns focussed on a combination of local grievances and national issues. Forward America's lack of history was a big advantage; because it was not in hock to any traditional interests and had no historical baggage it was able to create a movement out of constituencies that had previously thought they had nothing in common. Its signature policies were a rebuilding of American scientific prowess (this pitch greatly helped by the fact that Musk's rockets were now supplying the US moonbase) and a Universal Basic Income to replace social security, paid for by a federal income tax increase and a dismantling of state tax haven laws, which meant that many billionaires suddenly had to start paying a lot more tax.

When Musk was asked about the latter, he replied "After the first billion money becomes just a way of keeping score. If the government knocks a zero off the end of everyone's high score, it doesn't change anything."

Musk's habit of mixing business and politics was widely criticised; he famously threatened one recalcitrant mid-west senator that he would stop Amazon deliveries to his state. But the rebounding economy, along with his handling of the Ukraine Crisis and the Taiwan Controversy, led to his re-election in 2028.

67:

My understanding is that Elon Musk is not eligible to be (USA) President. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born-citizen\_clause\_(United_States)

68:

69 para 5 - Just why would anyone think that Musk controls "Large River corporation"!?

70 - "Musk was born to a Canadian mother and South African father, and raised in Pretoria, South Africa." Seems pretty conclusive to me.

69:

Since I’m presuming you’re not engaging in argument of the excluded middle[1] I’m not certain what your point is? I did after all specifically point out that Ubitricity’s lampposts are just one method by which on street charging can be provided.

[1] In this case it would be “Either everyone who parks on the street must be able to recharge from an Ubitricity lamppost, or they don’t solve the problem and are therefore useless!” I guess?

70:

Everything I mentioned is part of UK law, often created during the rule of That Bliar.

Imprisonment without trial or declared reason and Kafaesque trials with no appeal. Part of various 'terrorism' laws, and both have been widely reported as being used.

Arbitrary removal of citizenship and expulsion. Patel proposes it to extend that, but it's already being used - Shamima Begum is one example of many.

Arbitrary censorship. It is to express support for the democratically elected government of Palestine, for a start.

Ability to call in private/foreign armed forces. Thatcher and Bliar, plus older laws. It's not been used, yet, as far as I know.

Ability to suspend normal governance sine die. Witness the suspension of the Fixed Term Parliament Act - the same powers allow for suspension of elections (as was done in WW II).

71:

i realize there's quite a bit in afghanistan once things are stable enough there for mining operations to commence (cough), though i'm sure the chinese have some ideas

Lithium in Afghanistan is somewhere up in the mountains. And to be honest Afghanistan is a country that nearly defines "middle of nowhere". No ports and overland routes to major cities is hard. I've read where building rail and road lines into where they Lithium is located would likely take tens of $Billions. If not 100s. Then you get to start building the mines and processing.

There are much easier places to find Lithium. In the US, South America, and other places. It is all a matter of how much money do "we" want to spend to extract it and not leave behind a toxic mess. Bolivia has a huge deposit but so far is reluctant to let it be extracted (salt flat I think) due to their history of being exploited by foreign companies and countries. And the current estimates are that Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina have the largest deposits in the world. With the US and Australia coming in tied for 4th. China is in 6th place just now.

72:

Removal of citizenship dates from 1914; it was part of a bunch of laws introduced in response to a widespread panic about German citizens living in the UK after WW1 started.

73:

Apparently in the US a lot of first and second generation German immigrants took crash courses in learning English during the WWI period. Especially from 1917 onward.

74:

Pigeon: I don't see anything in Charlie's predictions to reassure me that we might eventually see the back of the current situation of electric cars being dependent on one utterly vital component which will never ever become cheap. Rather, the implication to me is that the situation will get even worse, not better.

Yeah, about that:

The running trend of the century is "rent, not own". This is driven by the vendors, not public demand. It's already endemic with consumer goods: consider the significant replacement of CD sales with streaming music services, of DVDs with Netflix, of mass-market paperbacks with ebooks, and so on. It's leasing all the way, except for disposable or skin-contact items -- your house (rental, unless you're rich enough to put down a 10% deposit on a half-million quid's worth of bricks), your laptop (this is not "your" laptop, Pigeon, you're one of the awkward squad who do the home-build thing: the "you" I'm referring to is the 95% of the population), your games console, your smart TV (the rental is paid in eyeball time on the manufacturer's intrusive advertising), and so on.

All part of the financialization and hollowing-out of our infrastructure: the oligarchs own stuff, we peons just pay to borrow it.

Anyway, cars are next. Already many cars are bought on a lease-purchase basis over 36 months of payments: and you can return your 3 year old vehicle as a deposit on your new set of wheels when the lease is up, rather than buying it out. Given that battery packs age, this is an obvious point at which the car manufacturer can run it through the automotive equivalent of an aviation C-check — tear it apart, thoroughly check all the components, replace those which are worn or faulty, put it back together again, recertify it, and lease it out again at a slightly lower price point as "remanufactured".

EVs need a lot less maintenance than gas guzzlers as there are far fewer moving parts to go wrong. Also, they're instrumented to hell and report on their state to HQ via their built-in cellular data link. There's no reason why 95% of problems can't get fixed without owner intervention: you're driving to work when you get a pop-up on the dash saying "your vehicle needs preventative maintenance, we'll send an engineer to collect it at 11am, it will be dropped back off in your office car park at 2pm, if the maintenance runs late we will leave you a complementary valet car instead."

95% of the automotive public will be happy to have a system like this: cough up your monthly rent, and that's the end of your worries unless you drive into a brick wall (which is difficult -- the car will try to dodge).

By the time this is happening, people like you will find it increasingly hard to get spare parts and all the local maintenance shops will be going out of business/selling up to become local depots for the manufacturers.

Note that if you want them to, Apple will sell you an iPhone, iPad, or Mac on this basis. I'm pretty sure Dell or Lenovo will do the same. I'm sure that if British houses weren't so idiosyncratic and variable, some of the big chains would do exactly the same for entire fitted kitchens and bathrooms.

75:

"Musk was born to a Canadian mother and South African father, and raised in Pretoria, South Africa."

Well, I figure if Demolition Man can get away with it, I should be able to as well.

76:

Those counterfeit helicopters - was there anything technically wrong with them other than who was building them?

They were airworthy, sure -- the question is, what state were the parts going into them in? It's possible they were using counterfeit parts from hole-in-the-wall factories. Or remanufactured parts that had already exceeded their fatigue life. Obviously certified lifetime for parts is less than the actual lifetime-to-failure, but it's possible/probable that dodgy parts would fail unexpectedly and early. And do you really want to rely on a chopper where the Jesus nut that holds the rotor head together is either time-expired or a counterfeit?

(The chopper in question is a very widely used crop duster/agricultural bird throughout the former Eastern bloc. Originally with radial engines, although later models had gas turbines instead, designed to be maintained collective farm style, i.e. "bash it with a hammer".)

The difference between these Kamovs and an MGB or Lotus 7 kit car is that if the car gearbox breaks, you get out and call AAA. If the Kamov's gearbox breaks, you probably die.

77:

Does that mean helium production will also disappear? It might! Or it might not (pump up natural gas, extract helium, pump natural gas back into ground).

My guess:

Pump up natural gas, extract helium, use methane as industrial feedstock -- either for chemical processes or for polymerization and burning as aviation fuel (we're not going to get long-haul air travel off combustion, period). Then carbon offsetting ensues.

In the very long time frame it's possible to manufacture helium -- it is, after all, just slowed-down alpha particles with a couple of bound electrons. It's even a by-product of fusion reactors. Just a very expensive one to manufacture.

Next century (if only because of the distances involved) someone is going to go helium prospecting out in the Oort cloud. Big snowball comets might well have enough helium to make it economically viable. But the boiling point of 4He is about 4 kelvins, and cosmic background temperature is 2.7 kelvin -- it's going to have to be a very long way out, or down in a gravity well it can't easily escape from. Best excuse for mining Jupiter?

78:

raised my life insurance premiums to 160% of their previous level this year

Yes: a news item doing the rounds last week indicated that the US life insurance industry had noticed that mortality in 2020 was up 40% over 2019. The people COVID kills directly are the tip of the iceberg: there's also every deferred cancer treatment, every fatal stroke or heart attack that can't get an ICU bed, kids dying of neglect or abuse because carers can't/don't/died, people shot by idiots with guns who were tipped over the edge by one conspiracy theory too many, people who died of some sort of obscure epithelial tissue injury 9 months after they "recovered" from COVID, and so on.

As soon as someone gets serious about zero-fossil-carbon fighter aircraft, then we see something.

Or as soon as a game-changer comes along that makes fighter aircraft as obsolete as armoured knights (optionally: with heavy cavalry pistols and half-armour). I've heard drones mooted as being a disruptive military technology on the same scale as machine guns, aircraft, and tanks, but it's still very early days.

79:

steadily increasing energy prices mean economic contraction afaict

Not to worry: between the stage 4 demographic transition most of the planet is undergoing (India just dropped below replacement-level fertility) and the effects of multiple pandemics (I'm betting COVID19 won't be the last new zoonosis to jump the species barrier this century and go pandemic -- not by a long way), we're probably within 20 years of peak population, and the population level around 2100 is about what it is now (assuming we don't all die of the next plague to come along).

In fact, declining electricity demand is probably something you can count on. Better insulated dwellings, more efficient transport and lighting, population peaking then beginning a slow decline: it all adds up.

80:

Less certain there's so much advantage in doing the "West Highland lines" North from Craigendorran, since they typically see 3 or 4 passenger movements each way per day, and I think similar numbers of freight movements.

The US appears to be trying out battery-electric freight locomotives, which is a big ask in my opinion ... but eminently practical for passenger rail on the highland routes in Scotland as an alternative to overhead electrification.

Lamppost charging for cars is a good idea that'll work in suburbia ... and not at all here in central Edinburgh, where there are probably 20-50 dwellings for every street lamp along a stretch of road, because we're all in apartments.

81:

paws
I'd argue that a Lancia Fulvia is less polluting than a Honda Insect, Toyota Pious, or even a Tesla Model 3, simply because the Lancia is at least 50 years old, so the manufacturing energy is written down so well. Same argument applies to any classic MG or Triumph you care to name.
THIS, entirely. The Great Green Beast was built in 1996 & is good for at least another 10-20 years. I bought it on the predication that I was NEVER, EVER going to buy another car.
Try persuading the fake greenies of this?

EC @ 72
Euw.

Charlie @ 76
"Renting" - not me, AT ALL. As you say, it's simply asking for trouble, down the road. IIRC the combination of bankruptcy, poor harvests & the extortions of the Rentiers was what did for the French monarchy in 1792.
And Bo Jon-Sun is deliberately going down this path! @ 80
Or as soon as a game-changer comes along that makes fighter aircraft as obsolete as armoured knights ... drones - Lasers - the USN are already trialling these. At which point defence, particularly fixed-point "fortress" defence upends the scissors/paper/stone of military balance, again.
@ 82
One "TOC" in this country is already trialling tri-power large locomotives: )

82:

someone is going to go helium prospecting out in the Oort cloud

have you had changed your mind that much about exploiting the solar system since your high frontier post back in 2007, don't the decades just fly by

i realize everybody's favorite emerald mine heir has moved the conversation a bit with respect to getting up there, but the effort required to keep people alive and healthy in space still seems out of proportion to what they'll be able to do out there economically (as opposed to scientifically)

83:

Don't bet on the latter. I can see no sign of more efficient transport - if anything, it looks like the converse in most countries (definitely including the USA and UK). We are showing no signs of curbing our lust for concrete, and the 'third world' is likely to move towards our types and level of transport and concrete use. And then there is Heteromeles's hobby-horse - if air conditioning becomes critical for most of the planet, that's a big, new requirement for electricity.

84:

"Renting" - not me, AT ALL. As you say, it's simply asking for trouble, down the road. IIRC the combination of bankruptcy, poor harvests & the extortions of the Rentiers was what did for the French monarchy in 1792.

News flash: it's not a local trend, it's global -- disseminated through the interlocking structure of free trade treaties created by WTO, WIPO, et al. (The EU implements a subset of this: not so much de-fanged as, they regularly bleed the venom sacs so it can't bite you quite as badly as the US private equity lobbying interests responsible would like.)

At some point I expect it to collapse. The popularity of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general can be seen -- at the punter level -- as a symptom of hopelessness at the prospect of ever getting ahead through conventional means: the bank is a casino, it's run by the mafia, and the usual rules apply (you can't win, you can't lose, you're not even allowed to quit the game). And at the issuer end, NFTs are a symptom that VCs and PE investors are unhappy with the degree of regulation to which conventional issues are subject. There's going to be a Black Thursday sooner or later ...

85:

Assuming they can get the numbers to make sense, yes, but that's not clear. I have seen analyses that vary from "yes, by 2025" to "no chance".

86:

In fact, declining electricity demand is probably something you can count on

In developed countries maybe, though all those shiny new electric cars are going to need quite a bit, but i can't see it in developing ones unless they somehow get to leapfrog a lot of the stages we had to go through

87:

have you had changed your mind that much about exploiting the solar system since your high frontier post back in 2007, don't the decades just fly by

In 2007, SpaceX tried (and failed, for the second time) to launch a Falcon 1. Falcon 1 finally flew in 2008, saving the company from bankruptcy. Falcon 1 was non-reusable, had a payload of up to 670kg in LEO (in practice, it never lobbed more than 180kg), and was a dead end. What it did accomplish was to flight-prove the Merlin 1C engine, which went on to power the Falcon 9, which up-ended the entire commercial spaceflight apple cart by achieving reusability comparable to the (retired) Space Shuttle ... in 2017, thus proving my point about the difficulty of predicting even a decade ahead.

Given the likelihood that Starship will fly in the next couple of months (prototype/non-reusable, even though full reuse is planned), and given that NASA is almost certainly not going to be able to get to the moon without Starship (I don't rate SLS very highly: it'll fly but the economics are implausible), I'm going to tentatively concede that throwing hundred-ton-plus nuclear powered ion rockets at the Oort cloud is going to be feasible in the next 30-60 years, although they'll be uncrewed: most likely scenario is a drop a volatiles refinery on a comet and turn it into fuel, which is wildly more valuable out there than it is on Earth (at least at first).

I don't expect a self-sufficient Mars colony any time this century. I do now expect a substantial Lunar research outpost -- possibly on the scale of McMurdo station -- before 2050, and a similar size Mars outpost by 2100 is not implausible.

88:

i can't see it in developing ones unless they somehow get to leapfrog a lot of the stages we had to go through

That's actually a thing that happens: those who install infrastructure last get the best iteration of it as a baseline -- for example, all those sub-Saharan African nations who are leapfrogging twisted pair copper wires to go straight to cellphones and fibre broadband in cities. Or why the British and French standards for analog colour TV in the 1960s/1970s (PAL and SECAM) were superior to the much earlier US NTSC format. And inversely, why British railway loading gauge and tunnel bores are so crap compared to the rest of the world (we built out railways first, and the earlier/cheaper/worse standard won out, and now we can't run true high speed rail without building new tracks and tunnels).

89:

yeah, i used to live in hastings, where they couldn't get high speed up to london because someone had only put two skins of bricks on certain tunnels rather than the three they were supposed to have

with energy though i've read that gas demand is increasing by leaps and bounds in a lot of the places it's produced, like iran, which is one of the factors putting pressure on the price in europe

not sure that things like that'll be susceptible to the processes you mention

90:

82 - I'm still not convinced. At least with the present model where a passenger going Glasgow (Queen St) to Oban or Mallaig remains in the same coach (probably even the same seat although the direction of travel for Gla - Mallaig reverses at The Garrison). The unit makes the down trip as detailed (~105 miles for Oban and 150 for Mallaig) then becomes the up train on the same route 30 minutes later. So you have to manage something like 320 miles including positioning with no more than 30 minutes charging for a plain battery electric unit.

I agree about lamppost charging except that you've presumed semis; there are plenty of apartments in suburbs in the West of Scotland.

83 - And the Class 93 is "only" 10 tonnes more than a Hymek!!

91:

Re: charging in dense urban settings.

Given the increasing ranges we see on electrical cars, using "quick-chargers" does become a reasonable solution for city-dwellers in many circumstances, but it requires a much denser network of quick-chargers which the oil-industry is very interested in not happening.

92:

the US life insurance industry had noticed that mortality in 2020 was up 40% over 2019.

How much of this is more that the life insurance paying classes are dying sooner, rather than the great excluded in the US?

On the lamppost EV charging - it is preferable to running cables from the house to the street, but it needs to mot eat further into pavement space. The rental model does make a lot more sense than ownership for EVs - e-bikes and e-scooters are already widely used that way, and extending to bigger vehicles as needed makes a lot of sense for Edinburgh level density.

The biggest difficulty in energy is that storage is hard - the key advantage of coal and gas was that they store energy densely in transportable form. Maybe the batteries in the EVs can be a buffer if the chargers are designed to be two way.

93:

You are ignoring Africa, where population is expected to nearly triple till 2100. Peak population might still be around 2100.

But "Projections of population reaching more than one generation into the future are highly speculative".

94:

Why would you need a 320 mile range to do 150 miles from Glasgow to Mallaig? Having been to Glasgow, Fort William and Mallaig I can confirm that electricity is present in all three locations. Or to put it another way, on-route charging is a definite possibility just provide your battery-electric train with a pantograph and it can leave Glasgow Queen Street "on the mains" (as it where), switch to battery power when the wires finish, and switch back to OLE in places where you provide it (e.g. short sections at Fort William and Mallaig, possibly other locations if necessary). (Covered side or bottom-contact third rail would be alternate options.)

These apartments in the West of Scotland which you speak of, where do the occupants park their current cars? As I see it the options are:- 1. They don't have a car, and therefore the provision or otherwise of EV charging points is pretty irrelevant to them. 2. They park in off-street car parks provided at their flats, and thus the provision of on-street charging infrastructure is pretty irrelevant to them. 3. They park on a street which has lampposts, and thus Ubitricity (or something like it) might well be of interest to them. 4. They park on streets which don't have lampposts, which is obviously plausible but how common is it.

95:
if you could speak with each other you would probably find a lot of common ground

Have to disagree with you on that one. Both-sides-ism is a snare and a delusion.

Pro-authoritarians really do want to kill you (or at least have the option to do so).

Refusal to be vaccinated? This kills not just them (in windrows) but keeps COVID running around the general population, killing all and leaving the window open for more variants.

Be darker-skinned than they like? Jail forever, or bullets from cops / vigilantes to end you.

Be Jewish? Yeah, they aren't saying the quiet part out loud. Yet. Mostly. But hearing them talk about how wicked 'international financiers' are, and know what 'international' is a dog-whistle for and you get the idea.

Many more examples exist, which I leave as an exercise for the reader.

I can't think of any pro-murder or pro-genocide examples from leftist rhetoric1. Which may just be because I fall into the leftist camp myself, and I am as blind to my own hypocrisies as they are to theirs.

~oOo~

1 Unless you count the continued support for the apparatus of the petro-state. Which many, but not all, leftists recognize must come to an end, and sooner rather than later.

96:

But "Projections of population reaching more than one generation into the future are highly speculative".

Yeah. Look at Iran's TFR in 1981 vs. it's TFR in 2021. (It's down from something in the 4-6 range -- children per woman -- to 1.5.) AIUI TFR is dropping everywhere in Africa, fast enough that it's plausibly going to crash as fast as or faster than Iran did (going from "population doubling every 20-30 years" to "each new generation is only 2/3 the size of the previous one" in just 1-2 generations).

97:

"and switch back to OLE in places where you provide it"

Overhead lines and pantographs are very much subject to I²R losses and other troubles at high currents, so they will not provide more than modest charging power on top of what you need for traction.

It will work where a modest gap in the overhead power needs to be bridged, but not if more than around 30% of the energy required is without overhead power.

Industry seems to favour charging at the station stops with infrastructure designed for really bad-ass quick-charging.

98:

It will work where a modest gap in the overhead power needs to be bridged, but not if more than around 30% of the energy required is without overhead power.

A classic case of this would be for the line from Edinburgh into Fife, which has to cross the Forth Rail Bridge. The FRB opened in 1890, was an engineering marvel at the time, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site -- it was the longest cantilever span bridge in the world until 1919, and is a major landmark.

But the FRB was designed with steam traction in mind. It's mostly made of cast iron, is exposed to high winds, and would be an absolute nightmare to string overhead cables along -- there'd be a regular risk of them grounding on the bridge structure, which would be Bad. (Megawatts plus cast iron = spot welding.)

However, there's a station south of the bridge (Dalmeney) and a station north of the bridge (North Queensferry) and only about a 2-3 mile run between them. So electrification of the line is in principle possible if the trains have enough backup battery capacity to cover a 5km gap at relatively low speed.

99:

"On the lamppost EV charging - it is preferable to running cables from the house to the street, but it needs to mot eat further into pavement space"

It's a type-2 charging port on the side of the lamppost, or possibly a pair on opposite sides. It's about 7cm in diameter, and probably doesn't need to protrude from the lamppost by more than 1-2cm (and that's probably mostly to provide clearance for the hinged lid to move out of the way). It's not like we're walking about fitting a dual-headed CHADEMO/CCS 50kw rapid charger onto the side of every lamppost!

100:

I do. Some of the anti-apartheid fanatics were calling for (and working towards) a bloodbath. I was amazed that Mandela's great-heartedness and de Klerk's bravery avoided that.

101:

Yes. There are a lot of tunnels with height constraints, but the FRB must be THE exemplar of the requirement.

102:

"A classic case of this would be for the line from Edinburgh into Fife, which has to cross the Forth Rail Bridge."

Likewise, it would seem obvious in many old tunnels are not tall enough for overhead wire.

However, the safety-people are very apprehensive about lugging about a lithium battery which only gets used when it's failure would cause most inconvenience/havoc.

Other safety-people argue that it would also mean that trains could limber into the nearest station in case of power-failure, instead of being stuck in the middle of nowhere until overhead power returns or somebody putters along with a diesel.

In the end it will be all about money.

103:

Next century (if only because of the distances involved) someone is going to go helium prospecting out in the Oort cloud. Big snowball comets might well have enough helium to make it economically viable.

There's vastly more helium in much more accessible locations: the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Comets are understood to be strongly depleted in hydrogen, helium, and neon, since those elements wouldn't condense at the temperatures of the early solar system, which is where the Oort Cloud objects formed. (The Oort Cloud is made up of objects that formed in the inner solar system and were then ejected by gravitational encounters with the giant planets; they didn't form in the Oort Cloud.)

104:

Charlie @ 100
Actually, one uses an overhead "RAIL" for something like the Forth Bridge ( Or the Severn Tunnel - they had problems with the latter - bimetallic corrosion included, but have fixed it ). The "rail" is a rigid narrow bar, so it can't swing in the wind, firmly non-conducting bolted to the superstructure - & if necessary with plastic shields over the top, to give any flashover a much longer path. Such is clearly visible at St Pancras Thameslink platforms.
So viable solutions are apparently available, with care & finagling.

105:

There's vastly more helium in much more accessible locations: the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. nearer isn't necessarily easier in those cases

i mean there was the old Traveler fuel skimming trick if u had a streamlined hull, but i'm not sure how well that would work without a fusion drive

106:

Several people have wondered what ICE powered classic cars will run on in the future. An obvious answer would be ethanol. The UK has recently moved to a 10% blend of ethanol in it's 'petrol', and while it's not common, E85 (ie an 85% ethanol blend) is available. The only changes necessary are replacing the fuel hoses with ethanol safe hose (if your classic is >30 years old, you've probably had to replace them already), and re-tuning the carburettor/ECU to account for the lower energy density. Due to increased knock resistance, you can actually add power, and your classic car will still make all the same old brrrrmmmmm noises.

107:

The “rent not own” model for cars is exactly the model that Uber and the other ride share platforms are betting on.

They want to take it a step further then leasing, since garage and driveway space is a large hidden cost for car ownership.

The current economics don’t support it, but if they actually get self driving to work on the next 20 years, they will

So I think a key question on your prediction Charlie is whether that level of AI is possible in your timeframe? If it is, you can kiss half the existing job market bye bye

108:

Laurie Garrett did not predict that the supposedly-competent "authorities" wouldn't have a fucking clue & would spend their time false-messaging the pubic for short-term political gain ...

Having been involved in disaster planning exercises, that's one no one predicted. Probably because most of the people actually involved were working towards the goal of planning for the disaster and assumed good faith on the part of actors.

I'm a cynical cuss, and even I wouldn't have predicted crowds of Canadians threatening civil war if vaccine mandates were instituted for an infectious disease*. And if I had, I would have been ignored as a crazy pessimist.

I'm thinking of Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell, about how people come together after a disaster, and wondering how she views the Covid response (by both authorities and individuals). Haven't located anything; maybe because she hasn't written anything, maybe because my search skills suck.

Also thinking of the Transhuman Space RPG setting, and how in one adventure a 'memetic response team' was dispatched to contain threatening memes before their spread went exponential. Unfortunately linguistic drift has turned "meme" into a picture with funny text rather than its original meaning, but I think with social media we're seeing the THS scenario come to life (without fast-action response teams).

* For example:

https://www.straight.com/covid-19-pandemic/living/bc-opponent-of-mrna-vaccines-predicts-civil-war-in-canada-if-he-and-his-fellow-patriots-cant

109:

96 para 1 - I agree that electricity exists in Fort William and Mallaig, but, other than the Caledonian sleeper which overdays in the Fort, a train is never actually stationary in either location for more than about 30 minutes. As to using existing overhead lines Glasgow - Craigendorran, I was trying to save the mass of the pantograph system and the tranformer-rectifier units that would be needed to convert 25kV AC into something that a DC motor that normally runs from batteries could use. Adding 3rd rail introduces further complications, and the issue of snow, which does happen on those routes.

para 2 - (3) is closest but the residents don't have sufficient street frontage to park all their cars and vans as things stand. I've just measured it, and we are talking in terms of 200m of main road that is parked solidly down one side, and the same again of side roads parked down both sides.

99 - Thanks; that filled in a gap that I didn't know of.

100 & 103 - Is this a good point to mention the Tay Bridge as well? The nearest station to Dundee and in Fife is Leuchars these days.

104 - Given the will, tunnels can be enlarged (bored out?). Witness the latest works in the Cowlairs Tunnel out of Glasgow Queen Street (high level).

109 - And yet Uber is an uncommon thing in Glasgow. Most people use buses, trains, or locally owned taxis or private hire cars (difference mainly in licencing).

110:

"Maybe the batteries in the EVs can be a buffer if the chargers are designed to be two way."

https://www.vox.com/recode/22872237/biden-electric-vehicle-batteries-clean-energy

111:

nearer isn't necessarily easier in those cases

In this case it is, though. Jupiter is 4–6 astronomical units (au) away from Earth; the Oort Cloud lies between 2,000 and 50,000 (or so) au away. And, as I mentioned, Oort Cloud objects will have very little helium.

112:

Expect a few ICE vehicles to go on for a surprisingly long time, simply because people using them DO NOT WANT a "new" or "modern" car.

What happens to gas stations when fewer people use them? As gas stations go out of business (or convert to fast-charge stations) it will get harder to fuel those ICE vehicles.

That may be what tips a fair number of people over to EV: increasing difficulty keeping their gas-burners fuelled.

113:

Who are these people who commute 100 miles each way?

Back in the 90s there were housing developments in Barrie that came with an SUV in the driveway, for commuting to Toronto in. That's 60 miles, up to 2 hours each way depending on traffic. People did it because they couldn't afford a house in Toronto, so traded off 3-4 hours daily commute against renting forever.

114:

There's vastly more helium in much more accessible locations: the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

All of which have much deeper gravity wells -- and storms! Really big storms.

Hauling a nuclear propulsion unit out past the frost line is hard enough even if it's only to provide power for an ion rocket and a small refinery (you can take years on the job as you drag your snowball home). Dipping into a gas giant means you're going to need a heat shield, flight control surfaces, some way of scavenging atmosphere and turning it into reaction mass (even if it's "just" a nuclear scramjet), and the atmosphere mining plant. So lots of extra systems to go wrong, and much more hazardous conditions than landing on a snowball.

Not saying it's impossible, just, it's equivalent to jumping from Hubble to JSWT levels of complexity in one go.

115:

It's like leaded petrol. Equivalents exist, kinda, for enthusiasts who want to keep an old car going and don't mind paying for it. Nobody else bothers.

I expect the likes of pigeon will be able to get liquid fuel in liter bottles for some exorbitant price. If civilisation and freeholds survive the century I would expect land deeds to specifically forbid hydrocarbon refining along with the already common lead smelting and chickens.

116:

whether that level of AI is possible in your timeframe?

Self-driving cars present multiple challenge levels.

We're already at the point where we can probably roll out platooning of HGVs on long motorway segments in the next few years -- one driver at the front supervising the autopilot, the rest of the trucks follow nose-to-tail, keeping their distance. Similarly, supervised self-driving cars on motorways are a thing.

That's a hugely different challenge from expecting a car to navigate the Magic Roundabout in Hemel Hempsted at rush hour while one lane is closed for a stretch due to emergency gas mains excavation and a cycling peleton is passing through (thrown in for shits and giggles). I wouldn't like to bet on when that'll be possible. (And if I found myself facing it myself, I'd probably park up for 15 minutes and wait for the shakes to subside.)

Uber ... the level of self-driving they need is not going to arrive while their line of funding holds up. They were betting on an optimistic time frame, and lost. But I'm certainly not saying "never", or even "not within 10 years" (although the latter would probably require breakthrough AI algorithms).

117:

"a train is never actually stationary in either location for more than about 30 minutes"

If you look at plans for "Quick charging" of ferries and trains, the idea is overnight full charge and only "top-op charges" when in harbor or at station.

"Top-up" charges happen in terms of megawatt, usually limited more by the local grid than anything else.

To even out the load on the grid, some of these chargers have a major pile of ultra-capacitors or lithium batteries, which they charge continuously from the grid and then dump into the ferry/train at very high rate in very short time.

You can move a lot of electrons in 30 minutes.

118:

Lamppost charging for cars is a good idea that'll work in suburbia ... and not at all here in central Edinburgh, where there are probably 20-50 dwellings for every street lamp along a stretch of road, because we're all in apartments.

So, where do people park their vehicles? What you need is a way to run power to those parking places.

When I lived in Edmonton, it was common for businesses to have plugs at every parking space — not for recharging cars, but so you could plug in your block heater while at work so your car would start at the end of the workday. Places like malls didn't have them, but apartments etc usually did.

Now a block heater doesn't take much power, so those connections likely wouldn't do for even slow-charging EVs, but the idea that you plug you car in overnight was pretty engrained when I was growing up.

119:

I think Solnit's get-out is that communities come together after a national disaster: what we're seeing here is two intermingled but actively hostile communities opposing each other, and the leadership of one cynically made COVID denialism (and anti-vaxx/anti-masking) a virtue signal -- that is, a demonstration of loyalty to the group.

(And it was definitely cynical. As witness Trump mocking his anti-vaxx followers last week and announcing he'd had his booster shot. He played them for chumps.)

120:

The goofy posts are coming up early this time.

I didn't bother looking at the youtube link for a fuel additive consisting of sodium and NaOH. Because

  • It doesn't pass the laugh test. Metallic sodium? As a fuel additive? For engines that are going to be run by people who aren't rocket scientists or test pilots?
  • If it passed the laugh test, making CO2 into Na2CO3 is not carbon sequestration. Not unless it's combined with a plan to bury the carbonate very very deep in a place where the water, when it does get it, will always have a pH higher than 7.
  • 121:

    I can comment on that -- I happen to have a small amount of expertise on the topic. We should hope for increased electricity demand about 3x. Lower energy, yes, but more electricity.

    If we don't see that -- welp. That means we're still burning way too many dead dinosaurs.

    I can also tell you that because of the range issue of EVs, we're not getting smaller cars, tragically.

    122:

    Given the will, tunnels can be enlarged (bored out?). Witness the latest works in the Cowlairs Tunnel out of Glasgow Queen Street (high level).

    Which closed Queen Street for about a year, did it not?

    The real problem is that our tunnels were built to accommodate standard loading gauge trains. They need boring out or replacing to carry continental gauge (or other HSR stock). And the early railway companies mostly only dug two tunnels rather than three, so they can't simply shut down one of the three at a time. (Ain't private enterprise great? See also: why the New York subway runs all night but the London Underground mostly has to shut down for maintenance for a few hours.)

    123:

    VW have demo'ed that since late 1960'ies early 1970'ies.

    The missing bit is not AI, but economics.

    You have to run this "truck-trains" in a non-merging edge lane, because merging onto a freeway with 500m long "trains" simply does not work.

    In Germany that is the coveted "I have a bigger Mercedes than you do" inner lane, so it is not politically easy to "sell" it to the trucking industry.

    Next problem is that there isn't /that/ much market for driving even just 10 trucks in cortege that way more than a few hundred kilometers here in Europe.

    If there is an actual market for that technology, it will be across Australia or through the rectangular parts of USA.

    124:

    An acquaintance of mine once used to commute three hours each way to work from Cambridge to London, by train (so six hours a day) because he couldn't afford to move to London. He was in senior management at an ISP, too (director level). He was an early adopter of Psion PDAs and cellular modems -- in the mid-to-late 90s -- so he could work on the train.

    Note: Cambridge (UK) is nobody's idea of "cheap", it's just that he had a family, and buying a family house in London was really nobody's idea of cheap.

    125:

    So, where do people park their vehicles? What you need is a way to run power to those parking places.

    We park on the street, in parking bays, typically nose-to-kerb. So there's roughly one vehicle per 3-4 metres of road on each side, and one street light every 20+ metres.

    (Not exaggering the "we" here; parking spaces in Edinburgh are so eye-watering that one street over from me there's a goon who parks his Lamborghini Diablo at the kerb. And others who do the same with a Bentley, Range Rovers, and Tesla Models S/X. On a road with no charge points, at that.)

    126:

    The goofy posts are early because this blog entry got slammed by Hacker News about an hour after I uploaded it yesterday. So, lots of drive-by postings (but nothing like the huge volume of comments on the HN thread: note, do not read the HN comments).

    127:

    We're already at the point where we can probably roll out platooning of HGVs on long motorway segments in the next few years -- one driver at the front supervising the autopilot, the rest of the trucks follow nose-to-tail, keeping their distance. Similarly, supervised self-driving cars on motorways are a thing.
    A FUCKING USELESS & EXPENSIVE solution to a "non-problem" - the real answer is, surprise, an electric TRAIN.
    Yes, I know, the current political cabal will do almost anything to avoid ding the sensible thing, but ...

    128:

    As a near-Cambridge resident, I have difficulty in swallowing his story. Three hours is a LOT more than the Cambridge to London train, and there were and are equally affordable (!) locations a lot closer. Two hours each way, yes, but three smacks of some other requirement as well. You can easily get three by commuting from the Cambridge vicinity to some inaccessible location like Gunnersbury (don't ask), but the solution is to buy a house in a direction that provides easier access to your target.

    There certainly ARE plenty of people who commute for that long, but most do it because they want more than just a family house (e.g. enough space to keep a pony).

    129:

    We bought an EV in the Spring of this year (2020 Kia Niro). I can say with certainty that 98% of the projected issues with them are incorrect.

    Energy usage: Our electric bill has actually gone down since the purchase, not because of the vehicle but because our eldest has moved out. The increase in use to charge the car has been more than offset by the decrease in use by 1 less teenaged person having long showers, standing for long periods in front of an open fridge, and leaving every light on in every room he passes through. Loosely translated, the bump in our electrical usage is not what people seem to imagine.

    Range: In cold conditions (i.e. now) an 80% charge gets us a 280 km range. 100% gets us about 340-360 depending on how many passengers etc. At no point has any of our driving exceeded that range, even when staying out of town and shuttling bodies between various sports arenas for an entire weekend. Yes, there was some awareness of finding charging stations, but generally it was 'park the car at a charger while watching the sports game' topping up, not leaving it untouched for multiple hours.

    Our mindset evolved after buying it. At first I was hyper conscious of the level of charge, and always tried to make sure it was at 80% every day. Now we are much more relaxed, plug it into our 120 outlet at home for a trickle charge. If we plan a longer trip the next day I'll go to a nearby 'Level 2' charger and max it out, but mostly I don't bother.

    Longer distance trips, which for us happen about 1/annnum, will either involve slightly more planning or simply renting/borrowing an ICE. I may use some of the $4000 I don't spend on gasoline.

    In every other way the EV is vastly better than an ICE. Parked and waiting at a ferry terminal? Leave the car on and the heat or AC running - not really an option with an ICE to sit and idle for an hour. Frost on the windows? Within about 60 seconds it is warm and defrosted.

    I'm sure that automakers have realized that EVs are vastly better than ICEs, and also realize that more people are going to realize this over time. There will be a tipping point where ICEs become relics.

    130:
    It's interesting that almost every politically conscious person (and you strike me as such) predict, for the future, the victory of the other side and an oppressive nondemocratic nightmarish regime. I think that you will find it amusing speaking with conservatives. The predict for the USA to become a "woke" oppressive regime and they, too, predict they will be "boned". Reading this article it feels like that part is a bit like that - a scare-induced bleak prediction for the future. Let me tell you: conservatives are as scared as you are and if you could speak with each other you would probably find a lot of common ground.

    On the one hand, Blog Host has a predilection for morose prognostications. On the other hand, conservative rhetoric about the political future does have a sort of vaguely reflection-like relation to liberal rhetoric about the political future. On the third hand, this latter observation is utterly worthless because one set of interlocutors are doing their best to see and live in and plan for living in the real world, while the other set actively refuse to look at the real world and respond to all challenges by doubling down on delusion.

    And it is for this last reason that no, if we try to speak with one another we find no common ground at all. I suspect you got to feel a bit superior and above-the-fray while posting that, but really it is a species of ignorant shitpost to talk the way you are talking about politics in the contemporary English-speaking world.

    131:

    It is possible I misremembered, and it was three hours a day, not three hours each way: it's still a hell of a commute.

    132:

    Please do not feed the shitposter.

    (It's not quite a shitty enough comment to be worth a yellow card, but it still reeks of spurious both-siderism.)

    133:

    And it was definitely cynical. As witness Trump mocking his anti-vaxx followers last week and announcing he'd had his booster shot. He played them for chumps.

    And it was hard not to believe it was not a scene from a Superman Bizarreo world comic book. All kinds of Trumpist podcasters (and maybe some fringe cable TV channels) talking about Trump needing an intervention to learn the truth of vaccines killing people and it being a plot of the D's.

    134:

    Something that keeps being missed is how different the UK is from the USA. The merits of EVs per se are almost irrelevant here.

    In the UK, few people have the space for more than one car, and the government-back insurance cartel makes it prohibitively expensive to hire cars for holidays etc., as well as excluding many people from hiring at all! Before many of these solutions could be adopted, that would have to change (ha! ha!)

    My requirements are fairly typical of many people, and my Skoda Fabia 'estate' meets them fairly well. Most of the time, I want a small, simple car for short trips, but it occasionally needs to carry up to four 6' adults, 2.5m lengths of timber, or some moderately bulky junk (not all at the same time). Oops. Available and planned EVs require me to buy a large, complex car to meet the carrying requirements.

    However, a few times a year, I want to drive long distances (300+ miles a day), with no guarantee of charging facilities where I stop (either overnight or at the end). Oops. The problem here is not the EVs but the infrastructure.

    All of the above is soluble, but the first problem won't be solved by the insurance cartel unless it is forced into it, the second won't be solved by the automotive industry unless it is forced into it, and the third won't be solved by the holy market but needs government action. Ha! Ha!

    135:

    I agree there! And, yes, there are a lot of people who do that commute, plus many from Peterborough.

    136:

    To understand crypto currency keep in mind this is, They believe, around national governments and states, whether corporate moguls or the mafia chieftans or insurgent warlords. Non-national exchange of value systems means non-regulation of any kind, and NO TAXES, always the goal of capitalism.

    137:

    Re: Energy & demographics

    A good reminder that how and how fast our demographics change will affect everything else that's normally tied to that particular segment.

    Basically: people's needs change with almost every life stage they enter i.e., we didn't 'need' a car until we had kids. The type/size of car also changed with our ages/activities. (My current car is the smallest and most fuel efficient I could find locally, fast.)

    Even so there have been some surprises like this one which seems to be cropping up in a few different countries and running counter to some assumptions about what factors drive household formation: the increase in single-person households.* A few years back there were a lot of stories of adult kids moving back in with their parents - mostly to save enough for a down payment. Now I'm even seeing stories about happily married couples who are living in separate houses.

    https://ourworldindata.org/living-alone

    Another demographic segment that's kinda fueling the increase in single-person households is the senior for (I'm guessing) mostly these two reasons:

    (a) the cost of relocating into a rental or senior assisted living residence is more expensive than staying put or the return on the sale of their house; and/or

    (b) new devices like electric stair lifts, sit-in soaking baths and powered wheelchairs that increase safety and personal mobility therefore independence.

    (I did some calculations of these back when my mother had her first series of strokes: way cheaper and safer to install a bunch of what then seemed like new-fangled and expensive devices such as an electric stair lift, motorized hospital bed, etc. Costs for most of these things has dropped quite a bit since. Overall, this turned out to have been a very good decision including resale of the house with these particular built-in's.)

    And - as many countries found out the hard way in the past two years - vulnerable elderly folks are less likely to catch serious viruses at home.

    • I imagine that several industries are hoping that the single-person household becomes the norm because it translates into more 'household' sales esp. of larger ticket items like white and durable goods (appliances, furniture, cookware, etc.) Down side is an increase in waste.
    138:

    Getting back to the original theme:

    I realize that this blog specializes in horror-adjacency, and I don't want to spoil the mood.

    That said, I'll throw in an unpredictable: by 2030, Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels are cut at least in half. This means that, by some combination of disaster, pandemic, war, technical advance and (most unlikely) people doing the right thing, we actually meet what currently seems like a pipe dream.

    Now if you want the horror of that, consider what it would take for the average QNut to go along with this, other than terminal Covid.

    I'd also point to possible paradoxes that might be worth exploring: for example:

    Both a Kessler cascade AND a moon base, both created by nextgen rockets lofting loads of stuff, whether it's massive numbers of disposable satellites that crap up LEO, or human vehicles that get past the cascade (how?) and put humans in deeper space.

    Both democracy and oligarchy/plutocracy make massive progress forward. In other words, the next cold war is right-wing authoritarian leaders versus the other eight billion of us.

    AI and non-computer progress: where the infrastructure and supply chains can support AI, it performs increasingly well. But perhaps those areas become more tenuous and intermittent?

    Ditto health care: where it's in good shape, it can perform miracles. Where it's in ordinary shape, it performs miracles working around supply shortages (for example, there's currently a shortage of normal saline in IV bags in local hospitals). And then there's the rest of the world, where falling off a ladder is something to be really avoided.

    In other words, instead of scaring yourself with dramatic either/or predictions, try scaring yourself with both/and predictions. At least it'll be different.

    139:

    Back in the 90s there were housing developments in Barrie that came with an SUV in the driveway, for commuting to Toronto in. That's 60 miles, up to 2 hours each way depending on traffic.

    That is wrong at so many levels. Were the SUV's donated by the local gas station dealer association?

    I have a 2016 Civic (1.5L) purchased in July 2016. It has yet to crack 40K miles. Almost but not yet. I also have a 2008 Tundra (5.7L) that I only drive when my wife might want the Civic or I'm hauling something. Typically less than 300 miles a month. Or if I remember I haven't driven it in nearly a month. Mildew starts to grow (based on the smell) if I don't air it out every week or few.

    My point is a driver the car that gets triple the gas millage anytime I can.

    An SUV for a 2 hour each way commute is nuts. And yes, I know people who do such things. If they ask I'll give my opinion.

    140:

    I can sort of see it if he was working at somewhere like Canary Wharf and was travelling at peak times. When I did a stint at Tower Hamlets in 2017:

    20-25 minutes drive to Huntingdon (the misguided bus took 45 minutes + and the unguided bus even longer) Wait up to 10 mins for the train, then 55 mins to Kings Cross Spend 15 minutes at KX shuffling along the platform on the Northern line to get close enough to a set of doors to actually get on the train Another 15-20 minutes to get to Bank and 5-10 minutes to get on the platform for the DLR Up to 15 mins wait for the Canning Town train, then about 15-20 minutes to get to East India, then about 5 mins walk to the office.

    In total, it was around 2:15 to 2:30 depending on how much humanity I had to fight my way through in Central London.

    141:

    (b) new devices like electric stair lifts, sit-in soaking baths and powered wheelchairs that increase safety and personal mobility therefore independence.

    I have multiple hard conversations with my wife over these issues. In my particular house these widgets are basically a toss away cost. My house will be torn down by the next buyer if not by me. We are one broken ankle or even bad sprain away from a miserable few months. Steps to do everything. Unless you stay in a bedroom where the bathrooms are on the same floor level. Then maybe we install a mini fridge and microwave for the stair bound person. Doctor visits will be fun.

    My thoughts are to move to a single level something within 10 years. Either someone we build replacing what we have or we move to.

    142:

    119 - I've no doubt you can move a lot of electrons in 30 minutes, but that means working with currents you need a really healthy (think HT lineman) level of respect for. I think it also means the vehicle batteries getting very hot very fast. Most people going Glasgow - Mallaig or vice versa by train tend to want to stay aboard when the train is in Fort William, and people are not required to detrain during the Mallaig turnaround. So you need really good electrical and thermal insulation on the battery packs. I'm not saying these issues are insoluble, just that they need careful consideration at the design stage.

    120 - I had friends living in apartments in the West End of Glasgow, and the honest if apparently snarky answer to "where do you park?" is "anything up to half a mile away". This with solid lines of vehicles along both kerblines and a single running lane between them.

    124 - Agreed. My point was more that the political will to do this in order to get catenary electric into QSHL actually exists in Scotland.

    131 - Teenager - You mean mid-50s or mid-80s female don't you!?

    141 - If I had to do a regular 2 hour drive, I would want something that is relaxing to do that sort of distance at highway speeds in (in the UK this typically means 70 to 80 mph indicated). Your ironically named "Tundra" is probably bigger than it needs to be. On the basis that 2016 Sickbricks are much the same the World over, I feel pretty sure it's too small. A 2.0l VW Jetta (or similar size Audi, Seat or Skoda) is probably about right.

    143:

    Yeah, even little EVs like the Bolt get nice and hot recharging on a 50 amp line, as one might expect.

    If we're talking electric ferries, what I'd suggest is a low level for "wheeled battery ballast," basically semis that are battery packs. Drive them onto the ship, plug them into the electrical system, drive them off at a terminal, recharge on land, repeat. While this isn't a universal solution for all ferry lines, I suspect that it's a safer way to move lots of watts in a saltwater environment than by plugging them in. Indeed, I can see transporting big, wheeled batteries as a pretty versatile solution to both moving energy and to moving storage where it's needed. Semi-batteries could be just as useful at something like a big music festival or after a disaster as on a ferry. Depending, again, on the situation. Driving a full battery 2,000 miles means the battery is probably empty on arrival, for example.

    144:

    Your ironically named "Tundra" is probably bigger than it needs to be.

    I got my Tundra as it had a 10K pound tow rating. And the cab wasn't a government low bid interior. Not hugely fancy but electric locks, windows, and a radio that didn't involve mechanical push buttons. (6 speed transmission with manual selection if I want.)

    I spent 5 months or so looking. Both in North Carolina and the Dallas / Fort Worth area. I got what I wanted.

    145:

    StephenNZ @ 69: My understanding is that Elon Musk is not eligible to be (USA) President. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born-citizen_clause_(United_States)

    paws4thot @ 70: "Musk was born to a Canadian mother and South African father, and raised in Pretoria, South Africa." Seems pretty conclusive to me.

    I'm usually pretty clear about what the Constitution allows & what it doesn't, but I just had a wild thought that raises a question that I don't have an answer for.

    Suppose something truly insane happened and South Africa somehow became the 51st State (beating out DC and/or Puerto Rico) ... Would Musk then qualify as native born even though he was already an adult before that happened?

    Barry Goldwater was eligible to run even though he was born in Arizona Territory before it became a State. John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone (in a U.S. Navy hospital) while the Zone was controlled by the U.S.

    Ted Cruz was born in Canada. His mother was a U.S. citizen & his father subsequently became a citizen (I think pretty late too, after Cruz had already started running for President the first time around).

    More generally, if persons with citizenship in some polity become U.S. citizens when that polity is annexed & becomes a State, do those citizens get "grandfathered in" as Native Born at the time of the accession?

    146:

    Here's a related item: the cost of EVs will drop, but not for the reason you think.

    Someone mentioned "much less complicated."

    In the early eighties, I knew someone in a small town who worked at the local Ford dealership. His specialty was transmissions. They wouldn't pay, so he had to spend $3k-$4k (in early 80's money) of his money on... special service tools, every year, because Ford would modify the transmissions, then sell new SSTs to increase their revenue stream.

    Take that trans away... and car repair costs drop, as well.

    Of course, the car companies will look for other ways to increase the revenue stream... and I gather, from cmts here, that they have to rebuild the car to replace the battery....

    So I'm looking for an open-source/right-to-repair company building cars from parts from suppliers, and to replace the battery, you have a special key, unlock a solid member, and slide the battery tray out (sideways, I'd think), and use the old crane that was used to pull an engine to remove the batteries.

    147:

    David L @ 75: Apparently in the US a lot of first and second generation German immigrants took crash courses in learning English during the WWI period. Especially from 1917 onward.

    That's about the time all those "Dutch" people moved to Pennsylvania.

    148:

    Remember, via interlocking boards and stock ownership, the oil companies own the US car companies. (Go ahead, justify all the larger and larger and larger vehicles... and I've just heard, the other day, someone complaining that they wanted the smaller pickup that they had 15 years ago, but the companies want to sell you something where the lift gate is chest high.)

    The result is they'll fight EV's every step of the way, and legislation (and note that I consider someone saying "government diktat" to, by definition, a libertarian or further wrong-wing), which has started, will be required.

    Otherwise, tell me why the US had NO, ZERO, ZIP hybrid minivans and other vehicles until recently.

    149:

    Before the world shut down I made a comment in a small gathering of people from various parts of the world. I said something to the effect there was a lot of similarity between the German and Dutch languages. One fellow who was Dutch told me in no uncertain terms just how wrong I was.

    I'm thinking there's still a bit of bitterness over the events of the early 1940s.

    150:

    First, I've seen numerous stories, and hear from people, about not buying cars, and esp. younger people wanting to live in cities, and walk or use public transit.

    Second, all this business of streetlight posts... come on, folks, let's think monetarily here: parking meters. You pay to park, and get to plug in (and the ticket you got when you put the money it lets you unlock your car's plug from the meter, to prevent someone else from unplugging it.

    151:

    It's not merely the multi-hundred mile range. For me to get to my daughters in Manassas is about 1.25 hours... about half what it would take me to drive to Philly.

    Except in rush hour, in which case add anywhere from half an hour to an hour to the drive.

    152:

    Sorry, but no. All metro areas have some kind of public transit, They range from good to lousy, and the further out you get, the worse they are, except for commuter rail, which is adored by everyone who uses it.

    153:

    EC @ 130 { And Charlie }
    Cambridge - KGX: 48 minutes ( No stops, 58 miles )
    Cambridge - LST: 71minutes ( 7 stops, 55.25 miles )
    Peterboro' - KGX: 73 minutes ( 7 stops, 76.25 miles ) - OR 51 minutes / 1 stop ( But more expensive )
    And yes, these are "ordinary" commuter routes with the first & last average speeds being: 72.5 & 86 mph respectively.

    Maddy E
    You DO REALISE that the "guided Pus" is slower than the ramshackle steam-hauled branch train was in 1922?
    [ I have a repro copy of a 1922 "Bradshaw" to prove this! ]
    Depending on your compass-point to Huntingdon, driving to Cambridge might have been faster - or not, of course.

    154:

    parking meters. You pay to park, and get to plug in (and the ticket you got when you put the money it lets you unlock your car's plug from the meter, to prevent someone else from unplugging it.

    I've been watching a trend of cities getting rid of the old parking meters. Instead you go to a hardened kiosk on the block and enter your license plate and a credit card. You get a receipt to put on your dash (or not) and that's it. No more individual meters. Which are a total PITA from a maintenance point of view. And costs less.

    155:

    Agreed. I've seen someone quoting posts about "if they take our guns away, how can we shoot liberals?"

    And then there were the two who need killing at the 6 Jan last year, wearing tshirts reading "Camp Ausschwitz", and "Not enough".

    156:

    145 - You've clearly never been on a loaded RoRo ferry; vehicles can be packed in on the vehicle deck to the extent that it's difficult to get in and out, and to make your way to and from the main passenger deck accesses. Giving up space to battery semis is not actually an option.

    146 - Ok, I can understand wanting a several ton tow plate. My point was that no-one needs a vehicle that size for one-up commuting.

    147 - No clear idea about Goldwater. McCain's Wikipedia page is pretty clear that he's a US citizen because both his parents were, and he was born on a US military base. Similar argument would apply to John Patrick McInroe although his father was serving in (West) Germany at the time. Ted Cruz' father was naturalised (Cuban), but we know he's run.

    148 - Well, a Tesla still needs lubricating oil changes. I've seen a video of someone doing it.

    157:

    For our needs/usage it's definitely cheaper for us to hire when we need a vehicle than own one. Most of the time when we owned a vehicle it was sitting idle, as unless we really needed it public transport was usually more convenient. We owned a van we had to park about a mile away because of the parking restrictions, we couldn't get a permit for it for this area. Even if we got a permit we'd not be able to park close to the flat unless we got very lucky, mostly we'd be a few minutes walk away. The amount it cost to keep and use was far more than we now spend on hiring, especially since hires are new vehicles with much better fuel consumption than a cheap vehicle. And we don't have a chunk of capital tied up in a depreciating asset.

    It's only really odd weekends away we'd use a car, or when we need a van to shift lots of stuff. It also means we can hire exactly what we need for each trip. It helps that there's a good hire place less than 10 minutes walk from our flat. Occasional taxi use is cheaper than keeping a car for the times we'd need it in town, and I can drink.

    If I needed frequent, short range car use I'd probably join the City Car Club and use one of their vehicles. They have a couple that live about 100 yards from my front door. It'd only be worth owning a vehicle if I actually needed to use it most days, rather than a few times a year. Obviously if I had one sitting here I'd use it for things I currently do by public transport, but I don't think that's a good thing.

    The parking issues for tenement streets do make charging for evs a problem that is not as easy to solve as it would be in a less crowded environment. Personally, I'd say that putting bollards every car length along the edge of the pavement with charging points in them would be a good thing - it'd also stop people parking on the pavement and causing problems for prams and wheelchairs.

    158:

    Charlie Stross @ 82: Lamppost charging for cars is a good idea that'll work in suburbia ... and not at all here in central Edinburgh, where there are probably 20-50 dwellings for every street lamp along a stretch of road, because we're all in apartments.

    I just went outside and counted - there are 12 houses on my block and 10 utility poles (three of which have street lamps).

    Several of my neighbors have more than one vehicle. Mostly DINKs (Dual Income, No Kids), but the guy next door has a work truck & a car and the guy across the street has his work truck & his wife & daughter each have a car (He does construction, She's a school teacher and the little She may still be in college - but they all have to go different ways & one car wouldn't cut it).

    It might be doable around here if each utility pole had two charging points.

    Definitely not so good for apartments, but around here new apartments (and condos) are required to have off-street parking for tenants. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch for local government to require builders to provide a charging point for each parking space.

    That would be harder to do in a "World Heritage" city where you can't change anything with the UN's permission, but it could be done for any NEW construction outside the zone.

    159:

    I think they come together if it's something simple, like a landslide, etc. When there's no solution amenable to "pick that up and put it over there", when the solution is complicated and needs engineering and science, that's where it breaks down.

    160:

    Been done in enough stories - that's what robotic and teleoperated drones are for.

    161:

    (a) the cost of relocating into a rental or senior assisted living residence is more expensive than staying put or the return on the sale of their house;

    Also, you are giving up independence when you do that. Rental puts you at the mercy of landlords, while a residence means that you eat meals at a set time etc.

    I've had this conversation with several friends who are putting off entering a residence as long as they can, because they've seen what going from 'independent adult' to 'retirement home resident' did to their parents.

    Imagine having to live your life to someone else's timetable. Eat when they say. Sleep when they say. Clear out of the way so your room can be cleaned when they say. Kids are used to it. Teenagers rebel against it. Are we surprised when older adults don't want to go back to it?

    162:

    Greg Tingey @ 83: paws

    I'd argue that a Lancia Fulvia is less polluting than a Honda Insect, Toyota Pious, or even a Tesla Model 3, simply because the Lancia is at least 50 years old, so the manufacturing energy is written down so well. Same argument applies to any classic MG or Triumph you care to name.

    THIS, entirely. The Great Green Beast was built in 1996 & is good for at least another 10-20 years. I bought it on the predication that I was NEVER, EVER going to buy another car.
    Try persuading the fake greenies of this?

    Well, the guy who's restoring the Lancia doesn't drive it that much anyway. He's in San Jose, California and mostly gets around on a bicycle. We're friends through a photographers group and I know about the Lancia because of the photos he's posted recently. But those photos are recent and before that I didn't even know he had a car.

    He's been posting photos from his various bicycle outings (and photos of his bikes) for as long as I've known him (maybe a little over a decade).

    I gather San Jose has EXTENSIVE infrastructure to make it pedestrian and bicycle friendly. He doesn't NEED a car to go about his business. I wish I could say the same about living in Raleigh.

    163:

    Please - I'm horrified by two-trailer semis on the Interstates, and three is worse.

    If you need to move that much... that's what railroads are for.

    164:

    That's about the time all those "Dutch" people moved to Pennsylvania.

    Um, no. The "Pennsylvania Dutch" are descended from Germans who moved there in the 18th and 19th Centuries; "Dutch" is just a corruption of "Deitsch/Deutsch" (meaning German).

    165:

    paws4thot @ 92: 82 - I'm still not convinced. At least with the present model where a passenger going Glasgow (Queen St) to Oban or Mallaig remains in the same coach (probably even the same seat although the direction of travel for Gla - Mallaig reverses at The Garrison). The unit makes the down trip as detailed (~105 miles for Oban and 150 for Mallaig) then becomes the up train on the same route 30 minutes later. So you have to manage something like 320 miles including positioning with no more than 30 minutes charging for a plain battery electric unit.

    That's the one train trip in Scotland that I know anything about ... in November 2004 I took the train from Glasgow (Queen St) to Fort William where I took a different train to get out to Mallaig the next day.

    I was trying to get there to photograph the Jacobite (aka "Harry Potter") steam train, but unfortunately because my R&R date was pushed back I missed the last running in October (voluntarily swapped with someone who had a family emergency back here in the States). My original dates would have put me there in early October in plenty of time.

    166:

    "a company he'd covered previously - Ubitricity - who do an on-street charging solution using lampposts. Basically if you replace sodium lampposts with LED lampposts, then since they use less power you can install a type-2 charging port in the lamppost and people can charge their cars!"

    Does not compute.

    Apart from the obvious point that there are far fewer lamp-posts than there are parked cars in the street so there simply aren't enough to go round, the usual residential-street-sized SOX lamp is 35W. Maybe you could expect an LED replacement to be about half that - not sure quite what they do use, but SOX lamps are bloody efficient and the gain from going to LEDs is not much. So if you're lucky you're releasing 20W of "spare" capacity per lamp-post, which is not a fat lot of use.

    Obviously there is a certain amount of spare capacity in the wiring; after all people do sometimes tap into lamp-posts in search of an unmetered supply, and it seems to cope. But there aren't many people doing it. If "type 2" means 3.6kW (which seems to be the least it can mean), then one charging station is equivalent to 100 residential-sized SOX lamps gone completely, or about 200 SOX lamps converted to LEDs.

    So you're looking at a couple of orders of magnitude increase in load, and whatever spare capacity the existing wiring has there's not a chance of it being anywhere near enough. Therefore the whole idea is a waste of time. You might get away with one or two charging points per circuit, but not one per lamp-post nor anything near it. You have to install new cabling in any case, so you might as well go all the way and install a separate system, and provide a number of charging points which is actually sensible in relation to the number of cars while you're at it.

    167:

    I'm quite familiar with them. But you're thinking parking meters, not vehicle recharge stations.

    168:

    JReynolds @ 97:

    if you could speak with each other you would probably find a lot of common ground

    Be Jewish? Yeah, they aren't saying the quiet part out loud. Yet. Mostly. But hearing them talk about how wicked 'international financiers' are, and know what 'international' is a dog-whistle for and you get the idea.

    Some of them have started to say the quiet part out loud in the last 4 - 5 years.

    I don't have any love for the Wall Street Banksters who have repeatedly fucked over the rest of us, but AFAIK not that many of them are Jewish, and the ones that are go to pains to hide the fact. It's very difficult for an openly Jewish (non-WASP) person to get ahead on the street.

    169:

    Is that USA or UK? As I said, they are very different.

    In my case, it's not the cost, but the hassle - it would take hours (probably 3-4) of my time and the cost of two taxis to hire a car for a half-hour trip, and would need extensive advance planning. Once upon a time, I would have cycled, but the road 'improvements for cycling' and my advancing age have made that too dangerous.

    For the longer trips, I would need something I can put my recumbent trike in, and they don't come cheap (40-50 quid per diem) - plus the fact that I would be paying for up to 20-30 days' use for 4 days' driving. Assuming that they WOULD hire to me, at 74 - most companies that hire suitable vehicles don't.

    170:

    What's the track of the "wide end" of your recumbent? I do have a cycle lane related reason for asking.

    171:

    All of which have much deeper gravity wells -- and storms! Really big storms.

    Hauling a nuclear propulsion unit out past the frost line is hard enough even if it's only to provide power for an ion rocket and a small refinery (you can take years on the job as you drag your snowball home). Dipping into a gas giant means you're going to need a heat shield, flight control surfaces, some way of scavenging atmosphere and turning it into reaction mass (even if it's "just" a nuclear scramjet), and the atmosphere mining plant. So lots of extra systems to go wrong, and much more hazardous conditions than landing on a snowball.

    But, as I said earlier, there is effectively no helium in Oort Cloud objects. How could there be? Helium is a noble gas and does not condense except at extremely low temperatures and high pressures. Trace quantities of helium atoms will inevitably be entrained in condensing molecular ices, and very careful scientific analysis can extract a handful of them... but trying to extract helium from Oort Cloud objects would make about as much economic sense as trying to extract gold or uranium from a human body.

    You'd be much better off scavenging helium from, say, the lunar surface; at least we know there's some from billions of years of solar-wind deposition.

    172:

    For a fun bit of pessimism, consider the generally accepted academic definition of a 'civil war' as involving >1000 deaths in a year, and 'civil strife' in the leadup to a potential civil war as involving >50 deaths/year.

    Now consider that for a meaningful percentage of people in the US, the civil war has 'already begun'. What was once a fringe population of doomsday preppers has morphed very rapidly into a kaleidoscope of Boogaloo Bois, Oath Keepers, Sovereigntists, militias of all stripes. All in constant flux, overlap and interaction with older school Nazis, KKK etc. and the newer variants of Incel terrorists. Most of these have as their core precepts that a civil war is coming, or had already begun. They take it as given that the 'Left' as they define it (anyone not them) is also in the fight and has already begun.

    Whatever the outcome of the 2022 Mid-term elections, we can expect a dramatic ramping up of the rhetoric, violence and propaganda by these groups - either triumphalist violence or violent outraged rejection of the results.

    The GOP can now be seen as a theoretical equivalent to Sinn Fein, with an unacknowledged but aggressive, violent and loosely coordinated wing. They may not even have shared goals aside from hating Democrats/leftists. In the event that the GOP takes control of Congress there will be impeachment, bogus hearings, endless shouting and violence.

    The escalating climate emergency and the ongoing pandemic will continue to throw explosive curveballs into the various political workings.

    Globally, imagine the ripple effect of a US economy in freefall and the collapse of the US dollar, combined with the absence of US ability to project force abroad. For that matter, imagine the US losing interest in events abroad due to the firestorm within its borders.

    All Empires fail, and they almost never see it coming.

    173:

    As witness Trump mocking his anti-vaxx followers last week and announcing he'd had his booster shot. He played them for chumps.

    Just earlier today I read a post by some anti-vaxxer who is convinced Trump "never took this poison" but has to pretend he did because he too is beholden to Big Pharma. She is also convinced that neither Biden nor anyone else "on top" has taken the vaccine.

    174:

    About the same as a wheelchair - nearly 90cm. I avoid psychle farcilities like the plague because they are almost always more dangerous and cyclist-hostile than nothing.

    175:

    whitroth @ 150: The result is they'll fight EV's every step of the way, and legislation (and note that I consider someone saying "government diktat" to, by definition, a libertarian or further wrong-wing), which has started, will be required.

    ... until the banksters who control the fossil fuel companies manage to capture EV manufacturing the same way they captured the current automotive industry.

    176:

    David L @ 151: Before the world shut down I made a comment in a small gathering of people from various parts of the world. I said something to the effect there was a lot of similarity between the German and Dutch languages. One fellow who was Dutch told me in no uncertain terms just how wrong I was.

    I'm thinking there's still a bit of bitterness over the events of the early 1940s.

    Yeah, but the conversion of Pennsylvania's German population into a Dutch population occurred a generation earlier, during the FIRST World War.

    German-Americans were no more nor less loyal citizens of the U.S., but the neighbors were less hostile to those whose ancestors had migrated from this side of the trench lines.

    That's the way it goes sometimes.

    177:

    Paul, there's this little thing in the US (the Constitution) which requires the President to be Native Born. Opening up the Constitution to change that is a Third Rail of USian politics.

    178:

    JBS @ 178 Yeah, but the conversion of Pennsylvania's German population into a Dutch population occurred a generation earlier, during the FIRST World War.

    No, they've been called "Dutch" since the 18th Century (and they've never claimed to be from the Netherlands, then or now).

    179:

    "The running trend of the century is "rent, not own"."

    Which is utterly ghastly, and ten times more so with the way so much of it is set up to require people to allow some remote hand to reach into their bank account and scoop up chunks of money in the background without any oversight. I cannot understand why people in general are not too horrified at the idea for it to have ever got off the ground in the first place.

    I do everything I can to avoid recurrent payments that I can't just not pay, and I refuse utterly to have anything to do with automatic payment of any kind. For instance my electricity supply is on pay-as-you-go with no standing charge so I always have the option of shivering in the dark if I need it and no-one can give me any extra grief on top of that. Things I can't set up like that I nevertheless pay by handing over money in person, so that if it comes to it I can tell them to fuck off and spend it on food instead, and I don't have to worry about unexpectedly finding myself with nothing to eat because they've grabbed it all before I got the chance.

    As far as I am concerned "own, not rent" is the only acceptable option: you pay for the thing, and that's all about it. Once you own the thing - whatever it is - it ceases to be a channel for people to keep grabbing money off you. If you haven't got the money to pay its running costs all you have to do is stop using it and nobody can give you any grief. If it's the kind of thing that doesn't have running costs (like the various examples of data you cite) then having it act as an uncontrolled money bleed is just plain bonkers.

    I've heard of these car leasing deals people get into and I think they're bonkers too. They seem to pay more every month than I would spend in a year and they can't stop paying it. The other thing people do with cars of borrowing some huge sum and being landed with a similar inescapable need to hand over a similar amount of money every month is bad enough, but at least it does stop eventually and they get to keep the car; with the leasing deals you don't even get that much.

    All these schemes are only remotely sensible if you have enough money that hundreds of pounds can disappear behind your back at arbitrary times and you don't have to care about it. Yet they are not only being pressed on people who are not in so fortunate a position, but those people are actually accepting it and punting the possibility of worry down the road... then when it hits them they have to spend even more money on loans and credit cards etc. to punt it down the road a bit further.

    A related aspect is the creeping extension of the idea that the way to solve any problem is to throw money at it. Again this is fine for people who've got more money than they know what to do with, but more and more people are being encouraged to believe - by being taught that they are too ignorant to do anything themselves - that that's the only way to solve a problem whether they've got money or not.

    The position was already bad enough with the housing situation compelling people to be utterly terrified of losing their jobs and unable to even consider telling the kind of employer who needs it to go and fuck themselves. It does not need to be made even worse with a whole host of additional minor and not-so-minor cuts that you can't stop the bleeding from.

    Of course, that's the whole idea, but people won't see it, and not only allow themselves to be thus manipulated but often positively ask for it.

    180:

    A neighborhood where the entire street is essentially parking is not a problem for electric cars.

    It is an opportunity for the local utility. You rip up the sidewalk, put in a trickle charge point every car length, and bill the cars/peoples phones for the power. In terms of infrastructure you have to build to sell more power, it beats the pants of a new subdivision, and those get done.

    Lets see.. predictions.

    Highly managed ocean areas- Kelp planting and oysters and fertilization with iron and other trace elements limiting productivity. Enough oysterbeds to make the north sea clear again even.

    Major advances in adult education.

    NaOH moderated and cooled reactors become really popular in the third world. There is a Danish firm working on Yet Another Molten Salt Design, but the actual key innovation they have stumbled on is a way to get 1200 degree NaOH to not eat structural steels. NaOH is a better moderator and coolant than heavy water. Powerful moderation, a thousand degrees C between melting and boiling temperatures. This means you can kitbash something a whole lot like a Candu with hardly any industrial base at all. Nothing needs pressure, and no need to do isotopic enrichment on anything at all.

    Ohh. I have the perfect surprise to upend All The Things.

    The integrated stress response inhibitor stunt turns out to transfer from mice to human. It gets doled out like candy. What do we think the results would be from all the elderly getting more or less their full faculties back?

    181:

    "Well, a Tesla still needs lubricating oil changes. I've seen a video of someone doing it."

    ...and engines these days don't need much more than that doing to them. Fluids and filters - which electric cars have too - plugs at very rare intervals if it has them, and that's about it. The engine isn't far from being a black box. You can take it out and put in an electric motor which is a slightly closer approximation to a black box, but you still have all the other systems to maintain, and they're where most of the maintenance goes in any case. Tyres, brakes, suspension and all that. I wouldn't disagree that electric cars may be a bit easier to maintain, but I think predictions of the collapse of the car maintenance industry are a bit far-fetched.

    It is true that another characteristic of engines these days is that some stupid thing can break and result in endless expensive fiddling on to try and work out what the problem actually is, but electric cars are built around the same technology that makes engines behave like that, so I see no reason to expect them not to be similarly afflicted.

    182:

    Re: '"GoLocal Agriculture is HARD WORK - ask me how I know this?'

    Intended to reply to this earlier ...

    Yes - I know that growing your own food on your own patch of land is hard work. I - along with many of my neighbors - tried doing a bit of that in 2020 during the first lock-down and worries about supply-chain disruptions, plus having something/anything to do as a distraction. (I ended up with excessive amounts of spinach and tomatoes - couldn't even give them away.)

    Why I keep harping on this --- Food security is a major global and local issue and isn't going to go away esp. with GW/CC causing more frequent and more powerful storms leading to even more frequent and serious disruptions. Not sure how many roads have been damaged where you live but the headlines from parts of the EU, Asia and NA have shown many roads, dams, railroads, etc. completely destroyed by weather events.

    I don't think it makes sense anymore to rely almost entirely on a food supply that can be disrupted as often and as thoroughly as we're beginning to see. We need a different approach, preferably local and decentralized.

    The technology for growing good nutritious and tasty food (produce mostly) has been improving for the past couple of decades. And as more and more people keep moving away from meat esp. beef as their primary protein source, the market for veg-based protein is likely to continue. This isn't some weird and unlikely SF/F scenario, it's already happening.

    More local production also removes a lot of carbon from the atmosphere - not a bad reason to pursue this as an option. And, yeah - I still think that already existing empty non-residential buildings should be the first to be converted over to grow-houses. (Actually, some smaller motel chains could probably also be adapted if the trend to less travel continues.)

    https://www.uschamber.com/co/good-company/launch-pad/indoor-farming-businesses-grow-during-pandemic?cid=search

    I suggest we have a contest for the most weird-*ss ideas for achieving this with the winner determined by OGH.

    ...

    Hey Charlie,

    According to the book store, my book is still supposed to arrive tomorrow. Hah! We'll see. The supply chain has had some serious weather-related problems getting anything here lately.

    183:

    "So electrification of the line is in principle possible if the trains have enough backup battery capacity to cover a 5km gap at relatively low speed."

    Ah, well, it doesn't have to be that complicated...

    As Greg says, it's straightforward to use rigid bars instead of wires in situations where the wires wobbling would be a problem. And the widespread rumour that there isn't enough clearance is officially bollocks. Technically, putting 25kV overhead across the Forth Bridge is entirely possible. The obstacles are matters of bureaucracy rather than engineering.

    184:

    paws4thot @ 158: 147 - No clear idea about Goldwater. McCain's Wikipedia page is pretty clear that he's a US citizen because both his parents were, and he was born on a US military base. Similar argument would apply to John Patrick McInroe although his father was serving in (West) Germany at the time. Ted Cruz' father was naturalised (Cuban), but we know he's run.

    Goldwater was born in the Arizona Territory in 1909 before Arizona became a State in 1912. Whether he was a "natural born" U.S. citizen was vigorously discussed in 1964. Arizona was a U.S. territory when he was born so the question was eventually settled in his favor. But I do wonder if that would have been the case if he had been born there before it became a U.S. possession or territory.

    Ted Cruz is a lying, hypocritical BIRTHER asshole, when his OWN right to claim "natural born" status is shaky. He was born to a U.S. mother in Canada in 1970. AT THE TIME, his father was still a Cuban citizen (NOT being naturalized until 2005). U.S. naturalization law has always concentrated on the citizenship status of the FATHER for children born abroad. AFAIK, the law has never been changed to specifically state the rights of children born to U.S. citizen MOTHERS - again AFAIK, that has only been established by court decisions, not laws passed by Congress (strict constructionists hoist on their own petard). 1

    The only reason I include Cruz is because he's a lying hypocrite, and he deserves all the shit I can heap upon him. See my previous comments regarding splinters & planks. It's something I think Cruz needs to seriously ponder.

    But all that is not even my question. Forget Goldwater, Cruz et al.

    If a person is born in a place that is not & never has been a United States possession or territory and after that the place subsequently became a U.S. State ... at what point do the people born there become "natural born" U.S. citizens? Does it apply only to persons born after the place becomes a state? Or is it retroactive for persons born there BEFORE it became a state?

    1 Remember the whole BULLSHIT BIRTHER argument about Obama was due to his Kenyan FATHER, completely ignoring his U.S. Mother and the inconvenient fact that Hawaii was ALREADY A STATE for two years before Obama was born there.

    What's sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander.

    185:

    Even worse for those times is that it this is just the station to station times and doesn't factor in the actual (home) door to (office) door travel time.

    186:

    Predictions... since my next novel in my universe starts about 54 years from now, I've been thinking about it for a while.

    2030: Yeah, the first trillionaire individuals (as opposed to companies). More automation, including restaurants. The beginning of more widespread BMI, which will start somewhere between 2025 and 2035, and in the US will begin by loosening up welfare, so that a) it's not next to impossible to get on; b) you don't have to be an unmarried woman, with or without kid(s), to get on it, and the means test will start resembling the way unemployment goes here, that you weren't fired, and are looking for a job. Long-term plastics, that is, non-disposable (the petrochemical industry will push this). About CRISPR... the first genengineered diseases, including a (mis)targeted one that kills fertility. Finally, someone puts a reactor in orbit (or it's assembled up there) for the first nuclear spaceship. One of the first uses will be shuttling between Earth orbit and the Lunar orbiting Gateway. (And one a little closer to home), breakthrough on diseases that are caused by, or provoked by, your intestinal biome. Among the cures coming out of that is fibromyalgia.

    187:

    The beginning of more widespread BMI

    Did you mean "UBI"? BMI means Body Mass Index. Although you could argue that in US it is loosened already. :)

    188:

    Robert Prior @ 163:

    (a) the cost of relocating into a rental or senior assisted living residence is more expensive than staying put or the return on the sale of their house;

    Also, you are giving up independence when you do that. Rental puts you at the mercy of landlords, while a residence means that you eat meals at a set time etc."

    I've had this conversation with several friends who are putting off entering a residence as long as they can, because they've seen what going from 'independent adult' to 'retirement home resident' did to their parents.

    Imagine having to live your life to someone else's timetable. Eat when they say. Sleep when they say. Clear out of the way so your room can be cleaned when they say. Kids are used to it. Teenagers rebel against it. Are we surprised when older adults don't want to go back to it?

    It's my only fear now. What happens when I'm no longer able to live independently? THEY will take my little buddy away and who can I trust to take care of him the way they should do.

    I'll be dead within six months.

    190:

    176 - Cheers; the "separated" (note qoted used advisedly) cycle lanes on certain main routes around North and West Glasgow are as dangerous to you as they are a menace to powered transport. There is at least one route where the divider is hard rubber bumps about 4" high and 242 long, quite capable of launching a car's LH wheels into the air and depriving the driver of all control until they land. I have been a passenger in one car that wandered into them, and know what I am talking about.

    185 - The Forth (Rail) Bridge isn't a "listed building" with Hysterical Scotland (sic), but it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which may pose its own issues with a modification like adding overhead electrification.

    186 - Ok, Ted Cruz' coat should be on a shoogly peg (as we say over here).

    190 - Ur kitteh? How about "any cat friendly regular poster to this blog who lives in the same nation?

    191:

    "yeah, i used to live in hastings, where they couldn't get high speed up to london because someone had only put two skins of bricks on certain tunnels rather than the three they were supposed to have"

    That's kind of confused...

    It is true that the original contractor skimped on the tunnel linings and didn't put enough rings of bricks in. When they started falling in they were brought up to scratch by installing additional rings, which narrowed the tunnels enough to cause problems with clearance.

    What this meant was that you couldn't have ordinary British-sized trains on that line. They had to build special narrow-bodied stock, for use on that line only, so it could get through the tunnels without hitting anything.

    When the line was eventually electrified the idea of having special narrow electric stock as well was too much to handle, so instead they reduced the double track through the tunnels to a single track straight up the middle and got more clearance that way, though with a reduction in ultimate line capacity, considered not too serious because the single line sections are only short.

    The problem with the British loading gauge in general is that as the first builders we didn't make it as big as those who came along later usually did, so we can't, or can't easily, do various things mostly involving bulky freight loads that railways elsewhere in the world find straightforward.

    "High speed rail" as the term has been used in this discussion is a different kettle of fish entirely. The problem there is that cornering forces increase with the square of the speed, so none of the ordinary lines are straight enough. All the countries which have gone for it have done it by building dedicated routes on new alignments with minimal curvature.

    192:

    whitroth @ 169: I'm quite familiar with them. But you're thinking parking meters, not vehicle recharge stations.

    Here in Raleigh there's one of these stations for every 4 or so parking spaces downtown (so people don't have to walk too far to pay for parking). You use a credit card & type in the number of the parking space (painted on the curb) plus however long (up to the maximum allowed time) you want to pay for and it spits out a little paper ticket that goes on the dash so the "meter reader" can see it through the windshield.

    But I don't think it should be too difficult to design a station for EACH parking space that could do double duty as a parking meter AND a charging station. I think it will come eventually.

    I also expect municipal parking garages will eventually have charging stations for each parking space. You'll pay for both when you exit. Take the ticket when you enter; insert the ticket into the charger while parked ... remove the ticket and hand it to the attendant (along with your credit/debit card) when you exit.

    Maybe they'll bury some kind of coil in the pavement to charge the vehicles like those pads you can get to lay your phone on? And the whole transaction will be by bluetooth?

    193:

    "wheeled battery ballast," basically semis that are battery packs.

    Or even standard shipping container battery packs. There's some prior art for this: before "cloud" really took off, and I'm sure still since, both Google and Dell have marketed "data centre in a shipping container" capabilities, where the idea is the container has all that's needed to run inside it, just plug it into your network. A shipping container battery could include all the switching, cooling and any required inverter or other conversion gear needed for a wide range of application (including powering the truck that is carrying it).

    Detachable trailer battery/floodlight combinations already exist in emergency management (I remember SES training in the old days, the generator/floodlight trailers were impressive in that you would stall the generator motor if you turned all the lights on at once), some with fold-out solar panels too. Using a standard shipping container would open up all the existing freight infrastructure, and potentially make the arrangement for a "ferry" a dual-use option... for short haul you could take some actual containers full of freight and half the battery load. Also, not sure how the numbers would work out, but retro-fitting existing container ships for electric feels roughly at the edge of worthwhile, since they already have the gear to carry a crazy number of containers. It would be a density issue, assuming something like LiFePO4 (although one of the benefits of the standardised container approach would be that the actual battery technology would be transparently changeable).

    194:

    "(Covered side or bottom-contact third rail would be alternate options.)"

    It is of course well-known that there is a long-unfulfilled desire for the DC 750V third rail system to be installed on the Kyle line. There's even a song about it - "Oh for DC to Skye".

    Personally I class electrification of the Highland branches as "more trouble than it's worth to do, and not enough usage to be worth fretting about it". Leave them as diesel because it works better than anything else would and it's a drop in the ocean. You can always run them on transesterified chip shop fat if you want to.

    195:

    The English Broadcasting Corporation appear to believe that "high speed rail" means "anything over 50mph" based on https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-59946362 . They also seem to think that trains can stop instantly.

    196:

    Owner of a Tesla here, and there's no lubrication oil change required for normal service. I just went back and checked my owners manual to be sure. Only scheduled maintenance is rotation of the tires every 6,250 miles, testing of the brake fluid for water and change of the cabin HEPA filter every two years and replacement of the A/C desiccant bag every six years. If you live in an area where roads are salted in the winter, they recommend lubricating the brake calipers every two years since the receive much less use than on IC cars due to regenerative braking.

    More anecdata from an EV owner: I live in a detached home and the car is plugged in when it's in the driveway. This gives me a "full tank" every morning. Replacement of a couple of kitchen appliances with more efficient versions has offset the additional power bill. Friends who live in apartments either have charging points in their parking lots or they are being installed. I realize this is not true everywhere. My situation is ideal for the car but not everyone's is. Tesla is installing Urban Superchargers in our citiy for people who might not have opportunity to at home.

    I just went on a trip to a small town in the North Carolina mountains. The cabin we were to stay in had a Tesla charger. There was a problem with the cabin so we had to move to a small hotel. It also had a charger. The hotel across the street had two chargers. I restaurant we stopped at was closed for renovation but said we could use their charger if we needed it. This town had one charger just a few years ago. The charging network is improving but Tesla's advantage is their widespread and reliable charging network. I've had about a 50% success rate with other charges the few times I've tried them.

    I don't want to come across as an EV apologist. I don't plan on selling my Honda S2000 until I stop driving. I sold a Coupe with mods for the track when I got the Tesla. I like the convenience (for me) of an EV but, more than that, it's so much fun to drive. I just wanted to provide my experience with a particular car in a particular region with an ideal home location for charging.

    197:

    The integrated stress response inhibitor stunt turns out to transfer from mice to human. It gets doled out like candy. What do we think the results would be from all the elderly getting more or less their full faculties back?

    You're not in America, right?

    Because "doled out like candy" doesn't seem to be the model for American pharmaceutical products, even the ones whose research was paid for years ago.

    https://www.statista.com/chart/23127/average-price-per-standard-unit-of-insulin/

    Combine this with Charlie's rent-not-own prediction, and you have people who are effectively renting their own minds. Can't pay, say hello to dementia…

    198:

    That is wrong at so many levels. Were the SUV's donated by the local gas station dealer association?

    Said by someone who doesn't have to deal with Highway 400 in the winter.

    It is frequently an unpleasant experience thanks to snow squalls and other weather fun causing many multi-vehicle pile-ups.

    There is no way I would commute that highway in anything less than an SUV.

    199:

    Basic Minimum Income, because it'll be a long time before it's universal.

    And, of course, how could I have typed a mistaken acronym, they're all unique... you know, like CRT.

    200:

    I think the EV situation will be interesting to watch, and interesting to see if it happens.

    It is one thing to say the automakers are all converted, but it will be another thing entirely to get people to buy them.

    And I can't help but wonder, as weather gets more unpredictable, if people will in addition to politics and other things decide if an old fashioned IC engine vehicle is safer.

    Better range for evacuations (won't matter if it is true or not), the ability to refuel even if the grid is down (see Quebec ice storm, any major hurricane, etc.) because you only need to find a gas station still with power or a generator.

    Generally I could see the attempt at EV conversion failing in the US.

    201:

    Para 2 - Not knowing the background to the song, you have misinterpreted the words as being about 3rd rail electrification. The song is actually a lament over the Scottish Government not having built a bridge between Skye and the Uists, hence the chorus "Speed bonnie boat,
    Like a bird on the wing,
    Onward the sailors cry,
    Carry the lad wha's born to be King,
    Over the sea to Skye." (from Peter's Port on Benbecula.)

    202:

    AJ @ 159 Hiring vehicles ...
    I'm 76 during this coming week. No-one at all will hire me a car, even though I've just had a licence renewal & also my eyesight tested & passed + medical check.
    SEE ALSO: EC @ 171

    Rbt Prior @ 163
    YES - simply NOT GOING THERE.

    Rocketjps
    THAT is exactly why Xi & Putin are backing Trump, of course, except they don't/can't/won't see that they are next. It's as "sensible" as the Imperial German guvmin't's capers 1913-17 - & as disastrous long-term. But they won't learn. All empires .. never see it coming - not so, or in one case, at least. I think one reason the dissolution of "OUR" Empire was for precisely that reason. "We" saw that it was - if not time to go, right now, then soon - & in spite of a lot of "minor" bloodshed, it was a lot less nasty than say, oh: Congo / Algeria / Viet Nam (twice) ......

    Pigeon @ 181
    Please refer back to my # 83?

    TJ @ 182
    The integrated stress response inhibitor stunt turns out to transfer from mice to human. It gets doled out like candy. What do we think the results would be from all the elderly getting more or less their full faculties back? - sorry, don't understand ... (?)

    ilya187
    Cat or Dog

    Pigeon
    Excepting Germany, where some lengths of older line without significant curvature have been rebuilt to take real high-speed: "Aufbaustrecke" as opposed to "Neubaustrecke" ... here that would be Kings-Cross - Morpeth or Paddington - Swansea / Bristol or Exeter via Bristol

    203:

    Said by someone who doesn't have to deal with Highway 400 in the winter.

    It is frequently an unpleasant experience thanks to snow squalls and other weather fun causing many multi-vehicle pile-ups.

    I've never found it a pleasant experience, thanks to large numbers of hyper-aggressive drivers in SUVs… :-/

    And semis. Let's not forget semi drivers who figure it's the car's job to get out of their way…

    204:

    The video I referenced was also made by a Tesla owner. Clearly one of you is mistaken about the need to change transmission oil.

    205:

    Bit of problem with going full EV for personal transport.

    There are almost 287 million registered cars in the US in 2020.

    Suppose you replace them all with Teslas.

    The battery of a tesla weighs about 1,200 lbs - or a total of about 172 million tons of batteries.

    A tesla battery warranty is 8 years or 100,000 miles with a battery retention capacity of 70%.

    Tesla car batteries are supposed to technically last for 300,000 to 500,000 miles, which is 1,500 battery cycles. That’s between 22 and 37 years for the average car driver, who, according to the Department of Transportation, drives about 13,500 miles per year. This is not the same distance that Tesla warranties. After 100,000 to 150,000 miles, Tesla does not cover repairs and replacements for you if your battery degrades past a certain point. So the typical owner will replace the battery after about 8 years.
    That's an average of about 21.5 million tons of battery replacement annually if 1/8 of existing tesla batteries are replaced annually.

    Recycling li-ion batteries is incredibly expensive unless heavily subsidized and confined to low labor cost markets (which China no longer is) that are also capable of massive economies of scale. Not impossible - but very, very difficult.

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004221007550

    So that leaves us with li-ion battery disposal.

    A non-recycled li-ion battery is defined as hazwaste.

    America currently disposes of 1.6 million tons of hazwaste each year.

    Replacing the projected tonnage of tesla batteries (assuming a cost competitive means of recycling li-ion batteries that does not require government mandates or subsidies is found) increases the amount of of hazwaste disposal in America by a factor of 13x to 14x.

    Again, not impossible but very, very difficult.

    And nobody is preparing for a potential tsunami of hazwaste from complete conversion to EVs.

    It normally takes 5 to 10 years to design, permit and build a new hazwaste landfill.

    206:

    Yes, he is.

    I routinely change all the fluids on my S2000. There's not only no transmission fill and drain holes, there's no transmission. The only gearing on a Tesla is a reduction gear integrated with the motor(s).

    207:

    That doesn't surprise me. I live closer to Huntingdon than Cambridge yet it takes as long to get to Huntingdon using the bus as it does to Cambridge. The reason is that the Busway itself ends 2 stops before my stop, and from St Ives to Huntingdon, it's on the roads and it goes round the houses in Huntingdon.

    Back when I worked at Shire Hall, my commute door-to-door was a little less than an hour. Now I'm working in North London, and my door-to-door is 1:30-1:45 depending on traffic and packed trains at Finsbury Park. The difference was surprising to me; it's actually better to go into London as I can read on the train - I get travel sick on buses. The other trade-off is the much higher basic salary plus London weighting,

    Living where I do has been a godsend with both of us working from home during lock-down; we have space for a home office big enough for 2 and the rest of the house is kept away from work. We've got a reasonable size garden for exercise (yes, I grown some veg but not a lot - I don't have the time). We're close enough to town to walk to the market (and Waitrose if necessary), although our main shop is done at Morrisons which is a bit further out. Theoretically, we can walk to Morrisons but it's along the main road, and I have dodgy joints. When I get my twirly-pass, I expect I'll use the local bus to go to Morrisons (the stop for that is opposite the house), but then I'll have the time to spend doing so (it's a circular route and it's far longer to come back than to go out).

    I do own a car - which is something of a luxury these days - but once we don't need to head to Corby at the drop of a hat or lug stuff to the local HWRC, then I expect not to replace it once it becomes uneconomic.

    208:

    Sigh.

    There's plenty of FUD to balance the True Believers of EV's. As usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

    I don't know about the other manufacturers, but Tesla is actively working on cleaning up battery manufacturing working with a company dedicated to recycling batteries with a recovery rate in the high 90's. They've also created a dry process for battery manufacture that eliminates the high levels of contaminated liquid. You might want to look at Musk's Battery Day presentation on Youtube. Granted, Musk is nothing if he's not a true believer, but even without 100% success, there's not going to be a flood of hazmat.

    209:

    "NaOH is a better moderator and coolant than heavy water."

    How do they work that out then? Heavy water is a good moderator because (1) lighter nuclei pinch more KE off the neutrons and (2) deuterium and oxygen both have bugger all of a cross section for neutron absorption. Sodium is too heavy to have a good moderating effect and it has a neutron absorption cross section about 1000 times that of deuterium. NaOH ought to be a rotten moderator.

    It's not the world's best coolant either because the consequence of that neutron absorption is vicious gammas being emitted from the primary cooling loop, which tends to be a bit awkward.

    On top of that you've still got the same problem that you get with a molten-anything-cooled reactor, that you have to melt the entire contents of the cooling circuit before you can start the reactor up. I can't see what advantage you get from adding the other problems with using NaOH apart from it being cheap, which I suppose is true, but the cost of the coolant is a pretty tiny proportion of the whole.

    210:

    Back of an envelope calculations... a TEU container has approx 33.2 cubic metres internal volume, while energy density for LiFePO4 is about 325 Wh/l, so you get roughly 10MWh per TEU, with roughly 3 cubic metres per container set aside for cooling and switching (assuming that's enough, it's a nice round number anyway, can always adjust for more ventilation if that's required but it won't be a do-or-die impact). The "very famous in 2021" Ever Given carries around 20,000 TEU and its engine puts out around 60MW at full power. So 6 containers gives an hour of runtime at full power, roughly. Osaka to Rotterdam is roughly 28 days, so a little over 4,000 LiFePO4 battery containers would give the equivalent to full power for that passage, assuming no recharging (or swapping out) en-route. That's giving up around 20% cargo capacity, so it could be cost prohibitive in current conditions, but as always, conditions can change.

    Some quick googling suggests that of the major shipbuilders, Wärtstilä in particular is getting into electric propulsion in a big way and Imbari, the builder of the Ever Given, is active in a range of spaces, including ammonia-based propulsion and energy storage ships for offshore wind farms.

    211:

    Duffy 207. Every time I see that analysis, and it's been a few times, it is always as if the disposal of EV batteries is the only thing happening. At no point does anyone mention the total environmental cost of disposal for ICE engines and components, and the oil/fluids/gasoline involved.

    For interest sake, I'd love to see a comparative analysis of the two modes. The 'tsunami' of hazwaste bearing down on us, which terminology I've seen in more than one petroleum funded publication, behaves as if we are starting in a position of zero waste.

    I don't think anyone is under the delusion that ICE vehicle use or life cycles produce zero waste, so I'd love to see a comparison.

    212:

    Pigeon @ 181:

    "The running trend of the century is "rent, not own"."

    Which is utterly ghastly, and ten times more so with the way so much of it is set up to require people to allow some remote hand to reach into their bank account and scoop up chunks of money in the background without any oversight. I cannot understand why people in general are not too horrified at the idea for it to have ever got off the ground in the first place.

    I do everything I can to avoid recurrent payments that I can't just not pay, and I refuse utterly to have anything to do with automatic payment of any kind. For instance my electricity supply is on pay-as-you-go with no standing charge so I always have the option of shivering in the dark if I need it and no-one can give me any extra grief on top of that. Things I can't set up like that I nevertheless pay by handing over money in person, so that if it comes to it I can tell them to fuck off and spend it on food instead, and I don't have to worry about unexpectedly finding myself with nothing to eat because they've grabbed it all before I got the chance.

    I have trouble managing money that well. Back when I was working & on the road a lot I had frequent problems with late payments and all the additional fees & penalties involved. I now have all my essentials - utilities & a couple of other things set up for automatic payment from my checking account. This allows me to do several things.

    I have EQUAL PAYMENT plans. My gas, electric & water are averaged over the preceding year and the monthly payment changes only ONCE per year. My monthly utility payments are locked in to be the same every month so I can BUDGET for what I have to spend.

    I get a discounted rate for using direct debit. And I don't have to worry about coming home from a week on the road only to find my water has been cut off because I was too busy to go downtown to pay the bill on time.

    When I bought my Jeep I had enough in my Money Market account to pay cash. I chose to finance it at the Credit Union and set it for direct debit because I got a much lower interest rate and I kept earning interest on the Money Market which partially offset the interest I was paying PLUS I had money for a "rainy day" and wouldn't need to borrow in an emergency.

    As far as I am concerned "own, not rent" is the only acceptable option: you pay for the thing, and that's all about it. Once you own the thing - whatever it is - it ceases to be a channel for people to keep grabbing money off you. If you haven't got the money to pay its running costs all you have to do is stop using it and nobody can give you any grief. If it's the kind of thing that doesn't have running costs (like the various examples of data you cite) then having it act as an uncontrolled money bleed is just plain bonkers.

    I've heard of these car leasing deals people get into and I think they're bonkers too. They seem to pay more every month than I would spend in a year and they can't stop paying it. The other thing people do with cars of borrowing some huge sum and being landed with a similar inescapable need to hand over a similar amount of money every month is bad enough, but at least it does stop eventually and they get to keep the car; with the leasing deals you don't even get that much.

    In the U.S. leasing makes sense if you can deduct the cost from your taxes as a BUSINESS EXPENSE.

    When I worked for the burglar alarm company they leased our vans. I ended up buying one of the vans at the end of the lease and got a WHOPPING discount off of buying even a used van of the same vintage ... maybe half of the market value. I'd have had to pay twice as much for an equivalent van if I hadn't had the option to buy the one I was already driving.

    All these schemes are only remotely sensible if you have enough money that hundreds of pounds can disappear behind your back at arbitrary times and you don't have to care about it. Yet they are not only being pressed on people who are not in so fortunate a position, but those people are actually accepting it and punting the possibility of worry down the road... then when it hits them they have to spend even more money on loans and credit cards etc. to punt it down the road a bit further.

    A related aspect is the creeping extension of the idea that the way to solve any problem is to throw money at it. Again this is fine for people who've got more money than they know what to do with, but more and more people are being encouraged to believe - by being taught that they are too ignorant to do anything themselves - that that's the only way to solve a problem whether they've got money or not.

    The position was already bad enough with the housing situation compelling people to be utterly terrified of losing their jobs and unable to even consider telling the kind of employer who needs it to go and fuck themselves. It does not need to be made even worse with a whole host of additional minor and not-so-minor cuts that you can't stop the bleeding from.

    Of course, that's the whole idea, but people won't see it, and not only allow themselves to be thus manipulated but often positively ask for it.

    Another example ... it may have been unique to my own situation, but I expect there are others with similar experiences. I rented an apartment even though I already owned a house.

    When I came home from Iraq I didn't have a job. The U.S. has a law that requires employers to reinstate you with all the seniority & benefits you would have had if you had remained on the job the whole time you were mobilized. The one thing they didn't really anticipate was what happens if the Employer is no longer in business. There was no job for them to reinstate me into because there was no THEM anymore.

    I went back to school. But the school was an hour-and-a-half away from home; three hours per day for the round trip; fifteen hours per week ... PLUS $400/month in fuel costs PLUS wear & tear and maintenance on my car. I found a cheap, one bedroom apartment 15 minutes from school for $450/month.

    As it turned out, I was at school from 8:00 in the morning to 9:00 at night and the fifteen hours a week I didn't have to spend commuting was more precious than gold.

    But it was only possible because I could RENT that apartment. Renting is often the best solution to a short term need.

    The bottom line is to own stuff when you need to and rent other stuff when you need to. Do whatever is best for your own financial situation.

    213:

    ilya187 @ 191: Your cat?

    I have a little dog now. Shih Tzu. He's a rescue.

    I still have these delusions about traveling around the U.S. to do photography and he's going to be my traveling companion. For now his job description is "lap dog" and he's quite good at it.

    214:

    One of the many, many things tried on mice was an attempt at treating cognitive loss from repeated concussions by turning off the mechanism that puts stressed neurons into, well, basically hibernation.

    Turns out, this also reverses the cognitive decline seen in old mice. Not "Prevents". Reverses. They found a drug that gives old mice the full learning ability of a young mouse. And yes, I was horribly tempted to conduct unlicensed human medical trials on myself when I heard about that. But it is also a hilarious macguffin for a sci-fi tale. What would be the consequences of the elderly getting their full mental adaptability back?

    215:

    The Forth Rail Bridge isn’t that long. Just hit it at 80 kph and coast.

    216:

    Volkswagen won't cover repairs or replacement of my engine and gearbox, but I'm not about to replace either of those after 15 years. The battery warranty isn't an expiry date on your battery FFS.

    Most of the cars also wont' be a Model S, they will be something hot hatch or smaller sized, so the battery weight will be half-ish, so your 1200lb becomes 600lb.

    On a related note, LiFePO should be good for over 1,000,000km at 80% power out which well past the usable life of most cars due to simple wear and tear (or accidents).

    I guarantee that not a single Tesla battery pack will go into a haz-waste dump, right now you cannot get a second hand Tesla battery module (not pack which contains 16 modules) for less than $1200 USD. Given that there are at going to be millions of cars that folks will want to restomod to keep them on the road, I can't se this changing in the next 5+ years.

    And last but not least, recycling batteries may be expensive in your country right now, but, as that link says, the biggest cost of recycling a battery is moving it to the place it is to be recycled. So if some random company decides (cough Redwood materials, cough) sets up their factories, on site in the USA I expect they will turn that shit into gold.

    Most recycling has focused on phones and laptops up to now, with millions cars comes amazing economies of scale.

    BTW, what do we do with all the old cars and toxic waste motor oil currently?

    217:

    On the rent vs own thing... I assume you all currently own your own buses, trains and trams, so paying a fare for ride in a self driving car is just too much :-)

    218:

    Free Fall Sparrow Division 56,57,59,60 Our kind of Chaos?
    Bachman Turner Overdrive - You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet
    ...
    björk - it's oh so quiet

    Those are good.
    The Gleipnir list is fun, though "Roots of a mountain" is a stretch. (echidna?) :-)

    (Still thinking about the Hellboy II Nuada death sentence scene ("Nuada Kills His Father" mentioned/deleted in the omicron thread (nym "Three Barrelled Names Are For The Bourgeoise" starting at 1750.) That 4Q 2016 thread where it was first linked... )

    ---
    Makes me laugh:
    Pentagon’s New UFO Office Worries Some Ufologists (Paola Rosa-Aquino, JAN. 8, 2022)
    One of my US Senators:
    “Our national security efforts rely on aerial supremacy and these phenomena present a challenge to our dominance,” Gillibrand said
    A surprise along those or related lines could be a fun as a within-10-years wildcard. :-)

    219:

    But it is also a hilarious macguffin for a sci-fi tale. What would be the consequences of the elderly getting their full mental adaptability back?

    Has been done in science fiction many times. First thing that comes to mind if "Pandora's Star" and its sequels, by Peter Hamilton.

    220:

    Queensland has been electrifying its coal train network with 25kV overhead lines and 3 x 3MW locomotives per train. It's amusing but also a bit depressing to consider how BE locomotives might be used for this, given we should be spending the money on the freight network and taking big trucks off the road. Because why build expensive specialised infrastructure that only needs to be replaced every 30-40 years when you can replace road infrastructure every 2-3 years. Unfortunately our version of continuous Keynesian stimulus comes with a requirement for large private sector superstructures siphoning much of the benefit.

    221:

    Holy Fire, by Bruce Sterling springs to mind.

    JBS @215:

    For now his job description is "lap dog" and he's quite good at it.

    I imagine he's good because he trains every day he can!

    222:

    I would also point out that a Tesla Model 3 weighs pretty much the same as those notoriously lardy BMW 3 series vehicles.

    A bunch of friends have various EVs, mostly Tesla’s. They previously had everything from MB S class, fancy Lexus’, Range Rovers, to several Porsche’s, even one Ferrari. All of them claim to be very happy with the exchange.

    If you don’t want an EV, fine, I don’t care. But don’t spread bullshit copypasta from oiligarch funded liesites. It’s tasteless.

    223:

    so paying a fare for ride in a self driving car is just too much

    You couldn't pay me to go in a self driving car, and I'm getting increasingly paranoid about other people on the road abusing those options.

    I have access to a local car share scheme and will be trying that out when I need a van for building my granny flat. I've also paid way more than car/van hire rates to get the "man with a ute" or "two men and a truck" because a lot of things are just easier with two or more people. Why badger friends to run all over town when you can just pay an extra $50 and get the vehicle owner to do it. I moved ~3 cubic metres of coolstore panels to build my shedroom that way. I gave the guy exact measurements in advance and he still boggled a bit at the actual size (think a stack ~1.5m high on top of the roofrack of a ute). It was safe and legal, just unusal. But it beat the suppliers delivery cost by a factor of two.

    But also, I don't rent trains or buses, I pay for them through taxes. The fares charged barely cover the cost of collecting them. But they're charged to make a political point rather than as any kind of cost recovery exercise, so until that changes we'll be paying per trip for PT.

    224:

    That's kind of confused...

    yes, well, i might have guessed this was not the place to be dispensing ill-remembered factoids about the uk rail system

    i stand corrected

    225:

    MaddyE
    Hemingford? Godmanchester? St Ives? I like Godmanchester - used to pass through it regularly

    RvdH
    NO!
    There are gentle curves at both ends, it used to have a 40 mph ( 64kph ) speed-limit & the real problem - look at the location of Dalmeny & S Queensferry stations?

    malware
    Stop comparing rocking-horses with unicorns!

    226:

    I have done the same thing with road-base, getting a wiry old guy with a truck and dingo was cheaper and less damaging to my back than just getting it delivered. Bless.

    For the last 3 months watching Tesla FSD 10.x videos I've had that chapter from Rule 34 with the cop car doing a high speed drive through back streets. Computers used to be shit, now they are good. Phones used to be shit, now they are good. Aircraft used to be shit, then they were good (now they are shit again). Cars used to be shit, now they are good. FSD is shit... at some point it will either be good, or something we don't remember or mock (Juicero anyone :-).

    Greg, its Matware, not malware... malware's what is making your computer shit again.

    There are some things that will be better in every way than the now, electric road transport is one of those, it is fractally anti-shit.

    227:

    Oh, for 2031 I'm betting that my best selling double sided pocket book "How to hunt rats an a post apocalyptic wasteland" and "How to cook rats in a apocalyptic wasteland" will be selling for between 200 and 400 bottle caps, and topping the used book charts.

    228:

    I spent a while onsite at the John Lewis Partnership HQ down at Victoria, and ended up chatting to one of the staff that I occasionally encountered on the train.

    She lived in Milton, one of the villages outside Cambridge, and had been working at the JL in Cambridge. She'd been taking the bus into Cambridge. There are bus stops directly outside JL there (actual address 10 Downing Street).

    She then got promoted to Head Office. So all of a sudden, her commute was bus from Milton into Cambridge, then the fast train (three or four stops) down to King's Cross, then the direct Underground 5 stops to Victoria, and then walk a short distance to the office. She was setting out at 06:30 to get in by 09:00.

    If the London end hadn't been so quick — perhaps a change required on the Underground — I can easily see that taking a full three hours.

    229:

    You might want to look at Musk's Battery Day presentation on Youtube.

    Nobody makes money selling printers.

    You make money selling ink.

    Musk isn't selling Teslas.

    He's selling batteries.

    230:

    208 - *Yes, he is.

    I routinely change all the fluids on my S2000. There's not only no transmission fill and drain holes, there's no transmission. The only gearing on a Tesla is a reduction gear integrated with the motor(s).*

  • Where to start? How about with your sexist assumption that anyone who works on their own car is male?
  • What is an "S2000"? I can think of at least three cars it could be, and 2 of them most assuredly do have gearbox fill and drain plugs. The other one is a Honda.
  • So "there is no transmission" becomes meaningless because you've not said what there is no transmission on, and the Honda at least I know has a manual gearbox.
  • The only gearing on a Tesla is a reduction gear integrated with the motor(s). Like a final drive on anything else. Why do you believe that this doesn't benefit from oil changes on a Tesla?
  • 217 - Will the speed limit on the FRB permit this? Can an EMU accelerating out of either Dalmeny or (S) Queensferry actually achieve 50mph before hitting the bridge and having to coast?

    231:

    total environmental cost of disposal for ICE engines and components, and the oil/fluids/gasoline involved

    POL products are easily filtered and reused and/or are already part of the 1/6 million tons of hazwaste dispose every year.

    Engine parts are scrap metal - very easy to recycle.

    232:

    Suppose something truly insane happened and South Africa somehow became the 51st State ... Would Musk then qualify as native born even though he was already an adult before that happened?

    Yes, because that's why George Washington was allowed to become POTUS. (And a couple of other 18th century presidents.)

    However, it won't happen. Can you imagine the confederate revanchists wanting anything to do with the country of Nelson Mandela, as a state? SA wouldn't be allowed in even if they wanted in (which they clearly don't) for the same reason that DC and Puerto Rico are kept from statehood -- too many non-whites.

    233:

    Volkswagen won't cover repairs or replacement of my engine and gearbox, but I'm not about to replace either of those after 15 years.

    You would if your drive train experienced a 30% reduction in performance.

    right now you cannot get a second hand Tesla battery module (not pack which contains 16 modules) for less than $1200 USD. Given that there are at going to be millions of cars that folks will want to restomod to keep them on the road, I can't se this changing in the next 5+ years.

    This I grant you is an excellent point. Used Tesla batteries can have a useful second life as energy storage for home and local renewable energy systems.

    Which only delays its inevitable trip to the landfill by 5 years or so.

    And even if the amount of Tesla batteries thrown away each year is a mere 5x the current hazwaste disposal rate, it's still a tsunami nobody is preparing for.

    234:

    General comment on short term predictions.

    There's a passage in Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises in which a character named Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he answers. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

    Or as Professor Albert Allen Bartlett pointed out, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”.

    https://www.sterlinghawkins.com/blog-1/the-greatest-shortcoming-of-the-human-race-illuminated-by-covid-19

    "We’re programmed to think very linearly: tomorrow will look a lot like today. And oftentimes, it does. So we plan for that. Organize around that. Enroll other people in it. And then guess what? Tomorrow looks a lot like today."

    "Exponential growth is all around us. Populations of underdeveloped countries. High-growth startups. Things going viral online (maybe after this pandemic we’ll rethink that name). Intellectually we understand exponential growth. We all know what the exponential graph looks like (the proverbial hockey stick). We even know the mathematical equation. And we know exponential growth creates entirely new normals almost overnight. It’s the UBER in a former taxi city. Netflix instead of shopping at Blockbuster. The iPhone when the Blackberry used to be the omnipresent device. If you don’t work inside these companies, you don’t experience the growth trajectory. You simply engage with the new normal."

    "These things happen so fast that it’s easy to slip into the new normal and not be present to the experience of the massive change that has happened underneath. Just because we conceptually understand the exponential function does not mean we truly grasp the power of it, much less plan for it in the future of our business and our lives."

    Whether its global warming, biodiversity collapse, refugee migrations, declining birthrates, or pandemics, nobody understand the exponential function.

    235:

    I just went outside and counted - there are 12 houses on my block and 10 utility poles (three of which have street lamps).

    While there are utility poles in British cities, I have the impression that there are far more in the USA -- in general, electrical trunking is buried in trenches, as it generally carries higher voltage/current and we don't have your pole-mounted stepdown transformers. (The local 600V substation for my block is in a cellar downstairs, under the main door entrance for six apartments, three shops, and a restaurant.)

    Off-street parking seems to be a thing for new apartment blocks in Edinburgh, outside the conservation zone -- they're clad to resemble the traditional sandstone, but have stuff like a basement level car-park, elevators, and double glazing. (Also low ceilings, pokey floor plans, and horrible leasehold agreements.)

    236:

    've had this conversation with several friends who are putting off entering a residence as long as they can, because they've seen what going from 'independent adult' to 'retirement home resident' did to their parents.

    Yeah, it can be grim. (Tip: tour the home first. If it smells of shit or piss without a very good excuse -- eg. a resident just lost control in the corridor five minutes ago and they're still cleaning up -- cross it off your list.)

    My family experience ...

    My parents went into a care home together a couple of times, while one or other of them was recovering from really major surgery. (Triple bypass for him, leg amputation for her.) Think of it as a hotel vacation with 24x7 nursing support, because they really weren't safe at home together. That was okay, if pricey (nursing homes are expensive hotels).

    The other was my mother's twilight year, after my father died. She had three strokes (and spent three months in hospital). Unfortunately they left her speech and swallowing impaired and paralysed on her right side -- which was particularly bad, as her left was the side with no leg. Effectively she had one working limb, impaired vision, wheelchair-bound, and vascular dementia on top ...

    That's the stage at which a care home is unavoidable, unless you're so wealthy you can turn the ground floor of your McMansion into your own miniature care home and hire a full-time live-in nurse.

    (We found a good home for her, visited her daily, tried to get her to eat -- the prescription diet for people who might aspirate their food and die of pneumonia is particularly grim and unappetising -- and for less cognitively-impaired residents the home organized a lively round of activities to keep them stimulated. Alas, a final stroke carried her away in her sleep after about 10 months. And now if you were wondering where that scene in "Dead Lies Dreaming" came from, you can read between the lines ...)

    TLDR: a good care home is essentially a resort hotel for severely disabled folks (who can't use the water slide any more). Unfortunately living full-time in a resort hotel is not generally a good idea. And a bad care home is hell on earth.

    237:

    Believe it or not, I realized I was making a sexist assumption as soon as I pressed Enter. I'm of an age where I grew up with these assumptions and I actively try to guard against them as well as all the other cognitive biases we are prone to. However, it has nothing to do with the topic and smacks of ad-hominem argument.

    What is a valid criticism is that the post is poorly written. I dashed it off before stepping away from the computer. Apologies.

    The S2000 is a Honda S2000. A model year 2000 roadster with a 2 liter naturally aspirated engine. Yes, it does have transmission fill and drain holes as does the engine and differential. What does not have them, at least for use in regular servicing is the Tesla Model 3. And no, the integrated reduction gear is not a transmission, it is more akin to a differential. Even on an ICE car, something that does not receive frequent fluid changes. I change mine on the Honda S2000 every few years because the car is used on a track.

    It's strange that you would believe a random Youtube video over an actual owner of a Tesla who even went to the trouble of checking his owner's manual on this topic. A video that you have yet to cite.

    I'm going to drop out of this conversation. People seem to be dug in on both sides. While following it I saw people making assumptions about what it is like to own an EV and how suitable it might be considering local infrastructure. I weighed in to hopefully provide some actual experience to inform the arguments. My experience with charging infrastructure was called out as unique to my region and obviously did not apply everywhere. My experience driving the car would be more universally applicable to anyone who enjoys driving and has the luxury of being able to afford one. Certainly, maintenance schedules apply everywhere unless there is a very unusual Model 3 variant I'm not aware of.

    I find the assumption that batteries will never be recycled but dumped in a landfill particularly odd. There's money to be made by recycling lithium. Arguments against an emerging tech that assume nothing will ever evolve or improve over time are not useful.

    I understand individual preferences. As a roadster, I love my noisy little Honda S2000 and wouldn't want to replace it with anything. There's nothing that could offer the handling or performance at less that four or five times the price. And even then, the replacement would have stability controls that miss the point of a roadster, at least to me. Everyone have fun with their own choices. I know I am.

    238:

    Major advances in adult education.

    I see the opposite!

    We have a debt crisis due to spiraling student loans, driven by a combination of the privatization of higher education (it used to be paid for by the government, if you could get a place), spiraling HE costs (largely on the admin side -- professors/lecturers are still badly paid) and by credentialization of employer HR (they can no longer ask previous employers "is this person an idiot, or competent?", all they can go by is the paperwork).

    Consequently we have 50% of the population going to university, getting degrees of highly dubious quality and relevance and getting into debt, just so they can wave a piece of paper under a bored HR drone's nose to get an interview place for a job.

    The end result is PhDs flipping burgers, a dysfunctional job market where nobody knows if anyone is really competent (hence nonsense like white-board programming tests in job interviews), and mass precarity.

    Steps we need to take to end this: a student debt jubilee, universal basic income, a 4 day/32 hour working week (as a step on the way to John Maynard Keynes' 3 day/24 hour work week, proposed as a goal in the 1920s), and de-credentialization of employment qualifications/higher education.

    I freely admit I don't know how to accomplish the last two steps. The first ones, though, are essential if we're going to rebalance our work-intensive high stress society to provide just enough employment for everybody instead of too much work and stress for some and poverty for the rest.

    239:

    "I'm going to drop out of this conversation. People seem to be dug in on both sides."

    Except for those of us who are sitting off to the side, remarking that both sides have missed much of the point.

    There is no doubt that electric cars could lead to a great simplification, but that's not the way the manufacturers are going. Yes, Tesla isn't too bad w.r.t. reliability and maintenance (pity about cost and functionality), but I have a friend that owns a KIA (don't go there). And, on modern cars, it's NOT the main works that cause the unreliabilities, hassle and maintenance cost; it's the vast amount of complex gimmickry, and EV models have at least as much as new ICE ones.

    Lithium battery recycling is currently almost non-existent, but could trivially be built up; 99% of lead-acid ones are. However, that happened only partly because there was money to be made, and at least as much because governments required it. Which is yet another problem of the sort I described in #136.

    You want me to add another issue? Much of the automotive-related particulate in cities' air is road and tyre debris, not from the exhaust. Since EVs look to be 50% heavier, and accelerate MUCH more rapidly, that's going to increase significantly. Again, nothing to do with the merits of EVs as such, but how the change is being mishandled.

    240:

    Yes :-( There's more to that, too, including a massive reduction in the use of HE to encourage people to think. "I don't want to understand the principles; I just want to be able to use it" (or, worse, tick a box that they have been taught that) - by some graduates at Cambridge University, fer chrissake!

    241:

    The last of those 3. My stop is 2 stops on from the P&R where the actual Busway bit ends. We looked at Godmanchester when we moved out of Cambridge, but the commute was problematic - bus into Huntingdon, and pick up the Guided bus there or you're limited by the occasional Busway into Godmanchester and issues if you miss it.

    242:

    Citations, please?

    243:

    I also perceive a long term decline in FE and apprenticeships, and a tendency to insist that you complete your education at the beginning of your working life, as two negatives for long term improvement in adult education.

    The first means that we're turning some HE courses into job skills courses, because a degree is worth more than an NVQ or similar. Never mind that what you want is someone with the job skills but not the deep knowledge a degree is supposed to help you acquire, just bear in mind that degree = good, apprentice = bad.

    The second means that if you make bad choices between 14 and 21 (an age range well known for its worries about the future and ability to make the best possible choice), the system remains rigged against you semi-permanently. Retraining is hard enough just in terms of the time and effort it will take you; when student support is simply not there for you, it's even harder.

    244:

    Lithium battery recycling

    Why do the batteries need to be recycled? Batteries removed from vehicles are still perfectly serviceable, if a bit inefficient, for use in a battery farm to store electricity. Eventually, of course, the efficiency drops too much or an internal fault occurs that creates an unacceptable fire risk.

    Road particulate

    This is very much climate and local practice driven. If the government / road operator uses sand &/or salt &/or brine for winter road maintenance, almost all of the particulate is from that source.

    That being said, a personal vehicle that is 50% heavier is still a light vehicle (for road dust generation purposes) and won't change generation of airborne dust from roads. The number of personal vehicles won't change until some financial / personal effort carrot / stick is applied. The absence of charging stations for electric vehicles in downtown business districts might be a sufficient stick to shift people to using public transit.

    Material transport will require some changes ... the existing road system was constructed for specific maximum vehicle axle weights. Increasing vehicle axle weight isn't possible without damage to the road, so either lower payloads or otherwise reducing the weight of the vehicle.

    All that being said, fuel taxes have been a consistent revenue source for governments for over a century. Some other source of revenue will have to be found to make up the shortfall.

    245:

    "The local 600V substation for my block"

    6kV (primary) or 400V (secondary) I could understand, but I have a hard time figuring out where 600V might fit into the picture ?

    Typo ?

    Where possible utility poles will get planted in the property-lines so they can feed two lots without crossing the other so their spacing depends as much on the cadastral map as ohms law.

    246:

    Yes. Some of us have been railing about that for years. Socially, the UK is headed in a catastrophic direction (except for the ruling monetarists, of course), but the sheeple won't accept we need a political change.

    247:

    Delaying the disposal or recycling by using them for storage is an irrelevance and doesn't change my points one iota.

    The road sand and salt generates large particulates, which don't get into the air much and don't stay there long when they do; the problem is the 2.5 micron ones, which are generated as I said. Also, it is not true in most cities that most of the particulates are caused by HGVs - the road damage may be, but breaking up a surface and grinding it into microparticles are not the same process.

    248:

    Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Server Room (closet, underdesk) this happens.

    ("This" being the "Nothing like this will be built again" post on the front page of Hacker News).

    249:

    Elderly Cynic @ 248: but the sheeple won't accept we need a political change.

    It might help if there was a clear vision of the alternative you want us sheeple to vote and/or agitate for. "Not like this" isn't much of a guide.

    250:

    Duffy: A non-recycled li-ion battery is defined as hazwaste.

    Elon Musk's line is that weight-for-weight, a dead LiIon battery contains at least 20x as much lithium per unit mass as the best ore deposits, so recycling dead batteries makes good economic sense.

    Also, degradation of car battery packs in the field doesn't appear to be as bad as earlier projections, so you can reduce the amount required.

    Also-also, batteries that won't hold up for a long car journey because they're below 70-80% of capacity are good for several years use in a grid backup farm -- unbolt from car, stack on a concrete plinth, and connect up: run until it's down to 30% or less. That probably gives you 5-10 extra years to work out a dismantling/recycling factory.

    I'm guessing the "dead car batteries are hazwaste" line is being pushed by the oil industry, possibly via the Koch network lobbying "think-tanks" ...

    251:

    The Forth Rail Bridge isn’t that long. Just hit it at 80 kph and coast.

    You're going to have to go pedal-to-the-metal to get up to 80 kph before you hit the bridge: Dalmeny and North Queensferry are very close, and trains are not notorious for rapid acceleration (unless you can figure out a way to run a Shinkansen up the East Coast Main Line) ...

    252:

    Faulty memory. Probably 6kV.

    253:

    Roads, in practice, can be described as a linear grinding process that transforms material into coarse and fine particles. As in any grinding process, the static surface (roadbed) and grinding media (tires) are also eroded to create particles. Roads are obviously eroded by vehicle traffic ... it is visible on asphalt roads where the asphalt has been eroded away to leave the harder aggregate. Tires get eroded to, eventually, lose all tread and become bald.

    Vehicle weight factors into this process because pressure is a factor in the grind / fracturing process that generates fine particles. A single heavy vehicle is more significant for aerosol generation than a single light vehicle, or the number of light vehicles occupying the same area of the road or comprising the equivalent mass.

    What goes on the road as coarse particles / chunks (>1000 microns for road sand) gets ground down to increasingly finer sizes. Depending upon geology of the source of the road sand, particles entirely / mostly composed of individual minerals are generated. Mineral density and electrochemical properties become increasingly important, in comparison to actual physical dimensions. The particle sizing of road dust depends on the composition of the traction material and roadbed aggregate. That being said, very little of this mass is found in the PM2.5 fraction because the materials are too dense and mechanical processes do not generate significant PM2.5 particulate.

    Road salt (or sugar, if beet juice is being applied) is different - applied properly, most of it dissolves to melt ice and snow and form a solution. Many factors (vehicle speed, wheel dimensions / angular velocity, relative humidity, air temperature, etc.) determine the initial and subsequent absolute and aerodynamic dimensions of the particles. Still, most of the mass falls into particle fractions larger than PM2.5, even after condensation.

    Much of the anthropogenic PM2.5 in urban environments, instead, are carbon nanoparticles and/or condensation nuclei from combustion or industrial processes, including vehicle exhaust.

    All this being said, it really depends on whether the units of concentration measurement are particle mass or particle number. Particle number is very likely more important when considering inflammatory response leading to disease, particularly in the respiratory tract and cardiovascular systems. In any mechanical generation process (including vehicle traffic on roads), virtually all the mass will be in large particles while most of the particles will be in the fine or ultrafine fraction.

    254:

    EC
    on modern cars, it's NOT the main works that cause the unreliabilities, hassle and maintenance cost; it's the vast amount of complex gimmickry - The Great Green Beast has no electronics .....

    Charlie
    Yes - 6kV - "Ours" is in a small concrete shed inside the grounds of the Girl's school opposite.

    255:

    6kV (primary) or 400V (secondary) I could understand, but I have a hard time figuring out where 600V might fit into the picture ?

    I was wondering just how much copper they had buried in the UK. 6KV makes more sense.

    I think the distribution lines on the poles in front of my US house are 14.x KV. And aluminum till it gets into my breaker panel box.

    256:

    EV cars.

    I keep thinking that this same debate happened all over the world in bars and gentleman's clubs all over the industrialized world. 115 years ago. Give or take. Just change a few nouns.

    As to the complicated bits, yes v0.x is almost always a dud. (Check out the Bendix/GM 8-6-4 train wreak of the 80s.) But my highly automated dash just works. For the instrument panel the only thing not created on a display is the stalk that lets me change between the A, B, and main mileage readings. Plus adjust the brightness of the entire display. I've had it for 5 1/2 year now. Outside of oil changes every 7K miles plus a brake fluid swap out at 30K the car just runs. And the complicated bits just work. Adaptive cruise control, passenger side camera when turning that way, etc...

    As to the entertainment system, well that 7" display is based on Android older version something or the other and every now and then I have to reboot it. Auto makers are just now barely beginning to understand how people use their devices. Sort of. Almost.

    257:

    You could start by simply never voting for the party that will take us fastest down the wrong path. Simples.

    I accept that, when it was Major versus Blair, the only sane thing to do was to not vote (except in places where an alternative had a chance).

    But it has been clear, since (and not including) Thatcher, that what our chancer politicians lack is any trace of socialism (in the original sense). No, not Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, Castroism or any form of confiscation communism, but an attempt to govern for the good of society as a whole, rather than just themselves or their own tribe. We had a chance to elect the first honest PM since Thatcher with Corbyn, and the sheeple swallowed the lying propaganda and conclusively elected mad monetarists.

    258:

    I know of nobody with a modern car who has not had trouble, but most of those will deny it until (and sometimes even) I remind them of the time when their car was in the garage being investigated or fixed.

    This includes simple things, like electric windows not working, which one of mine did, repeatedly. Thank heavens mine failed shut, but Cthulhu alone knows why it started working again.

    259:

    Yes, I know that people keep repeating those mantras, but they are NOT TRUE. The first reference points out that PM10 in London is dominated by light vehicles, and the second that over half of vehicle particulates come from brakes and tyres.

    https://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Policy%20themes/Environment/Demystifying%20air%20pollution%20in%20London%20FINAL%20FULL%20REPORT_IM_0.pdf

    https://www.imeche.org/news/news-article/this-is-why-electric-cars-won't-stop-air-pollution

    260:

    a bad care home is hell on earth,/i>

    I'm in Ontario, where the Harris Conservative government expanded the privatization of care homes (which is now making Mike Harris megabucks), and the Ford Conservative government extended contracts and also changed the conditions for suing the operators from negligence to gross negligence (so almost impossible to prove)…

    The death toll in private care homes was four times that in public ones, yet the Conservatives are still pushing privatization…

    Dare I conclude that they are aiming for a hell on earth? Or at least indifferent to it if it turns them and their cronies a profit?

    262:

    They probably count on not ending in one of those 'care homes' themselves.

    And they'll probably be right.

    263:

    Re: 'We had a chance to elect the first honest PM since Thatcher with Corbyn, and the sheeple swallowed the lying propaganda ... '

    Don't follow UK politics closely enough to feel confident that I can spot a good (social - your definition) vs. bad (money-grubbing egotist) pol.

    On this side of the pond, the late night talk show hosts have become fairly respected as political critics. For some reason I had assumed the same was going on in the UK. Apparently not because the few UK news/comedy panel shows I've seen on YT seem to dump on every pol - Corbyn included.

    OOC, are there any informal venues for a pol in the UK to get his/her message across? The traditional journalist interview is fine for outlining and critiquing policy (to some extent) but useless for getting a sense of the person championing those policies.

    264:

    a tendency to insist that you complete your education at the beginning of your working life

    Yeah. Taking university courses after you start working is tricky. Not only are you limited by times (eg. can only take evening courses), but at least in Toronto you are charged a lot of fees for facilities that you can't use because, hey, you're working.

    When I last looked at taking a class (admittedly over a decade ago) the tuition for the course was doubled by fees for student services I had no use for and couldn't use (like athletic facilities only open while I was at work). These fees were the same whether you took one course or a full load. To make matters worse, if you got kicked out of your one course (because someone on a degree-track needed your spot), you didn't get the fees back. And they weren't tax deductible, not being tuition.

    265:

    I know of nobody with a modern car who has not had trouble, but most of those will deny it until

    Interesting.

    I've owned or had in the family a 62 Buick Skylark, 65 Plymouth Fury, 59 Chevy Pickup, 64 Ford Ranchero Pickup, 62 Ford Falcon Wagon, 68 Dodge Challenger, two late 70s/early 80s (can't remember) Datsun Plusars, a couple of 80s Chrysler Vans, 94 and 96 Ford Explorers, an 09 Hyundai Elantra, 08 Tundra, and a 2016 Civic.

    15 cars. 4 with clutches, over 50 years. (I'm leaving out the Ford 8N tractor, assorted riding mowers, and the home built riding mower.)

    The Civic is the one with the least issues based on design and reliability. The only issues with it had to do with the entertainment system. I got a few firmware updates plus a new rear speaker deck as the sub woofer would vibrate the design too much after a while. Some of the other cars had issues as they just wore out after 10 years or more, I'm not counting that against them.

    266:

    EC
    PLEASE - J Corbyn was & is STUPID & incapable of learning - he is still trotting opt the fake remedies of 1975, for .. now. And, of course "The EU is an employer's ramp".
    Easy for me, of course, I voted for my Social Democrat ( Masquerading as Labour ) MP, with her 20 000+ majority

    ... On that subject - Sweepstake: - how long before BoZo is pushed or jumps?
    Days? Weeks? Months?
    My prediction is that he will drag it out for as long as he can - but then, we get the next horrible problem.
    What smarmy, crooked unspeakable crawler is going to sit in No 10 next?

    SFR
    As said above - "honest" yes, but honest & stupid & fundamentally incompetent.
    Labour HAD a chance at a competent, honest man - Miliband - & threw it away.

    267:

    The road sand and salt generates large particulates, which don't get into the air much and don't stay there long when they do;

    Sand perhaps (not used around here on roads, only sidewalks), but salt most certainly gets into the air - and we get to breath it under the right conditions.

    Salt on a dry road gets pulverized into a powder - coating the road and turning it white - and gets kicked up by the tires into the air.

    As to why there is salt on dry roads - lawyers. Too many lawsuits because road X wasn't dealt with fast enough, so everyone now over salts.

    268:

    Nice snotnosed comment, with zero thought behind it, only ideology. 1. Our taxes pay for public transit. No public transit system pays for itself via fares (please note that almost all metro public transit systems are NOT private, because all of those lost so much money. Public transit is public good. Therefore, yes, we do own our own 2. You seem to be new. Look at this, right near where I live, and a route I take often. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Garrett+Park+Rd+%26+Dewey+Rd,+Wheaton-Glenmont,+MD+20906/@39.0435446,-77.0857379,3a,75y,331h,80.35t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s4M2Hxt9geOllW7Mt8-0PsA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m5!3m4!1s0x89b7ce918118b999:0x196e74ac652c1987!8m2!3d39.0428846!4d-77.0854595

    If you're seeing the picture correctly, it's a three lane road, with a barrier on the left (park) side, cars parked against the hill (the houses are uphill), and the road is two way, and city buses take this route. No, there is no center line, or side lines. Go ahead, tell me any self-driving car could handle it.

    269:

    Part of that is personnel departments, in-house, who knew the organization, and understand what the hiring manager is looking for in a candidate, being outsourced (because MBA idiotology is outsource everything that's not a profit source), to companies that have no clue, and no interest in finding out what's needed.

    270:

    That happens more than you think. I went back in the late seventies, after being out of college for nine years. I got a good job (library page) that had tuition remission, and I went to school part time.

    That works. Otherwise... (and see my rant about HR, above).

    271:

    ABdPJ may well survive as PM for a lot longer than any of us would like.

    The Tories were pleasantly surprised by how well they did in the last election by drawing a line between "us" and "Theresa May's government", despite being the same party; plenty of the electorate seemed to believe that somehow, the Conservative Party and Theresa May's party were completely different and unrelated entities.

    I would put money on whoever wants to run the party next intending to take one of two routes:

  • Come in once ABdPJ has got the country to a point where there are no ongoing or upcoming crises to deal with. That means that Brexit negative effects and COVID-19 negative effects are a thing of the past, and the country is doing well.
  • Replace ABdPJ near the election (as he replaced May), and run on a "the last guy fouled up, and I'll fix it!" campaign akin to ABdPJ's "Get Brexit Done!". By having the election close enough to the change of leadership, you avoid any room to question your failings
  • The first isn't happening any time soon - we still don't have the full set of short term Brexit effects in place (import and export controls are still phasing in), and we're not yet through Omicron, let alone the last wave of COVID-19.

    That leaves the second; but to make it "near an election", you either need a good excuse lurking to call an early election (as ABdPJ had with Parliament refusing to either reject Brexit entirely or vote for a form of Brexit that could exist), or you need to wait until near the "normal" scheduled time for an election.

    So, realistically, option 2 is ruled out until mid-2023 - we're not going to be stable until then, and ABdPJ has enough of a majority that there won't be a good excuse for an early election. You don't want to take the reins too early, because you want to be able to shrug off all complaints about events since you took power as "fallout from ABdPJ's government", and hence be able to imply that you would never have made the (in hindsight) stupid decisions he did.

    In particular, you do not want the leadership in time to have to make a hard choice whose fallout will be visible at the election; your choices need to delay fallout until after the election, so that you can blame ABdPJ's incompetence for the bad things and suggest that you need your leadership to fix it all up.

    272:

    100% of all repairs on my vehicles have cost more as time goes by. 1989 Grand Voyager. Passenger window fell down inside the door. Repair, $160, they pulled the inside door panel and replaced the broken belt. 1997 Grand Voyager, same problem, they could not do the above, because it had been made a sealed unit, so even though the motor was fine, it was $360 for the whole panel. 2008 Honda Odessey: insulation pulled away from driver's door, water got in, onto the lock and window controls. The entire control needed replacing, thanks, dealer, for the discount. over $600 to replace a freaking set of switches.

    Shall I go on?

    273:

    Wrong. You really want salt on the road before the snow/sleet/ice starts coming down.

    274:

    Using sand (let alone salt) on dry roads is stupid. In the UK, the nighly condensation is such that roads rarely stay dry overnight, but salt rapidly dissolves and/or washes away. While there MAY be places it is a significant atmospheric pollutant (on occasion), it is almost always irrelevant (as it is in London).

    275:

    Simon Farnsworth
    Brexit negative effects ... ... effects are a thing of the past - what, in 25 years time?
    .. "That leaves the second ..." - except he is not going to last that long.

    276:

    Who was not standing for PM. YOU may prefer May/Cameron/Johnson to Corbyn, but I don't.

    277:

    Charlie Stross @ 234:

    Suppose something truly insane happened and South Africa somehow became the 51st State ... Would Musk then qualify as native born even though he was already an adult before that happened?

    Yes, because that's why George Washington was allowed to become POTUS. (And a couple of other 18th century presidents.)

    No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President;

    Washington and the eight Presidents who followed were all citizens when the Constitution was ratified. John Tyler (#10) was the first "Natural Born" President. I don't see how that clause would apply to Musk, since he was NOT a citizen when the Constitution was ratified.

    The question remains, would "Natural Born" citizenship be retroactive for a person born in some foreign country that later became a State?

    However, it won't happen. Can you imagine the confederate revanchists wanting anything to do with the country of Nelson Mandela, as a state? SA wouldn't be allowed in even if they wanted in (which they clearly don't) for the same reason that DC and Puerto Rico are kept from statehood -- too many non-whites.

    I did preface the question by characterizing the situation as "something truly insane"

    But I can imagine it. I can imagine Cheatolini iL Douchebag graciously declining the GQP nomination in 2024. I can imagine BoJo giving up his U.K. citizenship and petitioning INS to allow him to reclaim his U.S. citizenship so he could mount a third Party campaign for President of the United States.

    I can imagine as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

    But forget South Africa & Musk. Consider that a hypothetical 99-44/100% white Country X decided to petition the U.S. Congress for statehood & Congress granted it. Person Y was born in Country X 50 years before Country X became the 51st State X. Does Person Y gain retroactive "Natural Born" citizenship?

    PS: The thing that has kept Puerto Rico from becoming a state so far is the Puerto Ricans themselves rejected it. I don't know if Congress would act to admit Puerto Rico if the people voted FOR statehood, but up until now a majority of Puerto Rican voters have voted to NOT become a state.

    278:

    Older cars were a lot less reliable in terms of number of failures, yes, but even a trivial failure or routine maintenance now takes a day in a garage and one that impairs driving (including window failure) often takes three. It's not too bad if you are close to a dealer, or there is convenient collect and return or courtesy car, but a menace if not. And God help you if you are in the Highlands! Most failures used to be at least kludgable by the roadside, and fixable yourself. The result of all this is that the time lost isn't as different as the proponents make out.

    279:

    My electric central locking failed after 3? years; luckily, in a way I could get around. I was disinclined to spend 250 quid to replace a 20 pence resistor, when that might not have worked, so it's still like that 7 years later ....

    280:

    See, I have a horrible suspicion that he is going to last another 2 years or so. Getting steadily worse, of course, but being replaced with 6 months to go before Parliament is dissolved for the general election so that his replacement can attempt to pull off the "yes, ABdPJ sucked, but we will fix his suckery" trick again.

    Which is awful for the country, but it's about the only way I can see anyone who follows ABdPJ winning a general election; the alternative is to replace ABdPJ with someone even less capable, and to ensure that they'll be easy to depose, and that's not a better outcome.

    281:

    You might want to look at Musk's Battery Day presentation on Youtube. Nobody makes money selling printers. You make money selling ink. Musk isn't selling Teslas. He's selling batteries.

    Yes and no. By my count, he's got at least three forks on this particular strategy. Maybe four.

    I agree, he's selling batteries. All sorts of batteries. Backup power plants, cars, house batteries, whatever. In this, I agree with him: we need more rechargeable batteries like 20 years ago, so that's one line of work that's going to keep growing, supply lines permitting.

    Problem is, a good chunk of any EV is batteries, and it's not just a flat-pack skateboard in the chassis that can be readily swapped out. EV battery plug and play doesn't work, any more than it works with an iPhone. Tesla's going toward using battery packs as structural elements, and I'd argue that the Chevy Bolt kind of went there too.

    This poses two interesting problems. One is that, as with an iPhone, the battery life helps determine the car life. The other is that you can't just screw an old car battery to the wall to work as a house battery, because it's not flat. Prior to the pandemic, I know Chevy was hoping that we'd trade in our Bolt after five years when the battery went suboptimal. I don't know what their plan is now, but unless we get magic batteries, I suspect EVs will be like iPhones, where you trade in the whole thing when the battery gets too annoying. The battery pack will then be reused, remade, and/or recycled into some other product(s), along with whatever else is usable in the car (motors especially). My guess is that, if we get efficient, battery packs will be broken up into cells, the cells tested, and then sent to their next incarnation depending on how well they work.

    Anyway, so that's two prongs: batteries for a variety of uses, and cars with hard-to-replace batteries.

    The third prong is the service contract. That's how Chevy expect(ed) to make money on Bolts. It's sort of worked out, and I'd be surprised if Tesla's not trying the same thing. Again, this is somewhat like a phone. It also reminds me of the old mainframe service contracts.

    The fourth prong of their strategy might be that Tesla was trying for a first-mover advantage. They turned their technology to open-source to help grow the market, and they might have been hoping that they had enough of a lead that, even though others copied it, they'd still be competitive. Possibly they're hoping that they could service the cars of others, but not vice-versa. If so, I'm not sure how this worked. One problem they have is that Tesla motors, for all its cachet, is tiny compared with the other, established auto makers. I suspect they're hoping that the behemoths will die while they grow to take their place. This strategy will backfire if and when the big automakers manage to pivot from ICs to EVs using existing infrastructure. If they can pull this off, Tesla may end up (at best!) as everybody's battery supplier, with their car business bought off by Fiat or Tata.

    282:

    Far more likely would be England, post the break-up of the UK. What about Farage for President?

    283:

    The Supercharger network is a part of the fourth prong; effectively, Musk is using the telemetry from vehicles on the road already to work out where fast charging is needed, and have a first mover advantage in charging networks. Battery manufacture is a second first mover advantage, and I suspect that the plan is that full self driving will be a third chunk of first mover advantage.

    With the exception of battery manufacture, which simply needs customers, the other two benefit strongly from Tesla having telemetry from cars on the roads already - even if the car driver doesn't use the feature. Knowing, for example, that the next services on from LHR on the M25 is a common place to run out battery is useful (if true - it's a hypothetical), even if chargers in the LHR car parks are obviously sensible.

    Similar for full self driving - simply having the car upload "hey, the driver did a weird at this point, what's going on?" is useful data in itself, as you can then look at what's special about that location.

    284:

    Here in Portland (Oregon), payment stations are supplanted with a sign and a shoephone app (e.g., https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.passportparking.mobile.parkingkitty ). You open the app, punch in the vehicle's license plate, the location code on the sign, and how long you wish to park for, and your card is charged.

    285:

    Oh, it's not just personnel outsourcing.

    Back in 1990, I was working as the sole technical author for a small company. And I got a better job (50% pay rise: what's not to like?) so gave my month's notice. It was an amicable departure so my boss asked me to type up my job description and fax it to the employment agency he used.

    So I did that ... and two hours later the fax machine squawked into life and spewed out nine pages of expensive thermal paper which contained a CV.

    I read it. I was perplexed. So I phoned the agency. "Hi, I'm calling from [redacted]. We sent you a job description this morning, did you mean to send us this applicant's CV?"

    "Yes! Do you want me to arrange for him to attend an interview?"

    Me: "The Job Description is for a technical author. This guy is a technical support engineer."

    (Pause.) "Is that different?"

    286:

    One intriguing thing with the mRNA vaccines from a future-prediction point of view is not so much about vaccines as what it does. You can make your cells produce whatever protein you want in (relatively) large volumes for a little while. And it seems that the production could be garage-scale, probably not requiring anything currently restricted access. As for the rna sequences, you could build them on your laptop.

    Now, if you could have any protein you want produced and released in your body, what would you choose?

    287:

    Getting steadily worse, of course, but being replaced with 6 months to go before Parliament is dissolved for the general election

    Disagree.

    COVID19 provides brilliant cover for the Brexit supply chain up-fuckery. When COVID19 is clearly on the wane, however, is a moment of maximum risk for the government, as they lose their ability to blame shortages on a virus. Meanwhile, they've got an 80 seat majority -- enough to ram through an override on the Fixed Term Parliament Act and hold a snap election.

    So I think they'll leave BoJo in office until the pandemic is clearly dealt with, then they will give him the boot, install a replacement who will bribe the pensioners and oligarchs with tax cuts, and hold a snap election.

    If they do that in 2023 they get to hang around in office until 2028, by which time Brexit will be irreversibly bedded in for a generation. And the cabinet and back benches are sufficiently crazy that they would see this as a priority over providing good governance for the nation.

    288:

    EC
    STOP IT. IIRC Miliband stood for leader of the Labour Party & the fuckwits picked Corbyn, thus committing suicide. Also STOP putting words into my mouth .... that I definitely did not say - OK?
    @ 284
    Really - just NO. Nugent Farrago is just that - a farrago.
    What I'm frightened of is Patel, or ( almost as bad 0 -"Frostie" ...

    Charlie @ 289
    Euww - that's a really horrible thought. Though I think it's getting so bad that they may ditch him sooner?

    289:

    237 - And, indeed, a significant number of our utility poles are for landline telephones, and found in the back gardens of properties rather than streetside.

    253 - Agreed.

    261 - Nice one.

    290:

    Greg, you actually think Milibean is better than Cor Bin!?

    291:

    Wrong. You really want salt on the road before the snow/sleet/ice starts coming down.

    I'm happy that where you are they apparently can predict with a certainty when the snow/sleet/ice starts, and that the amount is always accurately forecasted so they know the right method to use.

    Around here, nope.

    Occasionally they will brine if the forecast looks accurate, but even with that they only get it right 50% of the time.

    Generally they wait for the snow to start simply because all too often either the forecast is wrong (and salt is expensive), it really can't be forecast (snow squalls off the lakes where you can't predict if/where the wind will drop snow), or the accumulation will be significant enough that they will need to plow, so salting would be throwing money away.

    292:

    On charging points, this turned up in my local feed: https://www.hampshirelive.news/news/hampshire-news/dozens-electric-vehicle-ports-costing-6464331.amp

    A local council is installing electric car charging points at £5k each.

    Presumably if these started being installed in thousands rather than dozens the price would drop.

    293:

    Batteries removed from vehicles are still perfectly serviceable, if a bit inefficient

    Coulomb and energy efficiency is still almost the same, it's volumetric and weight efficiency that drops (you get 80% of the energy but 100% of the original volume and weight). But for stationary applications the latter matters much less, and so does the power density (woe is you if your house periodically surges from 10kW to 100kW load, you're going to need a really big inverter).

    The idea that in a stationary setup a used car battery will last at most five years is farcical. Barring external disturbance all we know right now is that ten years seems reasonable, and 8 is definitely do-able (ie, the oldest repurposed pack I personally know if is only 8 years old).

    People who buy the packs generally strip them of a whole lot of car-related bits and end up with more or less rectangular blocks of energy storage. But because it's DIY they often keep random bits that suit them, so I've seen a pack bolted to a concrete wall, complete with rubber anti-vibration thingies... presumably so the battery isn't affected by the numerous earthquakes in that area? Or more likely because there were convenient bolt holes in the post-rubber bits of the battery so rather than making custom blocks to go between each battery hole and the wall the guy went with the ones that were flat and at the bottom of the battery box.

    294:

    I suspect EVs will be like iPhones, where you trade in the whole thing when the battery gets too annoying. The battery pack will then be reused, remade, and/or recycled into some other product(s), along with whatever else is usable in the car (motors especially). My guess is that, if we get efficient, battery packs will be broken up into cells, the cells tested, and then sent to their next incarnation depending on how well they work.

    BYD is already doing that in China. They'll buy back anything they sold and remanufacture it. Some of their stuff is explicitly cheaper because it has those old cells in it, and I've seen reports of ex-BYD cells turning up in the usual online sites with new stickers on them. Apparently the record is four stickers on one cell, someone got a heat gun out and melted their way through the layers, then removes second layer of heat shrink over the whole cell... it was an amusing video.

    The other thing that's still in progress is "what cell shape makes most sense". We see everything from 18650's, which even Elon seems to have realised are too small, up to rectangular cells in the 500Ah range, all used in small electric vehicles (the latter in low-voltage ones for the most part because a 100S pack made of 500Ah/4kg cells would be challenging)

    Again with the BYD press releases, they've just dropped pictures of really long rectangular cells. Seemingly about 100mm x 20mm x 1000mm (possibly longer, promo shots lacked dimensional numbers). The idea is you stack them side by side-ish, blow air between them for cooling, and it's easy to make up a slab of them to whatever length you require. I expected to see two of those so you have up-and-back with both external connections at the same end, but again, PR stunt lacked details.

    295:

    "I have trouble managing money that well."

    I can't do it at all. So anything automatic is asking for trouble. If things are happening in the background without my intervention then I don't know what the fuck is going on and the inevitable result is not just running out of money entirely and unexpectedly, but also the activation of mechanisms to grab large chunks of it when I do get more before I even get my hands on it myself. The existence of such mechanisms and past experience of what happens when they are activated is one reason for me not having a bank account now.

    Regarding "late payments" my attitude is basically fuck 'em. I don't have a problem remembering to do it because I get sent bills to remind me. If I don't do it when they want it it's because I plain haven't fucking got the money. It'll be a month or two before they start getting arsey enough that they do anything more than sending nasty letters, and I'll have managed to sort it out before then, so it doesn't matter. Allowing them to grab it automatically whether I've got it or not guarantees that palpably unpleasant consequences will occur straight away without giving me the chance to avoid them: either the abovementioned activation of bleeding wounds, or if I'm not quite so badly off at the relevant moment, the unexpected discovery that I've only got 50p to eat with for the next week because all the rest has disappeared without me being able to stop it.

    296:

    Using sand (let alone salt) on dry roads is stupid

    What they do here (at least in my part of Ontario) is spray a brine solution before an expected snowfall/freezing rain event. This adheres to the road and so there is less salt used. Some municipalities use a sugar beet solution (made with the leftovers from processing sugar beets) instead of/as well as salt.

    400-series highways still use granular salt — I suspect because the deicing trucks run at 80-100 km/h and there's too much turbulence for spraying liquids.

    In the West they don't use salt to deice roads (doesn't work at -20) but still add a bit to the gravel spreader so the gravel adheres to the ice and gives better grip.

    297:

    No idea how it works elsewhere, but where I live we have a Car Co-op, of which I am a member.

    We own our vehicle for the 99.8% of driving we need to get done. In the event I need a small truck (occasionally) or a multi-passenger van, I an reserve a co-op vehicle for the purpose. I pay an hourly rate for use ($8/hr) and a per kilometer rate if I go over 100km - which has never happened. I purchase my car for the 99.8% use case.

    EVs work for 99.8% of the driving that I do, and that's what we use. I accept that an EV might not work for retired curmudgeonly software engineers in certain parts of the UK, but it is worth noting that it DOES work for many millions who are not presently Greg Tingey, Pigeon or Elderly Cynic.

    As for my specific EV, if it breaks I cannot fix it. However, I paid a small amount more on purchase to have a 10 year 100% warranty on everything, including minor scratches (which was a surprise to me). If it breaks I call the number that is helpfully affixed to my window and a tow truck and taxi will be dispatched immediately. The car will be towed to the nearest Kia dealership and repaired or replaced, I will go about my business and be provided with a replacement.

    No, it probably would not apply if I was 2000 km up the Alaska Highway, if I go there I will take a different vehicle. I am not likely to go there.

    If my ICE vehicle breaks down I am also hopeless at fixing anything beyond a flat tire. As are most people, who have other things to be good at and focus their energies upon. I don't personally give a damn that my car is full if electrical gewgaws, they work, they are warrantied, and they make my life simpler. At no point am I ever going to have an interest in reprogramming my vehicle or its components.

    If eleventy gazillion EV batteries were to be dumped somewhere TODAY in the much repeated 'tsunami' of waste, that would be a problem. In the context of multiple years of ramping up, that is a solvable problem in a world where we have many much more alarming and potentially insoluble problems competing for attention.

    298:

    "You're going to have to go pedal-to-the-metal to get up to 80 kph before you hit the bridge"

    ...and IIRC the line speed over the bridge is 40mph, ie. about 60kph. I forget what the gradients are like but it's not safe to assume it's level without specific confirmation; just "being a big bridge" is not enough to guarantee it.

    Still, there's not the remotest chance of it ever being allowed to happen. You get problems as it is with trains stopping in OHLE neutral sections or gaps in the third rail and not being able to get going again, and those are much shorter. Even if you had a gronk on permanent standby to give stuck trains a shove/tug, it would still be viewed as an operational disaster waiting to happen. And a pile of other things too.

    (The only example I can think of where railways have found it acceptable to coast (as opposed to roll down hill) for a significant distance is the Dalkey atmospheric railway. The atmospheric traction pipe stopped several hundred yards short of the end, and trains would pop off the end of it and coast the rest of the way. Going the other way, some poor sod had to push them until they got to the pipe. Even in Ireland in the 1840s they didn't think this was much good.)

    Fortunately as I said the only obstacles to putting OHLE over the bridge are bureaucratic, not technical. And all the various possible methods of getting away without it are too much of a pain in the arse for the railway to consider them realistic. What I see happening is that there will simply be more delay and waffle with nothing being done until finally someone bites the bullet and deploys the authority to cut through the bureaucratic obstacles, so eventually we will end up with 25kV overhead anyway, it'll just take unnecessarily long for it to happen.

    299:

    Yep, it was a bit snot nosed, but just making the point that transport as a service only appears to grind people the wrong way when it comes to personal cars. Much like public transport, personal car transport is also subsidized by the state, unless you happen to own your own private roads (and atmosphere).

    Many people can't afford to, or don't want to live in an area that supports good public transport, and bad public transport is a time tax on the poor. The current accepted solution to this is to own a car, which hopefully becomes less common in the future.

    I totally fall for this too, but I hope my children don't need to get a license.

    It's easy to imagine a world where the state provides a 'bus' service with no fixed routes, no driver, and a maximum passenger load of 8 adults. It would be a nice real world use for quantum computing, continually running an annealing function over the entire network to pick which bus is going to get to you fastest and get you to your destination fastest.

    In response to your street, I give you this street (https://youtu.be/vNX89uqly6U?t=362) with a self driving car.

    As for road wear and electric vehicles (weight). Trucks (HV) completely dominate mechanical damage to roads (weight to the 4th power) and I don't think that anybody will be happy increasing the maximum weight on wheels for trucks. But, most trucks are overspec'd in terms of range because adding volume to a tank is cheap and easy. If you are buying an electric heavy vehicle it makes sense to tighten up the range specifications based on application to reduce cost. For example I believe that most rubbish trucks/buses/delivery trucks do well less than 100km a day, and that is all start/stop. Switching to an electric drive train for these trucks/buses would reduce the weight by a couple of hundred kg (remove 1200kg of engine, 400kg of transmission & exhaust, 300kg of fuel, add back in 300kg of switching/motors/gearing & 400kg of batteries). So EV, is some circumstances will reduce road wear.

    There is also a fair bit of road degradation due solvent damage from oil and petrol, especially in suburban streets and around traffic lights. I've never seen good numbers for how much this contributes to road wear, because, again HV's dominate.

    300:

    I have news for you. Not everywhere is exactly like where you live, and not everyone has the same requirements.

    The reason that coops don't work for people like me (in the UK, remember?), as distinct from where you live, is that very few (if any) coops have suitable vehicles. I checked a couple of local ones, one had nothing even as functional as my existing (small) car, and the other had only a MPV. While I could get my larger luggage into the latter, other people would reasonably object to the amount of muck I would get on the seats (think gardening and building supplies, rubble and junk left outside and being taken to the tip, etc.) And it definitely wouldn't help when I want to take a long trip and hang on to it for a month - that's NOT what those coops are set up for and (in at least one case) specifically forbade.

    My main objection to the gimmickry is because of the risk of failure in the middle of nowhere, and the fact that most garages in that sort of area cannot fix such specialist problems. Most of the recovery services will only take it to the nearest garage or at most 50 miles, so I would have to pay for a very expensive tow, and (WORSE) I will lose half a dozen days of my holiday. Many guarantees have similar constraints and, even if they DID despatch a tow immediately, expedite the repair, and return it immediate it was fixed, that's still 3-4 days lost.

    In the case of my friend with the KIA, it was in and out of the garage (losing days' of use each time) until they admitted the battery was faulty and permitted a courtesy car. And this was within a few miles of the dealer! Plus how many manufacturers give lifetime guarantees?

    301:

    Whatever. Corbyn was elected following the resignation of Ed Miliband, and neither Miliband was an opponent of his in either election. Whether Ed Miliband would have been any good, I can't say, but David Miliband was an acolyte of Blair.

    302:

    I'd also like to add my gloom to those who will miss owning a vehicle you can do whatever the Road Traffic act and your insurers will allow. As I don't have a car licence, I built myself a sidecar outfit to a spec I cannot buy for 3 times the cost. I reckon they'll not outright ban such vehicles (ICE or modified), just make them increasingly harder/expensive to run. I worry about what I'll do then.

    There was a link in Tom Scotts newsletter to a jalopnik page, inviting suggestions for really nasty car feature subscriptions.

    On Apprenticeships, I was pretty appalled at how they have been debased in the last decade. Some are quite blatantly only meant to get cheap/free labour.

    The bit about not being able to check competence of job candidates, this seems to be helping destroy job security for everyone. Small companies daren't give proper contracts, much safer to take people on as contractors, who you can drop if they are duds.

    Finally, my "Who ordered that??" was the Boeing 737Max scandal. It should have been impossible to get as bad as it did.

    303:

    That may be what tips a fair number of people over to EV: increasing difficulty keeping their gas-burners fuelled

    I drive a ten-year-old Volvo V40; low enough emission that I don't pay Vehicle Excise Duty, utterly reliable (beloved's SchwerGrossenKinderTransportPanzer has had a sequence of problems), and with a UI that is simple, intuitive, and works (in contrast to her Audi, which to my mind is an inconsistent mess). Unfortunately, my little Volvo is a Euro V Diesel, thus will be banned from any Edinburgh Low Emission Zone; while her 330BHP tank is a Euro VI Diesel, and acceptable :( Mine also has an affordable insurance group, and a manual gearbox [1] - making it the ideal car for our sons to gain experience as new drivers. Hiring a dual-control learner vehicle [2] only goes so far :(

    So I may well be changing over to an affordable EV or hybrid some time soon (hopefully not because one or other son has thrashed or smashed the Volvo). Or thanking the stars that I live ten minutes' walk from a station on a direct line into Edinburgh City Centre.

    Anyway...

    One thing that hasn't been mentioned, is the repurposing of all those office buildings. I currently work for (what remains of) a firm to which one of OGH's books is dedicated; we're giving up our lease on our 80-person office space in town. Everyone will work remotely for the most part, with some tied desks and meeting rooms in one of the "shared space" facilities in the middle of town; AIUI most of us are perfectly happy about this.

    If this is repeated, because two years of remote working have demonstrated its viability, the demand for commuter vehicles should drop off, as will the Edinburgh rush hour discontent (made glorious nightmare by this son of Tram) - and I wonder whether more offices will become "other things". As a for instance, Edinburgh Judo Club (rather successful, understatement) have one floor of an underused office block in Meadowbank; and enough space to have large groups training, run holiday clubs for kids, etc, etc. If I recall, a while ago they were on the point of having to move out - I suspect that the landlord is now quite happy to have them on site.

    Who knows, Edinburgh's city centre may have lucked out in terms of the Council's plans for a green space, and the economy's dropping needs for moAr cAR pArk PliZ.

    [1] For y'all - learner drivers in the UK almost always "drive stick" (and sit their test in a manual-gearbox car), because otherwise your driving license carries a qualifier preventing you from doing so. Granted, EVs mean that this may soon become as anachronistic as starting handles and choke buttons - but for now it's still a significant factor.

    [2] Beloved, the petrolhead, is teaching our sons to drive. I'm following my father's advice of "never try to teach family"

    304:

    As already discussed, the bureaucracy involving the FRB also involves UNESCO. One of the likely consequences of electrifying the bridge is a loss of its World Heritage Site status. If you doubt this, check the current register for Liverpool Docks.

    305:

    Thanks for the update.

    I'm still chewing on the idea of putting batteries directly in the hull of a cargo ship. It's cheaper to build. The problem is that now we're pretty sure Thwaites glacier is falling apart and big hurricanes are becoming normal. That leads to the literally shocking question of just how do you keep a high powered power grid going in a cargo terminal, if seas are rising both permanently and on shorter time scales. Shorts will be harder to avoid and will be rather bad news, if there's one big charging line to the ship.

    If some of the shipping containers are batteries, you can charge them away from the port, get them onto the ship, and plug them in. There's still the fun of saltwater and electricity, but the main high power line is inside the ship, not in the more vulnerable wharf. If a harbor gets trashed for big ships, you can even lighter battery containers on and off, while it might be hard to run a charging cable out to a ship.

    That's my thinking, anyway. There are probably some good arguments on the other side.

    306:

    Elon Musk's line is that weight-for-weight, a dead LiIon battery contains at least 20x as much lithium per unit mass as the best ore deposits, so recycling dead batteries makes good economic sense.

    Possible, but the proper comparison is recycling vs. disposal. Assuming transportation costs are similar for both options, hazwaste disposal can run anywhere from $0.40 per to ton to over $1,800.00 for incineration (depending on the type of hazwaste being disposed of) https://www.profitableventure.com/cost-dispose-hazardous-waste-per-ton/

    Also-also, batteries that won't hold up for a long car journey because they're below 70-80% of capacity are good for several years use in a grid backup farm -- unbolt from car, stack on a concrete plinth, and connect up: run until it's down to 30% or less. That probably gives you 5-10 extra years to work out a dismantling/recycling factory.

    OK, an extra 5 years increases the battery life cycle form 8 years to 13. That results in an average annual battery disposal rate of 13.2 million tons, or 8X the current hazwaste disposal rate.

    That's still a tsunami.

    I'm guessing the "dead car batteries are hazwaste" line is being pushed by the oil industry, possibly via the Koch network lobbying "think-tanks" ...

    Actually, its the USEPA: Lithium batteries are hazardous materials and are subject to the Department of Transportation’s Hazardous Materials Regulations (HMR; 49 CFR Parts 171–180). https://www.epa.gov/recycle/used-lithium-ion-batteries

    307:

    The Supercharger network is a part of the fourth prong;

    You're absolutely right of course. Thanks!

    I also realized, well after I posted, that there's a sneaky way to keep track of individual cells: in the memory of the cars' computers. If the car's keeping detailed records of the performance of its subunits, when it's returned and parted out, the "car butchers" will, quite possibly, have a destination for each major part: some batteries will be remanufactured, some reused or resold. Ditto the electronics, motors, whatever.

    I have no idea whether anyone's trying to set up that sort of tip to tail complete recycling for their cars, but I can see it working if the company has a policy of universal buyback, even of cars that are totaled in accidents. I can also see all sorts of political bullshit arising, as junkyards scream about how they're being put out of business.

    308:

    EC 302: "I have news for you. Not everywhere is exactly like where you live, and not everyone has the same requirements."

    I agree, but also return the information. Not everyone has your requirements nor lives where you live. On top of that, not everyone is in the stage of life we are each respectively experiencing.

    So a thing that doesn't work for you might very well work for a large percentage of, say, the 450 million or so humans who live in North America. So rather than saying 'EVs are bad because they don't work for me' consider just going with them not working for you specifically.

    As for co-op vehicles not being suitable, I would suggest that rather than digging in your heels and rejecting the concept, perhaps consider joining or at least advocating for a suitable vehicle to be added to the fleet. I specifically use my co-op for the uses you identify as a barrier - green waste, soil and construction materials.

    I was trying to respond to the repeated tropes that come up in every discussion of EVs on this blog. 'They don't work for my very specific unique situation as I perceive it so they don't work.'

    309:

    what about if they get snowbound?

    Recent test of a Tesla. Charged to 90%, drove 30 miles to simulate the average US commute, then parked for 24 hours to simulate being stuck in the snow. Cabin set to 68 F, seat heaters on, but no one in the car (so the 60W of heat from a person wasn't there, actual results would be better than this)

    https://youtu.be/P1HLRVREJF8

    Result was that for the modern Tesla with the heat pump, stuck in below freezing temperatures, the heating uses about 1% per hour, or about a 1/4 charge per day. 24 hours stuck on the highway on the way home and you'll still have 150 miles range when you get dug out. So despite many many many media reports that Tesla owners will die if it snows, you're probably better off in a Tesla than any ICE.

    310:

    We're now up to about 20% of 10-year-hence developments being utterly unpredictable, leaving us with 55-60% in the "here today" and 20-25% in the "not here yet, but clearly on the horizon" baskets.

    Where does the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica collapsing and taking the entire West Antarctic ice shelf with it rate?

    Reduction of pollinators to levels that agriculture is severely impacted?

    Inability of homeowners to get insurance due to increased hurricanes, wildfires, tornados?

    Simple spread of tropical diseases spreading northward.

    Economic/demographic collapse of China and/or Russia?

    311:

    http://digital.distributedenergy.com/articles/vehicle-to-grid

    Utilizing EV Batteries for Energy Storage – the Easy Part and the Hard Part

    EV batteries can be used to buffer a renewable power system in one of two ways. The first is to use discarded EV batteries. Normally used and worn out batteries end up in a landfill. That is, unless they are recycled. When worn out, EV owners will replace their batteries or replace the whole car. Currently there are approximately 253 million cars and trucks on U.S. roads. If EVs gain only 10% of the market, this could mean millions of batteries that need recycling each year. These long lasting EVs may be replaced by both owner preference for newer vehicles and technological advances that render them obsolete for transportation. But not for power generation.

    These used batteries can be obtained at lower costs and be combined into energy storage systems that that can smooth out fluctuations in renewable energy supply. Once its storage capacity has been reduced by age and use by 30 percent they remain useful for stationary power storage. Repurposed, recycled EV batteries have been estimated to cost a little as $49 per kWh compared to new, purposed designed batteries which cost $300 per kWh. Recycling older EV batteries is a twofer, eliminating a potential waste problem and providing cheap renewable grid stabilization.

    But what about using the EVs themselves, while they are still owned and being used for transport? On average, a typical automobile is parked and unused for 23 hours a day. During idle times, EV can be used for temporary power storage. Once parked at the end of work day commute, it could be connected to the grid and used to meet peak power demand when renewable generation is at its lowest.

    What does the vehicle owner get out of this? In return for providing power at expensive peak demand times, the owner can be reimbursed by the power company. Given that most commuter parking is at facilities where cars are accumulated for storage (downtown parking garages, office parking lots, train stations, etc.), the infrastructure needed to extract the power from EVs when parked become simpler to install. Each parking spot can be equipped with an electrical connection. Larger parking operations could act as middlemen, for example simplifying paying arrangements by offering free parking in exchange for power and then selling the power themselves back to the grid. EV batteries can be recharged during cheaper low demand hours when the sun is shining its brightest at mid-day before the return trip home.

    In addition to providing sustained power for predictable low and high demand periods, EV batteries can provide short bursts of power to the grid and back again. This ability can be used to correct imbalances in a standard electric power grid, or smooth out the potentially extreme fluctuations created by wind power. By using EV batteries for only minutes at a time to upload or download power results in less impact on battery lifetime than impact than subjecting the battery to deep cycling.

    However, skepticism remains and technological hurdles still need to be overcome. Current technology will need to advance further before it becomes widely economical to use EV batteries to send power back to the grid. However, with current technology, using EV batteries for dynamic charging or “smart charging” at needed times to the grid. Furthermore, it may be more economical to directly recycle old EV batteries, using their parts and materials in the manufacture of new batteries. In the short term, the best approach to adopting this technology is to use dynamic charging. Dynamic charging is essentially matching up the grid’s need for power and when energy is available and cheap for car recharging. Achieving this is more a management with software and controls instead of expensive new hardware.

    Full scale transmittal of power back to the grid is far more complicated. Locations of car recharging facilities will have to be located with an eye to convenient grid use. And battery technology will have to advance to allow for even greater operational lifetimes. Each cycle of recharge and transmittal of power to the grid – even if it does not involve deep charging – will have an effect on battery life. Other costs will have to be considered such as the installation of grid connections at parking facilities, establishment of equipment standards, etc. - and these costs will affect the system’s overall economic viability.

    312:

    Paws
    Yes - he was possibly electable, J Cor was not, ever.

    malware
    Noted.
    Why is road transport monies "investment" & rail transport monies "subsidy"?
    No, I've never managed to get to the bottom of that one, either ...

    paws
    No
    The "wire" or "rail" will simply not be visible in the main bridge from more than about 200m away - as for the approach viaducts, the Royal Border Bridge gives a clue as to how it should be done ...

    313:

    I mean bugger it, even the mobility scooter would be too much if its 1.2kWh of battery capacity was made of lithium cells rather than lead-acid as it actually is.

    Hyperbole much?

    https://m.alibaba.com/product/1600410759529/Rear-Rack-style-akku-600wh-electric.html?__detailProductImg=https%3A%2F%2Fs.alicdn.com%2F%40sc04%2Fkf%2FHb543f595bb2641129d70ea0c586a3666Z.jpg_200x200.jpg

    With lead acid only about 50% of the capacity is available unless you're happy to replace it every 100 uses, so a 1.2 kWh pack is really a 600 Wh pack. A 600 Wh lithium pack is about 250 GBP delivered and will last about 5-100 times longer than its lead acid cousin (depending on how it's treated).

    314:

    "...including a massive reduction in the use of HE to encourage people to think."

    Aye. When I were a lad we used to reckon there were nothing like a bit o' high explosive to get people to think...

    ""I don't want to understand the principles; I just want to be able to use it""

    It has to be said that there are situations where that becomes kind of a necessity for practical reasons of information overload. This does not need to be encrypted, left to myself I wouldn't bother at all, but the other end forces me to; I don't want to take the time to become a crypto expert or even a libssl expert, I just want to know what incantations to chuck at libssl to make it give me the data so I can get on with the important bit. Of course it doesn't work so well when you do need strong security but still approach it the same way... very often that is what enables the other side to find their way in.

    Personally (and I don't think I'm alone) I find that when I do want to understand the principles, it's a lot easier to "come at it backwards" and start with a known-good example of their application, then take it apart and see how it works, and use that as a way in to understanding the principles in general. To start with the basic theory and work forward to eventually arrive at a practical application means learning the whole thing as a self-contained cloud of abstractions with no connection to what any of it actually means, until eventually you are supposed to understand enough of the abstract concepts to be able to construct your own mappings onto actual problems from scratch. I find things much easier to understand if I can start from a mapping in the other direction (which is also very-many to not-so-many so it's easier to find your way through), use that as a framework to hang the most closely relevant abstractions on, and then work outwards connecting in the others. (Or run more than one instance of this more-or-less in parallel using different starting points, if the cloud of abstractions is large and needs more than one stem to support it.)

    It seems to me that school teaching (or at least the better parts of it) also takes the view that it works better to come at things that way round (possible observation bias because I naturally remember those bits better, but I think there's still a real tendency). This does of course tend to mean that you begin by learning a lot of what Pratchett calls "lies to children" and then having to learn the corrections later, but how much of a disadvantage that is probably has a lot to do both with who's doing the learning and with who's doing the teaching.

    It also seems from all kinds of representations of and references to schooldays of past times that it's a comparatively recent development, and formerly kids were indeed taught clouds of abstractions with no obvious connection to anything outside the classroom (and in some subjects still are)... and that university-level education still takes this approach by default. The attitude seems to be that building up understanding beginning with a simplified version and then learning corrections and refinements as you go along is anathematical, and it is essential to implant the fully complete, fully corrected and refined version starting with a blank slate so you never have to learn anything that is incompletely or conditionally true. I consider this to be suboptimal...

    What I think is really undesirable is the prevalence of the stronger corollary to the attitude you cite, "I cannot possibly understand the principles, I just want to use it/have it working/have it done". People are conditioned to believe that they are thick, necessarily unable to do anything for themselves that they haven't been specifically taught how to do and unable to learn it for themselves. Lord Finchley apparently was thick, but at least he tried; he didn't automatically consider himself helpless, so I think he deserves a bit more respect than Belloc gives him.

    315:

    I'm guessing the "dead car batteries are hazwaste" line is being pushed by the oil industry, possibly via the Koch network lobbying "think-tanks" ...Actually, its the USEPA: Lithium batteries are hazardous materials and are subject to the Department of Transportation’s Hazardous Materials Regulations (HMR; 49 CFR Parts 171–180). https://www.epa.gov/recycle/used-lithium-ion-batteries

    To expand on that a bit: --Lithium fires are exciting, so we don't want Mumbles the idiot recycler having tons of lithium sitting around to catch fire in exciting ways. --Some lithium batteries are 5% cobalt by weight, although Tesla's trying hard to quit that particular habit (Lithium iron phosphate for the looming phosphorus shortage, most likely). And before you ask, the EPA has issues with cobalt too: https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents/cobalt-compounds.pdf

    So it's a legitimate problem: Americans have demonstrated that a sufficient number of us are stupid, careless, and/or crooked enough to not be trusted around mass quantities of dangerous batteries, because they can be genuinely dangerous in not-very-extreme conditions. Therefore, they are regulated.

    My sad-faced prediction is that lithium battery recycling will be made a developing-world problem, at least until the Dakotas or Texas relax their rules (/sarcasm): https://e360.yale.edu/features/getting-the-lead-out-why-battery-recycling-is-a-global-health-hazard

    316:

    Ed Milliband gave us Corbin by changing the electoral system for leader and allowing cheap membership which led to entryism by both Momentum and stealth Tories who, for different reasons voted for Corbyn. Ed Milliband has resigned after the election defeat

    317:

    Euww - that's a really horrible thought. Though I think it's getting so bad that they may ditch him sooner?

    I think Charlie is right.

    Despite all the bluster and commentary from Conservative MP's it is noticeable that they aren't actually submitting the letters to remove him, and there hasn't been any reporting of the usual suspects actually trying to replace him at this moment.

    At a guess, the current theatrical act is about

    a) mollifying the local voter base, saying yes I agree Boris has been a bad boy.

    b) weaken Boris so the big boys can work to control him until the appropriate moment (mentioned by Charlie) arrives - things like ending his throwing money around that annoys so many.

    If they do decide Boris needs to go sooner than planned then expect a caretaker aka sacrificial lamb leader to step up and take the job of absorbing all the blame before the real leader steps up for the regularly scheduled election.

    (another, remote, possibility is something happens to change the polls in their favour and they find an excuse to roll the dice and hold a snap election).

    318:

    Occasionally they will brine if the forecast looks accurate, but even with that they only get it right 50% of the time.

    Do you get the same second act we get here. Either:

    Stupid school officials sent our kids to school and look at the mess they have to deal with. They should have know it was too bad to do so.

    Or stupid school officials had the kids stay home and look, sunshine and dry roads. How dare they ruin our daily lives.

    Here we live in a strange geographical area where the snow/sleet boundary can move north or south by 30 miles. So part of the school system can have ice covered with snow and sleet and at the other end of the county it be all sunshine and dry roads.

    320:

    A possible alternative to my numbers above (that is, carrying enough batteries to run full power from Osaka to Rotterdam takes 20% of the cargo capacity, all else being equal) is to arrange the batter containers in vertical stacks, so they can be accessed and changed at each port en route. The problem: this forgoes the advantage of placing all the electrical connections below decks (unless you unpack and temporarily store the cargo containers that are above the battery containers, but that seems inefficient).

    Other alternatives: Lithium-ion polymer has higher energy density than LiFePO4, but requires more careful handling. Various thoughts about cooling (there are marine engines that pump sea water directly through the cooling system).

    Turns out we're not the first to think of it. In this article, for instance, a company in Alabama called FleetZero "is experimenting with building electric batteries in standard 20-foot shipping containers which are modified to power smaller ships at sea." It sounds like targeting smaller ships has some benefits (access to smaller ports and up the Mississippi for instance) in addition to the reduced scale of components. I was picking on massive ships like the Ever Given because their the obvious case, but the idea that this would be more practical at lower scale also makes sense to me.

    321:

    But still, replacing a battery is harder than replacing a gas tank or even an engine, so it's not clear that EVs are being built to have the same lifespan as ICs.

    I think that's a GM thing rather than a battery thing. GM designs their ICE cars to fall to bits/rust out in 5-10 years too. They're also designed so that regular maintenance is difficult and that replacing parts that will wear is difficult and expensive so that they will fail and destroy things making it uneconomical to repair, just buy a new car. Which given that they're in the business of selling new cars isn't super surprising.

    Tesla designed their car so that the battery can be swapped out in half the time it takes to fill a petrol tank (let alone the time to replace a petrol tank). Since then they've added a skid plate, so it takes a bit longer than that, but it's still quicker than changing the oil on a GM ICE. Leaf batteries aren't much slower. Maybe 5 minutes?

    322:

    Thanks for the update.

    The obvious problem I see with containers of batteries is that they'll need to work in weather that looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCwUFjzEOS8 , because no one will be going outside to fix high amperage main lines that get knocked loose by that many tonnes of water hitting the deck.

    For a ferry, drive-on batteries are easier, because if the conditions are that fugly, the ferry's staying in port anyway.

    323:

    To expand on that a bit: --Lithium fires are exciting, so we don't want Mumbles the idiot recycler having tons of lithium sitting around to catch fire in exciting ways.

    Like the used tire fires that happen ever so often. And really can't be put out with a less than Herculean effort so they burn while the edges are contained.

    324:

    It sounds like targeting smaller ships has some benefits (access to smaller ports and up the Mississippi for instance) in addition to the reduced scale of components. I was picking on massive ships like the Ever Given because their the obvious case, but the idea that this would be more practical at lower scale also makes sense to me.

    Driving barge tows on the various east of the Rockies US rivers with "E" would be a big deal. Those boats are way smaller than ocean going vessels and don't really carry any cargo. They just push it. Large amounts of "it".

    325:

    Can confirm. Our 2014 model S shows negligible impact on battery life from supplying heat. A/C is significantly more energy-demanding, but when we tested over the same drive with and without heat (internal temp set to 'off' vs 68F, outside temp I believe ~45F) the difference for a 50-mile drive was in the noise (<1% of the transportation energy use).

    [I was interested to see the 'modal user will replace ~8 years' above. We've had zero costs and neglible decline in range thus far, no decline in performance. Daily commuter use, <10 long trips per year but we were all surprised to find that the enforced breaks on such trips (park at supercharger, get coffee/use toilet/peruse local bookstore for 30 mins or so to get the next 200 miles) made us significantly happier on arrival vs the nonstop gas-powered equivalent.]]

    326:

    It looks like this is already being done. I found this page when looking up electric tugs, but I note it also links to this page offering "containerised maritime energy storage".

    327:

    while it's not common, E85 (ie an 85% ethanol blend) is available. The only changes necessary are...

    My brother in law has done all that you suggest, including taking advantage of the increased anti knock. He tells me that he gets 45 litres per 100 km. Slightly better than 5 mpg. A tank of fuel lasts about 120 km. An exciting 120 km for sure, but 120 km (75 miles). He gets fuel delivered in 200 litre drums (that cost 900 dollars each) because if he drove to the nearest servo to fill, he'd be out before he got home.

    If you think batteries are inconvenient and impractical, you should try E85...

    328:

    So if you're lucky you're releasing 20W of "spare" capacity per lamp-post... [snip] ...if "type 2" means 3.6kW (which seems to be the least it can mean).

    I thought I'd look it up because you seemed so sure that lamp posts are supplied by tiny threads of near invisible cable. It's not what we do here, and I thought maybe I'm wrong.

    https://shropshire.gov.uk/street-care-and-cleaning/streetlights/facts-figures-and-faqs/street-lighting-facts/#

    Lighting columns are normally supplied from the same underground electricity networks which feed your home

    No, I'm not wrong. Each lamp post has the same supply as a home, so probably 100A single phase fuse, tapped off a 3 phase main cable running ~1000A.

    Still I'm not an expert on residential street lighting and the standards are hard to find.

    What's not hard to find and what I already knew, the amount of power a type 2 advertises is done with a PWM signal. The duty cycle multiplied by 0.6 gives the maximum amperage the vehicle should draw. I know that goes down at least as low as 10% or 6 amps. About 1.4 kW in the UK.

    So there's absolutely no issue having two Type 2 outlets (or even four) on every lamp post. If you really wanted to get fancy, you could set them up for demand balancing, so they'd help stabilise the grid. Free charging, but it might shut off for a few minutes every now and again. Sounds like a good deal.

    329:

    Possible, but the proper comparison is recycling vs. disposal.

    No, that's not the right comparison.

    If you're manufacturing a widget, the cost of getting raw materials is what counts. If it's cheaper to get the raw materials from old batteries than new mines, then you get them from old batteries if there are old batteries available. The cost/saving involved in throwing away something you want isn't part of the calculation.

    There's no coming tsunami of dead car batteries coming. Not now, not 10 years, not ever.

    330:

    mdive
    Um - nasty, but all too possible.
    However, I suspect today's PMQ's should be good circus - lay in some popcorn.

    331:

    "Still I'm not an expert on residential street lighting and the standards are hard to find."

    Streetlights are not connected directly to the main-feeder, they are daisy-chained on properly fused sub-circuit.

    Depending on where you are the details will vary, but as a rule of thumb, if each street will have one sub-circuit, two if there are lights on both sides of the road.

    The sub-circuits may be multi-phase on "high consequence" roads, but usually it is just a single phase.

    If the "lamp-post-chargers" will be more than a single-phase 16A outlet, it will almost certainly require new infrastructure next to the lamp-post, because normal steel-tube lamp-posts are not big enough diameter to contain the necessary contactors and protection circuitry for higher wattages.

    332:

    Like the used tire fires that happen ever so often. And really can't be put out with a less than Herculean effort so they burn while the edges are contained.

    I just had a quick look at the properties of lithium oxide: https://www.americanelements.com/lithium-oxide-12057-24-8

    Doesn't dissolve in water, high melting point, doesn't boil, just sits there. The aftermath of a lithium fire would still be usable lithium ore.

    I suspect that step 1 of the "recycling" is going to end up being an incinerator.

    333:

    mdive @ 319: it is noticeable that they aren't actually submitting the letters to remove [BoJo]

    I heard a passing mention from someone on the BBC this morning that the number of those letters is starting to build up.

    334:

    310 - The closest I have come to 'EVs are bad because they don't work for me' is more "EVs do not work for my use case, the vehicles need these improvements".

    313 - I keep seeing this argument. Aside from it being vapourware, how do you prevent $powerco deciding they need half the power from my battery pack for grid stabilisation on a specific night, when I have a trip planed for the following day that means I will need a fully charged battery?

    314 - The Royal Border Bridge is "only" Grade 1 listed, which accepts that modifications are possible (catenery, the lighting scheme). Oh and the catenery is visible in the photos on its Wikipedia page.

    322 - What are these intermediate ports on the Osaka - Rotterdam run? AFAIK there are no intermediate ports that can dock a Panamax (well unless you consider LA or San Diego an acceptable diversion on the Pacific side, and a similar incursion to the Gulf of Mexico on the Atlantic).

    327 - I've said this before, but part of the issue is that the enforced breaks are where the charger is, rather than at the much better coffee shop a mile down the road.

    332 - Radio Scotland do a morning phone-in program. Today's question is "Can you think of anything Bozo can say to make it better?" "My sis and I both responded with "I resign."

    335:

    Tire and Li fires.

    The issue with either is what happens to the surrounding air during the fire. I KNOW you really don't want to be around a tire fire. And I assume similar for a large Li battery fire.

    336:

    If the "lamp-post-chargers" will be more than a single-phase 16A outlet, it will almost certainly require new infrastructure

    Thanks for chiming on with actual knowledge.

    So no issue with two 6 amp outlets per streetlight then.

    337:

    I can't disagree with that. Lithium fire probably won't smell as bad as a tyre fire so the solution is to dump them in the middle of nowhere and pretend not to notice.

    Apropos of nothing, my local waste incinerator/power plant has a shiny glass facade and signs outside proclaiming it to be an "energy recovery centre", so that's ok then.

    338:

    313 - I keep seeing this argument. Aside from it being vapourware

    It's not vapourware, you can do this already. Google virtual power plant. Not everywhere, but it certainly exists.

    how do you prevent $powerco deciding they need half the power from my battery pack for grid stabilisation on a specific night, when I have a trip planed for the following day that means I will need a fully charged battery?

    You set the amount you're prepared to make available on the app or website of the virtual power plant.

    339:

    My sad-faced prediction is that lithium battery recycling will be made a developing-world problem

    Exactly.

    It will be politically impossible to build al of the necessary hazwaste facilities here in the US (or EU).

    We Will simply ship dead li-ion batteries overseas to some some 3rd world country (China is not taking our waste anymore) and call it "recycling".

    Same thing we do now with e-waste.

    340:

    There's a streetlamp charger trial I'm following near me: the street lamps have a pair of type 2 sockets on, and you supply a type 2 cable to run from the street lamp to your car.

    The controller is surprisingly intelligent based on the marketing bumpf; by default, the port is a 6A charge port (which allows both cars to charge and leaves enough power to run the lamp safely), but it's capable of permitting up to 30A to one socket if the infrastructure is there and only one car is charging.

    It looks like the power actually available varies depending on the lamp post - most of them are limited to 16A maximum, but the ones that were upgraded after being hit by motor traffic (that knocked the existing posts down) had an underground chamber added for the contactors etc to allow them to run 30A.

    The bumpf also claims that the chargers in a street communicate to limit the street draw to a reasonable amount; so presumably, you'd only get 16A or 30A if the other chargers were not pulling their 6A. It also has mention of being aware of time-of-day loading, so may vary the power on offer based on the grid's overall load (so if it's a windy night, the street lamp chargers are faster than if it's a still night).

    It looks like quite a sophisticated system, overall, and the trial hasn't had to halt early because it broke things, so I'm optimistic that it's going to work out.

    341:

    From a system engineering point of view, if EVs don't work for a use-case, the solution is not necessarily to enhance EVs until they do. (In SE we call that kind of thinking "solutioneering").

    What we should do is identify the use-cases where problems exist and look to solve those use-cases. Better EVs are one possible solution, but there may be others.

    Unfortunately that kind of thinking seems to be something that governments are bad at.

    342:

    Google virtual power plant.
    So I did. I got 4 unique companies in the top 50 hits, including Tesla, who definitely use car power packs as temporary storage.

    343:

    I said that my requirements are fairly typical of many people, and that means of perhaps a third of the UK population. No, my USES are not typical, but my REQUIREMENTS are. It is the reason that the sort of car I drive (and even the actual model!) was one of the most commonly bought in the UK. And, in this respect, the UK is a damn sight more typical of most of the world than the USA.

    If you think a bit, and READ what I post (especially #136) rather than just jerking your knee, you will realise why your suggestion would not help. Even if I could wave a magic wand and create a coop with suitable vehicles, that would NOT solve the holiday problem.

    344:

    I take your point, but I was referring to closer to the latter, though not so much as "I am too thick to understand" but "I am too blinkered to try to understand". The context I encountered was in programming where, for example, they wanted to be able to use Fortran or C++ arrays/pointers and procedure calling without reven trying to understanding the language's array, pointer and reference model.

    345:

    How would you feel about living in an area where the boundary can change every mile? :-) All right, most of the time, we get almost no snow, and heavy snow is usually more consistent, but it does happen.

    346:

    Unless it is carried away in the conflagration plume and scattered ouver the surroundings. I have no idea whether it would be and, obviously, that could be prevented if it were being recycled in a furnace.

    347:

    Yes, precisely. My #136 was all about (some of) the non-EV changes that are needed in the UK, and NOT about the merits or otherwise of EVs. In summary, what I said was: "All of the above is soluble, but government action needed".

    348:

    I suspect EVs will be like iPhones, where you trade in the whole thing when the battery gets too annoying.

    Apple does battery replacements for out-of-warranty iPhones for a flat fee of £49 for older iPhones back to the 9th generation (2016 SE, 6s) and £69 for the 11th generation through the current model 13.

    349:

    At the level of zoom out you're engaging in?

    Anti-GMO is a big one. Largely a left wing perspective and involves a ton of people starving to death via not being able to implement GMO crops. Particularly concentrated on the poor/third world, too.

    They'd probably put America's "Racial Reckoning" in the same camp. High increases in murder rate, the arson and looting. Also general claims that migrants are out to murder you and take your stuff.

    If you count fetuses as humans, the left wing's also got a couple holocausts on their hands since Roe vs Wade that kind of dwarf every other policy matter including literal wars.

    I'm not saying this as an argument the deep Right is correct or even not-crazy. It's just that anyone symmetrically far Right thinks the Left is just as terrifying as you think the Right is.

    350:

    It will be politically impossible to build al of the necessary hazwaste facilities here in the US

    https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/09/21/north-americas-first-lithium-ion-battery-recycling-hub-is-coming-to-new-york/

    Li-Cycle, a Canadian battery recycling firm, has chosen Rochester as the home for its planned $175 million recycling facility

    https://americanbatterytechnology.com/sustainability/

    ABTC is aggressively building a no-waste, economical and environmentally sustainable system to recycle waste and end-of-life lithium-ion batteries

    https://www.electrive.com/2022/01/11/recycling-startup-batterie-resourcers-to-build-recycling-plant-in-georgia/

    The US battery recycling start-up, supported by Jaguar Land Rover among others, is building a commercial recycling plant for lithium-ion batteries in Covington, Georgia

    I don't know where you're getting your taking points, but it's got little to no relation to reality.

    351:

    I can speak as to lithium battery fires and say you do not want to be anywhere near one, especially a mass of batteries on fire. When I was on the bins the blade of the compactor pierced a lithium battery, a phone battery maybe, and it started "burning", by that I mean it started smoking and got hot enough to set the rubbish on fire. There were no flames. I hit the emergency stop, dropped the back flap and jumped in the back(do not do this!), whereupon I flipped the battery out with my foot and stamped out the burning rubbish. Doing this I got a face full of the smoke, very nasty stuff and there was a lot of it from just a small battery. We then dropped the battery in water which smothered it. We also still had to call out the fire brigade as rubbish inside was still smoldering, but at least it didn't burn out the truck. If I hadn't noticed though, it would have. Again just from one small battery.I want emphasise though, do not jump in the back of a bin truck!

    All this is not to say I am against EVs. They are coming, even if not for environmental reasons we would have to switch when the oil runs out anyway. This debate that comes up on here every so often is pointless. The naysayers need to adjust, if things are not fit for your purposes then YOU might need to change. I have experienced a lot of negative change, but you just have to deal with it. Comparably what we are talking about here is nothing but inconvenience.

    352:

    Finally, my "Who ordered that??" was the Boeing 737Max scandal. It should have been impossible to get as bad as it did.

    That was a long-overdue reckoning for Boeing McDonnell-Douglas.

    After the takeover of McD-D by Boeing, Boeing lost the plot completely -- largely because the board were taken over by McD-D directors who followed the McD-D Way, not the Boeing Way, and McD-D are primarily a defense contractor, not an airliner manufacturer.

    For added shits and giggles, see the fiasco over the Boeing Starliner space capsule, designed as the big-budget trad aerospace riposte to those upstart SpaceX people and their amateur-hour Dragon capsule. (Spoiler: three times the budget but hasn't successfully flown an uncrewed test flight yet: meanwhile Crew Dragon is quietly ferrying astronauts to the ISS and has put the wind up Roscosmos, who are worried about losing business to it from Soyuz.)

    353:

    Unfortunately, my little Volvo is a Euro V Diesel, thus will be banned from any Edinburgh Low Emission Zone

    My 2006 V70 diesel is in a similar position. Plan is to MoT it in March, drive it to Heathrow and back for Eastercon (three adults plus 5 days' luggage) assuming the con goes ahead in person, then sell it. No replacement needed because it's barely moved for two years and I live 50 metres from a car club parking spot and 200 metres from an Avis rental office, if I actually need a car for anything (mostly the past two years have shown that I don't).

    354:

    Lithium batteries are hazardous materials well yes, because some pillock might stick a screwdriver through the back of the phone and set it on fire.

    I don't think the EPA's regs have caught up with the reality of EVs yet. Nor will they for some time (Trump notoriously took an axe to the EPA and dumped third-rate apparatchiks in to run it, like everything else he hated).

    As for treating them as hazwaste and incinerating them, I have this tanker full of crudded up transmission oil and brake fluid: how would you like to incinerate that? (Frankly it's an idiotic proposal.)

    Finally, recycling is a policy issue. We don't "need" to recycle, it'd be cheaper to just dump it in the drinking water, but we recycle because it's good policy if you want a stable society. (This is incidentally a big chunk of what's wrong with nuclear policy -- deep disposal runs into purely arbitrary hominid territorial delimeters, recycling is too costly to be market-competitive with fresh fuel ... bah.) So make it mandatory and factor it into the cost of new EVs.

    355:

    I agree with you as far as the GMO goes. We're going to need it, and big time, in 10 years time. Not having it ready to roll out will mean famine and societal collapse all over the world, not just in poor places.

    The remainder of your arguments reinforce that the Right is about authoritarianism. Do what the silverback in charge says. If you choose not to, you will be hurt until you do do what you're told. The personal freedom that they claim they value only counts for (1) themselves; (2) the people who believe themselves to be the chosen in-group.

    Of course, the true chosen in-group are those who give the right-wing authoritarians money and (for Fox news and its ilk) authority. If RW politicians actually gave two shits about the people who vote for them, they'd be actually trying to materially help them, not to 'help them' in the sense of giving them someone to look down upon, to hate, and to murder with few consequences.

    (My comment may well be nuked if Charlie thinks that you're doing a soft troll, WyldCard4. Or shmarik - your writing styles seem similar, and you may well be a sockpuppet).

    356:

    However, I suspect today's PMQ's should be good circus - lay in some popcorn.

    I changed my mind -- I think Boris is in big trouble.

    Reason: I just went out to collect a prescription, and stopped at the pie shop two doors up from the pharmacy (because: lunch). While I was paying, the check-out clerk (who is generally chatty) launched into a tirade against Johnson (and Dominic Cummings). Very much "there's one law for them and another for the likes of us."

    Middle-aged shop assistants with grandchildren aren't generally noted for being politically engaged, but she was furious about the Number Ten party -- seriously outraged.

    Forget brexit, or the economy, or supply chains, or COVID19: it's the personal insult of "one law for them and another for you" that struck a nerve. If this carries over into Middle England, the Tories (and particularly the PM) have a real problem.

    357:

    it is noticeable that they aren't actually submitting the letters to remove him

    IIRC a 1922 Committee leadership challenge can only be held once every 12 months.

    So there's a strong built-in incentive -- even for enemies of the PM -- not to hold one prematurely.

    358:

    It's easy to imagine a world where the state provides a 'bus' service with no fixed routes, no driver, and a maximum passenger load of 8 adults.

    Back in the 80s I visited some relatives in Holland. The final leg of the cross-country trip was by buurt-bus — a van that ran in a fixed area. At the train station you gave the final address and the driver dropped you off at it or close by. To catch it you telephoned a number and were given a time and location to go to to catch it. (I think it may also have had fixed stops, but it was a long time ago and memory is faint.

    What most impressed me about the dutch public transit system was that it was a system: the schedules of trains, busses, and ferries were integrated so no arriving at the station five minute after the train left and waiting an hour for the next one. Also, if there was a delay they tried to compensate with connecting transit eg. if the train is lat the bus will delay leaving so transferring passengers aren't stranded. This was (and is) very different to the Canadian model.

    359:

    I agree with you as far as the GMO goes. We're going to need it, and big time, in 10 years time.

    What triggered the anti-GMO campaign in Europe and on the left was Monsanto's "roundup-ready" terminator gene product, which was basically just plain evil. (Here is a proprietary, trademarked variety of corn that is resistant to the herbicide we sell, so you can spray it all over the place and the only thing that will grow in your field is our crop. Which, oops, does not produce viable seeds -- you have to buy fresh from us for every season! And, oh, if the roundup-resistant gene skips into your neighbour's cornfield we will sue them for trademark infringement because the only way their crop can possibly be roundup-resistant is if they pirated it." And did I mention that Roundup (glyphosate)) is carcinogenic, associated with pollinator die-offs, and was brought to market with inadequate testing?

    If the first GMO crop to reach the public had been Golden rice instead, consumer resistance to GMO crops would have been blunted or entirely absent. (It's hard to argue against preventing children from going blind.) But no, Monsanto basically did for the reputation of GMOs what nuclear weapons did for the reputation of civil nuclear electricity generation.

    360:

    Result was that for the modern Tesla with the heat pump, stuck in below freezing temperatures, the heating uses about 1% per hour, or about a 1/4 charge per day.

    What was the temperature, other than "below freezing"? (Skimmed video, if it was mentioned I missed it — a problem with video vs. text.)

    There's a big difference between -5 (just below freezing) and -30 (typical Prairie temperatures).

    361:

    BoZo has survived, but it looks as though he's wounded... I don't think he'll be PM come December.
    Which prompts: Which crawling piece of Brexit slime do we get instead? And will they wait 6 months & try for a "snap" election - or will the cost-of-living/Brexit/shit in the rivers (etc ) lead them to try to drag it out?

    Charlie
    GMO & Nuclear power in a nutshell ... But it also shows up the hollowness of the fake greenies, following religion, not knowledge

    362:

    Stupid school officials sent our kids to school and look at the mess they have to deal with. They should have know it was too bad to do so.

    For years the Toronto school board (and North York before them) had a policy of not cancelling school before noon. This meant that it counted as an instructional day and thus wouldn't require making up later*.

    Eventually this was relaxed a bit and we actually had a snow day but it was announced late. Board announced that they would make a decision by 5:30 AM. I checked at 6:15 (usually left at 6:30 anyway) and they hadn't announced a closure so I headed in to work. Traffic was light and conditions weren't too bad until I arrived at school. I got into the parking lot, shovelled out the berm left by the street plow so it would be easier for other people, and headed in to the building to be sent home at the door by the principal saying that schools were closed — they had announced the decision at 6:45. Needless to say I was ticked, as that meant I spent basically 3+ hours driving in shitty conditions.

    Earlier in my career I was late because of snow, despite leaving an hour early. Stopped and borrowed a phone to call in** and was told off because they needed me. I didn't have a class first period, and so they needed me to cover for a phys-ed teacher who was late. She lived four blocks from school and was an avid cross country skier, yet I was the one in trouble. My first inkling of toxic management…

    * Not that instruction was done — teachers were told that anything covered that half-day had to be recovered for absent students without penalty. So everyone knew that we were just going through the motions, and providing child-minding services. Including some people having to stay into the evening because children were still at school and then try to get home through absolutely horrible conditions.

    ** Before cell phones, so literally stopped and a nice security guard at a condo let me use his desk phone.

    363:

    Yes, and it wasn't just that. They were also proposing to put the scorpion venom gene into cotton, which would have been REALLY bad news for bees :-( Before Monsanto did that, the PBI in Cambridge were trying to get a rust-resistance gene from a grass into wheat, to eliminate the need for fungicide. I can get behind that sort of thing, too.

    364:

    350 - Assuming a Tesla uses 3000 jPhone batteries, that's 3000 *£49 = £147000 for a new battery pack. That's rather more than a new Tesla in the UK.

    358 - Agreed. As I said upthread, "making it right" involves saying "I resign", not "I'm thunderingly stupid. Oh and I'm sorry people have died".
    And that's not allowing for how even Baroness Ruth Davidson and DRoss are on the bandwagon.

    365:

    I suspect that there's some economy of scale! However, like almost all of the current problems with EVs, the difficulties are NOT technical, but political (either governmental or commercial). Tesla or any other company could trivially offer a refurbishment service for a moderate, fixed amount. The difficulty is that they may choose not to, in order to force customers to buy newer, more expensive replacements.

    366:

    meanwhile Crew Dragon is quietly ferrying astronauts to the ISS and has put the wind up Roscosmos, who are worried about losing business to it from Soyuz.

    I think that's putting it a bit lightly: before Crew Dragon, NASA was paying Roscosmos through the nose to carry astronauts to the ISS. This was a significant source of foreign currency that suddenly went *poof*. Now they're stuck with the status quo NASA and ESA prefer - exchanging services of approximately equal value so they can avoid moving currency around. Combine that with the brain drain leaving them with QC issues that would make Boeing ashamed, and that is not a happy space program.

    367:

    In general, although I'd point out that glyphosate's reputation for being toxic is overblown, unless you're in the tinfoil hat club. The thing to remember is that a) most comparable herbicides are less versatile, less researched, and often more toxic, and b) you're using these chemicals to replace things like machetes, axes, and other tools that have demonstrably already killed more people on this planet than glyophsate ever will. If you treat herbicides the way you treat chemotherapy drugs, by targeting them against specific plants rather than broadcast spraying, they're quite useful. If you treat them the way the livestock and soap industries treat antibiotics, they spawn resistance and all sorts of other problems.

    Do I have an axe to grind in this? Oh yes. If you look at the efforts to ban glyphosate in the California at least, they're targeted against the licensed weed control experts, especially those who are using low concentrations of glyphosate (often in hand mixes to suit the target) to slow the spread of invasive plants and protect often rare natives. There are a lot of plants (tamarisk, pampas grass, giant reed) that basically can't be killed mechanically with anything short of a bulldozer, but die nicely with three timed doses of glyphosate (or in tamarisk's case, garlon). So let's make that illegal.

    What's not illegal? Big Box stores selling glyphosate products by the gallon at concentrations more than double what the licensed applicators are spraying. For lawn care.

    Why aren't the crusaders going after the Big Box stores? Because that would be hard, per their personal testimony. Picking on volunteers doing weed control in parks is easy (it involves a bunch of cute female high schoolers and their well-connected mothers pressuring politicians and getting media), so they're pushing hard to get that outlawed in the name of public safety. While this is normal nonviolent tactics (start with the easy stuff and work up), in this case they're acting more as bullies, because there's no obvious plan to ever deal with the Big Box stores.

    And there are the war stories. I know someone who lost an arm to a mechanical weed clearer and have a machete scar. When I moved to my current property,there was a normal-sized pampas grass in one corner of the garden. It took us a month to completely clear it, 32 trash bags full of saw-edged grass, plus buying an iron spud bar to dig out the rhizome. Plus over a year of pulling out the volunteers and resprouts that I'd missed.Conversely I took a licensed pesticide applicator out into a park to deal withca few dozen pampas grass of the same size. Three spritzes of glyphosate per plant a few weeks apart, and the plants were dead. That's the difference in labor.

    Anyway, feel free to be horrified by Roundup. For the record, the only time I ever talked with Monsanto, I told them not to GMO mycorrhizal fungi to be Roundup ready. I also think broadcast spraying Roundup on crops and asserting patent rights is as evil as it looks. The chemical itself isn't the problem, and properly used, it's as useful as any antibiotic or chemotherapy agent, and less deadly than most alternatives.

    368:

    My sad-faced prediction is that lithium battery recycling will be made a developing-world problem...Exactly. It will be politically impossible to build al of the necessary hazwaste facilities here in the US (or EU). We Will simply ship dead li-ion batteries overseas to some some 3rd world country (China is not taking our waste anymore) and call it "recycling". Same thing we do now with e-waste.

    I suspect you've conflated the plastics mess with all recycling efforts.

    If you look at the link posted, we apparently have a fairly efficient global lead recycling system. It's not a safe system, but it gets the lead out of dead batteries and into live ones. Similarly, a fair amount of ewaste (especially the gold in contacts) get recycled in similar unsafe and unsanitary ways.

    My guess is that similar things might happen to lithium, under a business as usual paradigm. Musk is right, that lithium batteries are better than lithium ore for extraction, so why not? The question is whether it gets done onshore or whether it is offshored. Ignoring China's perfectly reasonable desire to clean up its act in the face of massive protests, I think Covid19, growing hurricanes, and sea level rise are pushing at least some people to rethink the value of offshoring recycling anything. The challenge is primarily to keep the profit monsters from dominating the process and externalizing the costs of pollution, and that's a non-trivial challenge.

    369:

    For years the Toronto school board (and North York before them) had a policy of not cancelling school before noon.

    Again fun to see different approaches to things: I don't remember school ever being cancelled because of snow or cold weather. When I was a kid, -20 or -25 C for a couple of weeks each winter was usual, and -30 C was not that unusual. There was one winter when temperature went below -30 C for a longer time, but school time it was.

    Snow, yeah, we do get it, and sometimes the car lanes are not all cleared when people start moving. Walkways and nowadays bike lanes are a different matter, though. There's also less snow than what I remember from 30-40 years ago, but even then it wasn't really a problem.

    There were times when it was too cold to go outside during the fifteen minute breaks between classes, but that was usually when it was below -25 C, IIRC. Not many of those days a year, if any.

    Today the temperature rose to maybe +3 C from the -15 C it had been for some days, and it's going to freeze again, so then roads will be slippery. (As the melted slush refreezes.)

    370:

    Combine that with the brain drain leaving them with QC issues that would make Boeing ashamed, and that is not a happy space program.

    Now combine that with no reporting allowed for the most part:

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/russia-tells-its-space-reporters-to-stop-reporting-on-the-space-program/

    Which makes this damming article even more surprising:

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/a-state-aligned-russian-newspaper-reviews-the-space-program-and-its-scathing/

    371:

    Yeah, growing up in the Toronto area I don't remember school ever being cancelled for snow either. I do have memories of a blizard in... must have been '87 or '88. My mom was bound and determined that I wouldn't miss an appointment in Toronto so bundled me up and walked with me to catch the Go Train into the city. Only time I've ever heard thunder snow, was pretty surreal!

    Living in Winnipeg now, my daughter is in Grade 3 and hasn't had a single snow day in 3 and a half years. A few days where bus service has been cancelled because of the cold but the parents are still expected to get the kids to school regardless.

    372:

    Before I start responses to cmts, I was struck a few minutes ago by the simple resolution to the electrifying the bridge problem: y'know, everyone here seems to have forgotten that trains frequently have multiple locomotives. For that matter, for severe grades, railroads have pusher engines stationed by the bottom of the grades for that one purpose.

    Do that with a diesel loco, or use one of the just-come-out battery-powered electrics to take the train through the bridge.

    373:

    You wrote: ...Many people can't afford to, or don't want to live in an area that supports good public transport

    Let me point out that, at least in the US, 80% of the population are in metropolitan areas. "Bad" public transit is always further out from the city centers, and of course it's overwhelmingly based on "you need to get to/from downtown", not "I need to go from 10km out of town in the direction of 10:00 to 11km out of town in the direction of 1:00". Circulation around the downtown is what's cheaped out on.

    That, and the auto industry, and the petrochemical industry advertising.

    374:

    Homeowner insurance? That'll just go up, and be part of inflation. Would I have imagined that I needed the insurance on a house that is valued (hah, hah, hah) at several hundred thousand dollars... when my first house, easily well over twice the size, we bought for $11,500?

    Spread of tropical diseases north? Please, I argue with people about wanting snow and cold weather, and invite them to look up kudzu and fire ants.

    China? Nope, not going to happen. Russia? Unlikely - they will draw back from another collapse, since most remember what a disaster the collapse of the USSR was. On the other hand, there was an article yesterday that India, for the first time, had a fertility rate under replacement rate.

    375:

    You write: What I think is really undesirable is the prevalence of the stronger corollary to the attitude you cite, "I cannot possibly understand the principles, I just want to use it/have it working/have it done".

    And that was the first, and continues to be one of the reasons I dislike Apple, the attitude of "don't worry your pretty little head, you don't need to know anything".

    376:

    Getting back to the original theme, I've got a brainfartstorm for 2029. It's an unholy mashup of a solar thermal power plant and a petrochemical plant.

    We've got a couple of big problems, one being solar thermal plants (big and inefficient), and another being plastic waste (too valueless to haul away, and no place cheap left to bury it).

    My solution is to rebuild solar thermal plants to melt plastic waste. Since they're currently circular fields of mirrors facing a tower, it might be necessary to lose some of the mirrors. The essential trick is to replace the power generating central tower (which is where focused sun hits something like molten salt, which then runs into a generator to make electricity) with something akin to a petroleum cracking tower. Shredded plastic waste is loaded into the tower. As sunlight melts it, it flows down through catalysts or whatever, and these become feedstocks for new plastics.

    I don't know enough engineering to know how the system would work. It's possible that the tower's loaded every night, distills through the day, and the gunk is cleaned out at sundown and reloaded for the next day's processing. It might also be possible that plastic is continually melted throughout the day, and the system is cleaned out at night, with the gunk used as an asphalt replacement product if it's not too toxic.

    The basic point is that we're already talking in California about landfilling more urban waste out in the deserts, and we're siting more solar plants out in the deserts. It makes me wonder whether it's possible to do solar-powered materials recycling out in the desert too. I'm quite aware that this is hard on deserts, but plastic have turned from an answer to a fracking nightmare, so we need to do something about it. The alternative seems to be the neopelagic, and that might be more problematic than it's worth.

    377:

    Neither case is good. Burn it in the middle of nowhere? Oh, you mean right next to the cheap housing, where mostly non-whites live?

    Hell, no. Sealed burn furnaces... assuming that the recovered gases are easier to handle than disassembly.

    Disassembly? How do you think the different types of recycled metal and plastics from big cities are handled? They hire cheap, low skill people to separate it. Yes, really.

    378:

    I don't know enough engineering to know how the system would work.

    In general melting plastic doesn't make it usable as feed stock for much anything but hard plastic lumps. So maybe turn it into plastic gravel for roadways. As long as you don't mind the micro plastics such a road will gradually add to the environment next to the road.

    Those chasing circles on plastic are for most of the numbers something you can do on a lab bench but no one has figured out how to do it at any scale at all. Only 2 or 3 of them work at scale. And not all that economically at that.

    379:

    High tech parking meters. You kinda have to wonder why it took so long for someone to do it.

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/01/scammers-put-fake-qr-codes-on-parking-meters-to-intercept-parkers-payments/

    380:

    I agree about the road waste, but I'm contemplating cracking it like they do tar sands, cracking it down to short-chain hydrocarbons (or methane, for that matter) and sorting out the various feedstocks to start over again.

    I agree that there will be random outgassing of random halides, and other nastiness at the bottom of the tower. But at least it doesn't add to GHGs during the processing.

    381:

    Well, it was a prediction more than a suggestion so while I would hope for sealed furnaces that trap nasty byproducts I wouldn't bet on it.

    As for "middle of nowhere" I was more thinking of the big holes in ex industrial cities where factories used to be. Not all of them are covered in shopping malls or warehouse conversions yet.

    382:

    That might work in a non-polluting fashion for polythene and polypropylene, but I doubt that it would work for most others.

    383:

    374 - The specific line (Fife circle) under primary discussion is normally run using 2, 3, 4 or 6 car reversible Multiple Units. I've never seen a banker engine used with a multiple unit (well, except "Thunderbird 4" which got the name because it's used to rescue broken down MUs, and yes is bright yellow).

    377 - THIS! Well this and their reliance on single button mice which became awkward to actually use after a year or 2 in service.

    384:

    If a deadly strain gets a name, it should obviously be The Andromeda Strain.

    385:

    So I guess nobody has read of JB Straubel (one of the founders of Tesla) and his Redwood Materials company. Just one of a number of EV batter recycling companies already making a start on commercial recycling. I understand that one of the major problems right now is a lack of EV packs needing recycling because they are lasting rather longer than the naysayers like to bloviate about.

    386:

    paws4thot @ 291: 237 - And, indeed, a significant number of our utility poles are for landline telephones, and found in the back gardens of properties rather than streetside.

    I live in an older semi-URBAN neighborhood - mostly single family detached homes, but there are a few apartments, condos & one quadruplex. It was built over a period spanning from 1900 to 1960 with some infill as late as the 1990s, and of course now there are a number of houses being torn down and replaced with larger houses; mostly taking the original footprint and building a new multi-story house.

    It's what around here is known as "inside the Beltline". The Beltline is a ring expressway imagined in the 1950s when it was far outside the city limits. You can plug 35.79449578093416, -78.582563494443 into Google Maps to see where the original late 50s, early 60s Beltline is. That's where the Beltline ENDED when I moved to Raleigh in 1967. Think of it as owning a home in Raleigh's MINI-version of "The City of London", the "SOHO" district of Lower Manhattan or "Georgetown" in Washington, DC. ... and having moved in there BEFORE the area became prime "real estate".

    I've been here 47 years. Moved in 27 Dec 1974. Current property tax assessment is almost 20X what I paid for the house. The tiny piece of dirt my house sits on is worth 5 times as much as the house itself.

    The neighborhood is approximately 3 blocks long by 4 blocks wide - roughly 1,740.46 ft (530.49 m) X 2,001.55 ft (610.07 m) - sort of embedded in or contiguous with some larger neighborhoods. Neighborhoods to the south & west (closer to downtown) are older and neighborhoods to the north and east are newer.

    This neighborhood was built over a period spanning from 1900 to 1960 with some infill as late as the 1990s, and of course now there are a number of houses being torn down and replaced with larger houses; mostly taking the original footprint and building a new multi-story house. When I moved in here in 1974 the neighborhood was just sort of OLD and most of the homes were owned by long time residents, a lot of them the original owners.

    Which is kind of a long way of getting around to we have UTILITY poles lining the street. They carry electric, telephone & cable, even AT&T's fiber optic. Spectrum & Google are newcomers to the area and they are burying their fiber.

    Parts of this neighborhood existed before electricity became generally available in Raleigh's outlying areas (which this neighborhood was when it began). I live about 3/10 of a mile outside the American Civil War breastworks that were thrown up to protect Raleigh from Sherman's Army; half a mile outside the city limits that existed through the 19th Century and into the early 20th.

    According to Raleigh's "Annexation History Map", this neighborhood became part of the City of Raleigh some time between 1930 & 1949. I think it was closer to 1949 because I've seen a Raleigh fire insurance map and in 1949 Brookside Drive (where my street ends) was still a dirt road with farmland along the east side.

    Raleigh didn't really start to become anything other than the Legislature met and where the Governor's office was located until late in the 19th Century and when the growth did begin, it started out mostly on the west side of town.

    Many of the newer neighborhoods (those built in the 70s or later) outside the Beltline usually have their utilities buried, but it's not economically feasible (meaning the power company doesn't want to spend the money) to bury the utilities around here.

    OTOH, since the poles ARE along the street, it would be possible to mount charging stations on them if there was sufficient demand. There just wouldn't be a whole lot of them compared to the number of houses on the street.

    387:

    mdlve @ 293:

    Wrong. You really want salt on the road before the snow/sleet/ice starts coming down.

    I'm happy that where you are they apparently can predict with a certainty when the snow/sleet/ice starts, and that the amount is always accurately forecasted so they know the right method to use.

    Around here, nope.

    Generally they wait for the snow to start simply because all too often either the forecast is wrong (and salt is expensive), it really can't be forecast (snow squalls off the lakes where you can't predict if/where the wind will drop snow), or the accumulation will be significant enough that they will need to plow, so salting would be throwing money away.

    Around here forecasting has become accurate enough that when winter weather is predicted the DOT can be pretty sure SOMETHING nasty is going to come down even if they don't know if it's going to be snow, sleet or freezing rain. So they go ahead an apply a brine solution. We're in an area where we need some way to deal with ice & snow, but not often enough to justify maintaining a whole fleet of snow removal equipment.

    The brine solution dries in place and is good for several days in case the winter weather is delayed. And it seems to be as effective as spreading dry salt after the fact.

    There's kind of a "snow line" that generally follows Interstate I-85 ... NORTH of I-85 it almost always comes down as snow. South of I-85 it almost always comes down as some kind of shitty mix of snow, sleet & freezing rain; frequently all three at the same time. Durham, where I grew up was right on I-85. Raleigh is about 25 miles south.

    388:

    Paul @ 294: On charging points, this turned up in my local feed: https://www.hampshirelive.news/news/hampshire-news/dozens-electric-vehicle-ports-costing-6464331.amp

    A local council is installing electric car charging points at £5k each.

    Presumably if these started being installed in thousands rather than dozens the price would drop.

    The article does say they expect the revenue generated by the charging points will eventually repay the cost ... and maybe even show a profit someday.

    "the expected revenue from the EVCPs would take several years to cover the cost of installation and any scheme is not likely to show a profit for several years."
    389:

    Sorry, most of those are either converted, or developers have moved in like gangbusters (cheap land located well). See what happened to the original Walter Reed hospital in DC....

    And I put down $5 that any such incinerators will go into whatever industrial sites haven't already been developed, because they're probably already hazardous waste sites.

    390:

    I've always said that a mouse is great... for management, who like to wave their hands and point, but for actual work, well-designed menus and key combinations are much faster and more efficient.

    391:

    Pigeon @ 297:

    "I have trouble managing money that well."

    I can't do it at all. So anything automatic is asking for trouble. If things are happening in the background without my intervention then I don't know what the fuck is going on and the inevitable result is not just running out of money entirely and unexpectedly, but also the activation of mechanisms to grab large chunks of it when I do get more before I even get my hands on it myself. The existence of such mechanisms and past experience of what happens when they are activated is one reason for me not having a bank account now.

    I do not use direct deduction payments for variable expenses; only for recurring payments of FIXED AMOUNTS (with the bonus that by using direct debit along with Equal Payment Plans I get a discount, so the fixed payments are less than what I would pay if was writing checks ad hoc).

    The same amount of money comes out of my checking account on the same day each month. There's nothing happening in the background without my permission. I have a predictable income (Retired Pay from the Army & Social Security directly deposited) and a predicable monthly payout. And with that I can make a budget which allows me to know how much I'm going to have left over to use for the variable expenses.

    Regarding "late payments" my attitude is basically fuck 'em. I don't have a problem remembering to do it because I get sent bills to remind me. If I don't do it when they want it it's because I plain haven't fucking got the money. It'll be a month or two before they start getting arsey enough that they do anything more than sending nasty letters, and I'll have managed to sort it out before then, so it doesn't matter. Allowing them to grab it automatically whether I've got it or not guarantees that palpably unpleasant consequences will occur straight away without giving me the chance to avoid them: either the abovementioned activation of bleeding wounds, or if I'm not quite so badly off at the relevant moment, the unexpected discovery that I've only got 50p to eat with for the next week because all the rest has disappeared without me being able to stop it.

    The problem was that allowing the costs to fluctuate from month to month that way almost guaranteed the "due date" would eventually fall on a day when I couldn't write a check right away because I didn't have funds in the bank at the time and every month there'd be a "late fee" tacked on in addition to whatever I actually owed. And if I did write a check and mail it off during the week and had to work overtime on Friday so that I didn't get to the bank with my paycheck in time to have it credited to my account there was a good chance the check I wrote would process BEFORE the deposit did and then I'd have not only a late fee, but a "check fee" from whoever I wrote the check to PLUS a check fee from the bank.

    Having the utilities, the things I can't really live without on a FIXED schedule for a FIXED amount solved that problem. And going to Direct Deposit with my paychecks guaranteed my check would ALWAYS be deposited on time. Which in turn meant a predictable surplus that I could save to build a cushion against a "rainy day".

    But the KEY is not using automatic payments for variable expenses, only for those expenses that can be set up for a recurring basis of a fixed amount.

    392:

    everyone here seems to have forgotten that trains frequently have multiple locomotives.

    What is a "locomotive"?

    The line in question is mostly used by diesel multiple units -- a series of passenger carriages with underslung DE generators. Every carriage has a motor and a drive axle; the one at the front or back merely has a driver's compartment, and they're connected by through tunnels for passenger movement.

    (Separate locomotives are only really used on freight trains in the UK, since the HSTs were retired -- except for the handful of HSTs still serving the Highlands. And HST locomotives are not designed to be coupled up: there's one power car at the front and one at the back, and that's all.)

    393:

    TJ @ 216
    LINKIES - PLEASE?
    I want to know what chemicals/drugs are supposed to do this?
    Links to easily-available public papers also appreciated!

    394:

    Loco haulage isn't as dead as first appears. TfW are overhauling Mk4+DVT sets to run with a 67, said sets formerly running up the East coast being shoved by a Class 91. Some of those are still running too. Think East Anglia still has 90's trundling about, and the Trans Pennine has some shiny new 68's and Mk5's. Some Class 43's had buffers retrofitted, to run as DVT's for the 91's when they got introduced before their matching coaches. When both powered up, about 7000hp available...

    395:

    It wasn't just the rotten corporate culture, but that the rest of the system failed. I'm on the shop floor of aerospace. My whole working life has been within a very strict system, with regular training/reminders about what can happen if it goes wrong.

    I don't think I can adequately express how appalled I am that the FAA let the 737 slip through. That a single point of failure design wasn't grounded immediately after the first nosedive. That it took the Chinese authorities to actually do something about it-even FEMA didn't do that. That bit felt, to me, like history will see it as a turning point for China as the dominant country in the world, and the USA falling away from that. I also can't believe that people weren't arrested immediately.

    Granted, I don't take much interest in aviation beyond what affects me, perhaps it was more obviously coming to those who do.

    As for starliner...the response to the clusterfuck that was OFT 1 shows they've learnt nothing. It'll be a very brave astronaut who rides that thing.

    396:

    Interesting comment. I THINK it has to do with trains. But very inside the ballpark comment.

    [grin]

    397:

    -8 in that video. So the cabin was 28 degrees hotter than the exterior.

    TeslaBjorn did some tests with the cabin a couple of degrees higher.

    0C 0.9 kW

    -8C 1.3 kW

    -11C 1.1 kW

    -24C 1.95 kW (included boiling a jug so he could throw boiling water in the air and see it freeze before it hit the ground)

    I couldn't find any colder tests, but you're still looking at days at -24C (it was -26 when he started but it rose to -24 during the test)

    I noticed that the consumption at -8 is higher than -11. He doesn't explain that, but it could be a different time of day. The -24 test was 3 am to 10 am. Still in the shadow of the mountain at 10am though it was "daylight"

    398:

    After the takeover of McD-D by Boeing, Boeing lost the plot completely -- largely because the board were taken over by McD-D directors who followed the McD-D Way, not the Boeing Way, and McD-D are primarily a defense contractor, not an airliner manufacturer.

    A friend who did flight control software left Boeing after a very senior manager said at a very open company function, "Boeing is not, and never will be, a software company." My friend was senior enough they did an exit interview. At that, he quoted the very senior manager and added, "and with that attitude, before long your products will start falling out of the sky."

    399:

    On the left side (the sane side of the left) the objection to GMOs is based on the precautionary principle; don't use it until you've properly tested it. Don't test it until you've laid out some proper standards, like "make sure the improvements are on recessive genes so the farmer next door doesn't get his crop spoiled" and "make sure your modifications haven't accidentally made the plant bad for people with a particular food allergy or done something awful to the nutritional characteristics."

    Genetic Engineering can do some really amazing stuff, but if we're going to use it someone has to do the necessary work, which should have started decades ago, to make sure it's intelligently regulated and doesn't produce "round-up ready" products or worse that are bad for everyone. The essential thing here isn't "frankenfood" that's philosophically horrible (and feeds billions,) but the idea that someone might add the genes for kudzu to poison ivy and make it vulnerable only to a patented weedkiller. (Paging Martin Shkreli.)

    400:

    I was mostly just grabbing Fox news and Steve Sailer arguments to give a decent idea of what the Right is actually arguing. If it's coherent or not is another matter, but it's my impression of what the Right thinks is actually happening with the Left's attempts to murder them. You kind of asked "am I in a leftist bubble" and I tried to respond with the basics.

    My position is the authoritarian Right is more dangerous than the authoritarian Left in current American politics and they are saying the quiet part loud a LOT more. There's really not much symmetry on which side is actually more dangerous, but a lot of the paranoia and rhetoric is pretty symmetrical.

    401:

    Charlie @354

    I've been following Boeing's travails and the 737 max fiasco quite closely, mainly through reading Aerospace & Space Technology, and from what I can see Boeing is in serious trouble. It's showing signs of British Leyland Syndrome where a lack of investment in new product is catching up with it. Boeing has just lost big orders to Airbus from KLM and Quantas, two very long time customers. It's been bodging the 737 for years instead of building a new plane, and like with British Leyland, the bodging keeps you going for a while, in this case for 10-15 years, but when the lack of new product catches up with you, by then it's too late, especially with the lead times to build new airliners.

    Boeing plans around maximizing the next quarter's profits. Airbus plans around keeping its pool of engineers with steady employment on new projects, so it can keep up its level of expertise.

    Quantas went with Airbus for the A220, and KLM went with Airbus because of the A321 line, neither of which Boeing can match.

    It used to be that Boeing and Airbus basically split the market 50/50, but now I expect Airbus to outsell Boeing 2/1.

    402:

    well, just saw this afternoon's announcement that in Ontario 30% of students need to be absent before Public Health will inform parents of a Covid outbreak.

    Looks like the Ontario Conservatives are embracing their inner Republicans.

    403:

    "Who ordered that?" - Deaths from Covid-19 among the unvaccinated result in a loss of the voting base of far right parties in both Europe and America leading to closes losses for the far right in future elections.

    405:

    "I thought I'd look it up because you seemed so sure that lamp posts are supplied by tiny threads of near invisible cable. It's not what we do here, and I thought maybe I'm wrong.

    http://shropshire.gov.uk/street-care-and-cleaning/streetlights/facts-figures-and-faqs/street-lighting-facts/#

    Lighting columns are normally supplied from the same underground electricity networks which feed your home

    No, I'm not wrong. Each lamp post has the same supply as a home, so probably 100A single phase fuse, tapped off a 3 phase main cable running ~1000A."

    Shropshire council's "street lights for muppets" web page is hardly the place to look for the electrical specifications of street lighting circuits. And the quote does not say what you say it says anyway. It says they're supplied by underground wires; it does not say that the specification for each connection to a lamp post is the same as that for a connection to a home. Pedantically, too, it should insert "sub-networks supplied from" after "from" to be properly accurate.

    http://www.durham.gov.uk/media/3075/Street-Lighting-Specification/pdf/StreetLightingSpecification.pdf is a more technical reference and reasonably typical. That has them on circuits initially fed via a 32A isolator and looped from pole to pole using 6mm2 BS6346 XLPE/SWA cable, buried in ducting, which has a current rating of 44A thus installed. It doesn't say how many lamps that may supply, but typically a circuit will cover a number of streets and have a few tens of lamps on it, or very roughly 0.1 x the number of houses.

    Taking the rating of the cable itself rather than that of the switchgear, that still only allows 7 of your trickly little 6A chargers that won't even give a proper charge overnight to a Nissan Leaf. Over the area covered by a circuit you therefore end up with nothing better than one or two people per street getting a crappy sniff at a charge, or one or two people in the circuit's entire coverage getting a decent one.

    This is nothing to do with "lamp posts [being] supplied by tiny threads of near invisible cable". It's for the very ordinary reason that no fucker is going to pay to bury the copper for getting on for a couple of orders of magnitude more capacity than the system they're building can ever possibly need.

    There simply is not some massive stash of distribution capacity hidden under the pavements and somehow forgotten about and just waiting for some clever bugger to remember that it is there after all. No matter how much capitalists wanting to rake it in without laying it out and tight-arsed privatisation-obsessed governments who have forgotten that keeping national infrastructure up to scratch is what government money is for would like there to be. It's thanks to them and their attitudes that the whole electricity supply system, not just bits of it for charging cars with, is in dire need of improvement and doesn't get it because all anyone cares about is how to not pay for it.

    (As for mobility scooter batteries, I really do not give a monkey's what price some joker on a joke site is claiming for something of the wrong bloody spec.)

    406:

    Around here forecasting has become accurate enough that when winter weather is predicted the DOT can be pretty sure SOMETHING nasty is going to come down even if they don't know if it's going to be snow, sleet or freezing rain. So they go ahead an apply a brine solution. We're in an area where we need some way to deal with ice & snow, but not often enough to justify maintaining a whole fleet of snow removal equipment.

    Yep, for many places you can rely reasonably well on the forecasts.

    And for typical front type systems that works well even here.

    But much/most of our snowfall is squalls aka lake effect - the joy of living among the Great Lakes. That can't be predicted most of the time as to where the winds will actually drop the moisture they grab off the lakes.

    407:

    Chiltern and their 68s too. But still sadly far too rare, and not at all over the Forth Bridge...

    Also (note to overseas) even double-heading on freight doesn't happen much any more.

    408:

    Thanks for the link.

    Previous discussions had indicated that electrical supplies in the UK are run unducted. Which would mean that you were limited somewhat in what could be supplied to each lamp post. As has been mentioned, noone is going to want to dig up the road just to meet international agreements.

    So the much more comprehensive link you supplied shows (section 23) that the posts are supplied from ducted cables. So it is trivially easy to pull additional or replacement cable and really any size outlet is electrically possible.

    So thanks.

    That nicely dispenses with your claim that the maximum available for car charging is 20W. Thanks for clearing that up so thoroughly.

    The link to a lithium pack wasn't to suggest that you should use that exact pack, though someone of your undoubted skills could do so easily. It was more to point out that having lithium based scooters rather than lead acid doesn't mean that they become unaffordable, contrary to your claim.

    409:

    Yeah... I'm not convinced that's that decisive. The Liverpool thing seems to be basically that they had ten years or so warning about it but they carried on and did it anyway because they didn't really give a fuck. They perfectly well could have built their stupid-looking new buildings down in the bottom of some disused excavation in the sandstone or something so nobody would have to look at them, but no, they just had to shove them right out there in front of everything and bollocks to the heritage bit.

    Looking at the list of WHSes in Britain it seems that the Forth Bridge is more or less unique in still being a full-on live active industrial site regularly and frequently used for its original purpose, as opposed to something that used to be one once but isn't any more. The other industrial-type listings are showpieces first and functional sites somewhere from second to not at all, while the Forth Bridge is the other way round. This creates an obvious conflict that doesn't apply or doesn't apply much to any of the others (it would be interesting to know what sort of influence this aspect had on the process when it was first made a WHS).

    One could also argue that its listing is more a matter of prestige than of meeting a need for protection; as long as it is still in use then it's effectively safe because it's so bloody huge that keeping it going as it is will always be vastly easier than any more complicated possibility. It's if it was closed and someone still had to be made to maintain it that things might get tricky, but I doubt there's much chance at all of that happening.

    The major obstacle to any extension of electrification is getting the government to pay for it, and I rather suspect that once enough head has built up to burst that dam, any lesser obstacles in the nature of demands to do something difficult and expensive to a little bit of a route for non-technical reasons will simply get swept away in the flood; if the engineering says it's possible to just carry on and whack the standard system straight through everything, then that's what they'll do.

    410:

    Interesting - thanks, Adrian. The paper being reported is from a very well respected group and not obviously crazy. It has a couple of methodological oddities, but impressive.

    411:

    "the posts are supplied from ducted cables. So it is trivially easy to pull additional or replacement cable and really any size outlet is electrically possible."

    Not really... pretty soon you hit limits. Before you get up to ten times the current capacity you find that the cable is bigger than the duct (the footpath-sized duct; and that's where most of them are anyway). You will also most likely get caught on the minimum bending radius at some point, which goes slightly faster than with the diameter.

    "That nicely dispenses with your claim that the maximum available for car charging is 20W."

    My claim that the maximum made available by changing from SOX to LED lamps is around 20W per lamp post - and therefore that to claim as per the original post that that change is what makes the idea possible is bollocks - stands. (Indeed is strengthened, since that Durham PDF also confirms that my estimate of what kind of power the lower end of the range of LED streetlamps use was about right.)

    "It was more to point out that having lithium based scooters rather than lead acid doesn't mean that they become unaffordable, contrary to your claim."

    It does if you compare like for like without changing the spec to suit your argument.

    412:

    Ok, my "anything" was hyperbole.

    But 3C+E 16mm^2 cable is only 20mm dia and 80mm minimum bend radius. I'm sure most tradies could squeeze that down a 50mm conduit. It will carry 32A 150m with less than 3% voltage drop. That's enough for sixteen 6A chargers. So each connection to the mains gets you over half a km coverage (150 up the road and 150 down the road and 130 up and down the other side of the road assuming 20m to cross the road). With sixty-four chargers, each supplying 1.4 kW. Enough to drive about 100 miles or 5 times the average UK daily diving distance after about 16 hours charging. Most cars sit for more than 16 hours a day and few drive more than 100 per day on average (36,000 miles per year). There will be (already are) fast chargers for those vehicles.

    Mains connections every 330m or so gives a small unserviced length of roadway, but that might line up with a space between poles. If you put the mains connection at an intersection of two roads, you can have 128 chargers per mains connection, and cover 130m up both sides of both roads in both directions for over 1 km of parking provided with charging.

    Much as you might hate it (for reasons I can't fathom) there's really no technical reason this couldn't be done.

    413:

    Adrian Smith
    Thanks.
    So, "ISRIB" is a licenced drug - I wonder how much it costs & how difficult is it to get some?

    A ride through the Forth Bridge - START @ 15.38, as you are leaving Dalmeny station ...

    414:

    411 - I can see why you'd think the FRB is unique in being a British WHS still used for its original purpose, but straight out the gate I went to check Jodrell Bank Observatory and found a second one.

    As to the political will for electrification. 30 years ago there were no electrified routes between Edinburgh and Glasgow; now there are certainly 2, and possibly 3 if Carstairs to Haymarket has been electrified so any issues with the Fife circle are clearly not Scottish political. (BTW the reason I'm not considering routes out of the Central Belt further than Perth and Dundee is that other than the ECML none of them carry more than about 1 train per hour and most more likely carry no more than 3 or 4 passenger services per day).

    414 - Try more like 9 points each way assuming your figures of 150m and 1 charge point per lamp post are correct, and applying the normal British spacing of 33m between lamp posts.

    415 - Cheers Greg; I did spot another factor that the coasters haven't considered; the FRB main spans are another 3 signal sections on the line.

    415:

    Greg: ISRIB is not a licensed drug: it's currently under development. Lots more testing required and it'll probably first get licensed for conditions like Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's, and Down's Syndrome (which apparently it can improve cognitive functioning in). Use for general age-related cognitive decline will probably come last, once the side-effects and constraints are well-understood.

    416:

    David Moore @ 403: Boeing plans around maximizing the next quarter's profits. Airbus plans around keeping its pool of engineers with steady employment on new projects, so it can keep up its level of expertise.

    I remember this coming up with Westland Helicopters. Some time in the 80s the management said "OK, we've taken our existing product lines as far as they can go. We need to think about building a new helicopter. Who have we got who knows how to do that?", and the answer was "Nobody". The entire engineering team were very experienced at tweaking their existing models, but nobody had ever even sketched a new design, let alone been involved in the process of getting from there to production.

    It sounds like Boeing has fallen into a similar trap.

    417:

    Yes, but that often misses that the thoroughness of testing needs to vary according to the risk. The main risk with putting a grass rust-resistance gene into wheat is that the retrovirus (which is what was used then) will escape - the actual risk from the gene is trivial. The risk from putting scorpion venom into cotton is huge.

    418:

    Your post made me grin. Not being a railway buff, the meaning of HST that sprang to mind was High Speed Train, which is extremely funny to anyone who has been on the Highland lines :-) Yes, I know now that it's a class of locomotive ....

    419:

    Charlie @ 417: ISRIB is not a licensed drug ... Use for general age-related cognitive decline will probably come last, once the side-effects and constraints are well-understood.

    Which could make life interesting if a black or grey market develops. There are a lot of middle-aged knowledge workers looking nervously around at all the impatient young turks coming up underneath them.

    Would the use of neurological performance enhancing drugs be considered "cheating" by HR?

    How much can you take before side effects become a problem? What happens when people start noticing that half their managers seem to have them? What if the Prime Minister / President shows them?

    What if the side effects turn out to be long term but serious, like after 20 years consumption you become psychotic?

    What happens when people start selling fake or adulterated versions? What might it be cut with? How could you check?

    What if you need this stuff to compete, but can't afford it?

    What happens if you give it to children?

    420:

    What if the side effects turn out to be long term but serious, like after 20 years consumption you become psychotic?

    To answer my own question: imagine an entire generation of psychotic ex-middle-managers. How would you know?

    421:

    Well, my first journey on an HST was on a service that routed Aberdeen - Edinburgh Waverley - York - Manchester - Birmingham - Bristol - Penzance...

    422:

    Not exactly the Highland lines :-)

    But, looking at Wikipedia, it DOES stand for High Speed Train, and it's not what I expected. It certainly used to pull the Caledonian sleeper, but I don't know about the new one. However, on the Highland lines as such, I have seen some sort of commuter-type train, and ones pulled by a much more old-fashioned locomotive; I don't remember having seen a HST. I can easily believe that the Highland lines tend to get whatever was superseded last on the main lines.

    423:

    On a completely unrelated issue, except that it's related to aging, my optical mouse has developed all of the symptoms of a dirty and worn ball and rollers - including unjamming when I slap it down hard on the mat. Even putting a tinfoil hat on, I have difficulty in believing that Logitech has programmed the simulation of that as the mouse ages.

    It's not the first optical mouse that has done that to me, either, but is the one that has done it most thoroughly. I can only imagine that there's some kind of mental degradation in the mouse driver (Linux).

    424:

    I've had this problem too (with Apple magic mice). It generally happens when dust or dirt gets on the optical sensor -- blowing on it or using a cotton bud to clean the optics works, and maybe also thoroughly cleaning the area of desk I use it on: skin oil and grime builds up over time.

    425:

    Thanks very much. I will do that.

    426:

    Also a sign the battery is getting weak. If you just turn it off for 10 seconds then back on and it works fine then that is most likely the cause. Most AA/AAA batteries recover some voltage if the current drain is removed for a few seconds. But not for long.

    I have a pile of $10 Logitech mice that I and others use. And yes I've seen this often.

    427:

    Well, the Highland Boundary Fault does pass into the North Sea at Stonehaven ;-) but I know what you mean. More seriously, when BR started using HST sets on Cross-Country, they realised that the big advantages the double Valentia had over loco hauled anything was acceleration out of restrictions and stations, and holding speed up hills.

    428:

    That happened to my wife's mouse, but mine is attached via USB ....

    429:

    paws
    Edin-Glas electrified: via Falkirk, via Airdrie, via Carstairs & via Shotts = 4.

    430:

    Try more like 9 points each way assuming your figures of 150m and 1 charge point per lamp post are correct, and applying the normal British spacing of 33m between lamp posts.

    Sure, but we were taking about electrical limits.

    If there are fewer outlets then the cable run can be longer. At 16A the cable can be 310m. That allows 8 outlets for each cable run. Put that on a corner of an intersection and you get 64 outlets.

    A 310 metre run would go halfway around a lot of city blocks. Take it all the way around and join it up again and you've got a British ring circuit that I don't know how to calculate a voltage drop on, but should surely go at least 620m and support at least 16 outlets?

    Having said that, did I say 1 outlet per pole was the limit? Why not 2? Then paint the parking bays so that 2 cars can nestle up to the pole.

    431:

    to some extent this is already happening with modafinil (as recommended by esr: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7183)

    432:

    I've just had a Kensington Orbit trackball fail pretty comprehensively to the extent I thought a website had installed malware...

    I ended up dismantling it and cleaning out several years of crud from the baseplate. Haven't retried it yet though!

    433:

    I would suspect maybe the wires in the USB cord may be fraying / breaking inside the cable. They are stranded and if broken somewhat or even all the way they will likely make contact "most of the time" and things work.

    434:

    Ah those nice Kensington trackballs. I like the big ones. And when they start acting up I have to remember to remove the ball and clean out the crud. Which mostly consists of micro fibers matted together with the body oils from my finger tips.

    And if the itty bitty ball bearings wear out you can order them once you figure out the size. From an industrial supply house. I have a bag of them.

    435:

    Could just be that your USB cable is broken and you're getting intermittent disconnects.

    In my experience almost all (wired) mouse problems come down to a broken USB cable these days.

    436:

    Oh, absolutely. "You made X amount of changes so you'll need Y amount of testing" is pretty basic. But figuring out how that would work in terms of legal requirements is part of that legal/philosophical process we haven't even started yet.

    If you want to comment on how badly broken modern capitalism is, "we haven't even started yet" is probably a good starting point - if there's anything more dangerous than nukes, it's the ability to edit genes.

    437:

    Thank both of you, but it seems less likely in this case. I could explain why, but it's boring.

    438:

    IIUC, the T-Cell immunity works to limit the severity of the case of COVID you get once the T-Cells have been primed. It doesn't immunize you.

    OTOH, it may well means that there's a durable residual defense, that keeps almost everyone from having a severe case of COVID after vaccination, or even after catching and recovering.

    HOWEVER: Will this prevent the disease from continually circulating, and picking up new mutations? Probably not. And will it prevent long covid? Uncertain. (That depends a lot on just how long covid happens. My hypotheis (I'm no expert in the field) is that it's caused by small circulating blood clots, so to the extent that it's kept away from the blood stream, it will prevent long covid. This is just my guess, though. But it implies that Omnicron should produce less long covid/case than Delta, Beta, or Alpha, because it likes to start in the bronchial tubes, giving the body time to ramp up its defenses before the assault reaches the blood stream.)

    439:

    "Rare Earths" aren't actually rare. What they are is very hard to refine. It's done in China because of cheap labor costs and few environmental restrictions. It was shut down in the US only because it was too expensive to do.

    That said, there's a significant time lag in getting a working mine/refinery setup going. There could be lots of politics-based shocks. But the long term problem isn't there anymore than it is with, say, Lithium. (I.e., it's there. All resources are limited. But it's not extreme...yet.)

    440:

    Ok. In the US, the only self-propelled railcars are, AFAIK, commuter trains, and not all of them don't use locos. Regular passenger trains all are pulled by locos.

    441:

    Greg: ISRIB is not a licensed drug: it's currently under development. Lots more testing required and it'll probably first get licensed for conditions like Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's, and Down's Syndrome (which apparently it can improve cognitive functioning in). Use for general age-related cognitive decline will probably come last, once the side-effects and constraints are well-understood.

    You can see more on ISRIB at https://www.alzdiscovery.org/uploads/cognitive_vitality_media/ISRIB.pdf

    There are a couple of orange flags for me. One is that it's "not very water soluble and requires significant preparation before treatment in mice." Another is that there are no human trials yet, although it's been on the radar since 2013. Considering how many billions have been pounded down the hole of Alzheimer's treatments, these don't look good.

    In general, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are thought to be similar diseases caused by accumulations of misfolded proteins: Tau in Alzheimer's, Alpha-synuclein in Parkinson's. Problem is, every treatment aimed at tau proteins has failed miserably in humans, and this may include Aduhelm in the sense that, although it got FDA approval, that approval process was heavily criticized and most insurers won't cover it, nor will many doctors use it. Parkinson's research appears to be further behind. While there are dozens of candidate drugs in PD, none have reached Stage II trials to my knowledge.

    There are a couple of possibilities for why Alzheimer's treatments haven't worked. The big one is the sour joke about having dozens of ways to treat mice with Alzheimers, but none for humans. The problem is that the mice were engineered to have Alzheimers, so detection of the disease behaviorally is not a problem. In humans, once it's detected, it may be too late for effective treatment.

    The other, more grim, possibility is that the tau plaques are a symptom, not a cause, and something else is causing the disease. If it's the protein targeted by ISRIB, that would be great, but don't hold your breath.

    Parkinsons might conceivably be treatable pre-symptomatically. The "nice" thing is that alpha-synuclein is expressed throughout the body, and there's even a theory that the misfolding starts in the gut and travels up the vagus nerve into the brain. One of the places A-S crops up is in the skin. Fortunately, a British woman noticed her husband's smell changed when he was diagnosed with PD, and subsequent testing demonstrated she could reliably distinguish PD patients from controls based on smell alone. Researchers identified what was making the smell, and trials of skin-based diagnostic tests for P-D are underway in humans. This is good news, because a constellation of Parkinson's issues show up before the classic disease manifests. If it's possible to find presymptomatic PD patients, then treatments that block the misfolded proteins might work to stop the progression of the disease before it gets to full PD.

    This all assumes that A-S misfolding is what causes Parkinson's. A lot of researchers seem to think so, but it's a very active field.

    442:

    Starliner - Boeing did bring in q/a testers. I know this for a fact, since one of my daughters who works for them as a programmer was brought onboard for the better part of a year.

    443:

    It most definitely will not prevent COVID from circulating, because of how easily people are reinfected; and it will mutate. We simply don't know about long COVID.

    444:

    Lake effect - if you say so, although the 11.5 years I lived in Chicago, the weather forecasts were fairly accurate.

    445:

    The train ride: thank you very much. Watched about half of it, skipping a few spots. Odd that the camera can't see the headlights. And... is that a third rail on the bridge?

    At any rate, parts of Scotland I'll probably never see otherwise.

    446:

    +1. Although for me, it hasn't been my direct managers, but upper management.

    447:

    Duffy @ 405:

    Re: 'Deaths from Covid-19 among the unvaccinated result in ...'

    But in the meanwhile you've got people (including young kids) from across the political spectrum with serious illnesses who can't access time-critical treatments because the hospitals are overfull with these idiots. Plus approx. 20-25% of medical staff at the point of collapse from overwork and emotional stress and who will probably need time to recover at some point.

    This is where I think the francophone (France & Quebec) leaders have it right. If that doesn't work well enough, then kick it up a notch to: if you show up within our realm with Covid/unvaxed and need ANY medical care/services, we'll triple bill you - and we'll also contact your personal/private medical insurer because why should they - and all their other clients - pay for your poor/selfish decisions! At some point medical insurers are going to decline coverage - because there's no sane reason for any gov't to continue to bail them out as long as there are highly effective and free vaccines.

    Robert Prior @ 404 -

    Re: 'Ontario 30% of students need to be absent before Public Health will inform parents of a Covid outbreak.'

    Yeah - just saw that in my GoogNews. Also saw some mention of students saying they're scared, fed up and might protest. That might work for older high school students but the younger, elementary school students - who's going to speak up for them? The current Ont Premier - and his late younger brother - are on record as being GOP fans. Wonder who from the GOP has been leaning on him - maybe dangling a large trade/biz deal.

    448:

    I get that - in fact, what seems to happen for me is that the LED goes dark, and I have to unplug and replug the USB cable. I thought it was an artifact of kubuntu....

    449:

    It's not limited to that. The a few weeks ago my comb disappeared while I was combing my hair, and about a week later it appeared on the floor where I'd been standing at the time. In between the floor had been cleaned a couple of times.

    I'm rather convinced that time line switches happen all the time, usually on a really minor level. And that they seem to be totally random (except that there's an observation bias).

    Yes, I know this isn't standard QM, but you wouldn't expect the kind of experiment they do to reveal this effect. And we KNOW that QM is "broken", though this isn't one of the places that we know it is broken. But how would you design an experiment to show this? I've only observed this on macroscopic objects, and it's an extremely rare event. (I think I've noticed it 3 times that I'm reasonably certain of, a couple of times I think of it as a plausible explanation, once I accept the initial 3, and perhaps a few dozen times where it could be a reasonable explanation, perhaps.) Now how often would a meson need to appear or go missing before it was noticed? Since the times I have noticed it, it's involved entire objects, not parts of them, does it require solid chunks to happen? Etc.

    Of course, these could be memory glitches, and that comb...well, I've got trouble coming up with a reasonable explanation. But it could be a time slip rather than a parallel world slip. Or I could have a LARGE memory glitch, and constructed the whole event. But once you start accepting memory glitches that large, the entire world starts seeming rather illusionary.

    450:

    It's not limited to that. The a few weeks ago my comb disappeared while I was combing my hair, and about a week later it appeared on the floor where I'd been standing at the time. In between the floor had been cleaned a couple of times.

    Glad I'm not the only one these happen too. A couple of months ago my wedding ring went missing. Since it's often in a shirt pocket, I checked every single one multiple times, to no avail. Went through the wash, nothing. My wife was unamused, and we started talking about me getting a new band.

    Then, a week later, as I was pulling shirts out of the laundry bin to take to the washer, Clang!, out fell my wedding ring from a shirt that I'd checked at least four times. Right in front of my wife.

    At this point, I just blame gremlins the Good People, so I start laughing, to show that I appreciate their joke. Stuff like this happens a few times a year. Maybe it's mesotemporal schismogenesis, maybe it's the Happy Folk. I take a version of Pascal's Wager and laugh along. Just in case.

    451:

    Ok, there's an obvious answer - I'll skip "did you check the laundry bin', what actually happened was, of course, that it slipped into the lost sock dimension, then worked its way out, being heavier than lint.

    452:

    That sounds so expensive that Hydrogen fuel would be a better choice, or possibly some synthetic organic made via bio-reactor.

    But your point that battery powered flight is unlikely beyond the short-haul range is probably valid. I'm not sure an evolved super-capacitor couldn't handle it, but they tend to be more for voltage than current...and it would take a LOT of evolution.

    453:

    Ok, there's an obvious answer - I'll skip "did you check the laundry bin', what actually happened was, of course, that it slipped into the lost sock dimension, then worked its way out, being heavier than lint.

    As I said, mesotemporal schismogenesis. Same difference.

    454:

    Sorry, that's one phrase I've not heard before.

    455:

    I don't know if Charlie has changed his opinion, but I've been in favor of permanent space habitats for a very long time. I acknowledge that there are lots of unsolved problems to be dealt with, but that doesn't mean it isn't what we need to be doing.

    OTOH, I'm skeptical that we can do it until sociology advances a lot, virtual reality advances a lot, and AI advances a lot. The last two are visibly in progress, and the first one is being worked on with a modicum of attention. There are lots of ancillary things that need to be done, and space medicine is one of them. Just as important is the development of a "nearly closed" ecology. So I consider 20 years to be exceptionally optimistic unless a super-human AI is developed (in which case who knows).

    FWIW, my idea of a space habitat is basically shaped by Zebrowski's MacroLife. It's NOT small. It's basically a life form, and it moves around and reproduces. And it's not inherently tied to a star. (I don't expect the FLT aspect to carry over into reality, but I also don't expect people who have grown up in one to want to leave.) Clearly they would need at least fission power, and ideally fusion. Ion rockets would probably be good enough, but they'd want to run a LONG time. 30 pounds/sec isn't much on something that weighs tons. And they want high exhaust velocity. Ideally they should also be able to use something found plentifully on free asteroids as fuel. Nitrogen might be a good choice, or water. (Well, Hydrogen or Oxygen.) It not something we've got even in development, but in 20 or 40 years...

    456:

    Re: '... caused by small circulating blood clots,''

    Yeah - when I first heard about the loss of smell/taste I immediately thought that COVID was somehow screwing up blood cells therefore causing blood clots leading to mini-strokes. [The ACE binding map that came out a couple of months after the pandemic started seems to show a good overlap between worst symptoms and highest density ACE locations. However, maybe I'm seeing what I want to see in order for it to make sense to me - just dunno.]

    There are a few heme disorders that show up out of the blue and whose symptomology is similar esp. the diffuse blood clots/thromboemboli, e.g., PNH. Big question is: so why did it start now?

    Thromboemboli may also help explain why diabetics and pregnant women are at higher risk of serious disease with Covid:

    https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-uncover-mechanism-deadly-blood-clots.html

    https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/disseminated-intravascular-coagulation

    457:

    n fact, what seems to happen for me is that the LED goes dark, and I have to unplug and replug the USB cable.

    To me that indicates a broken trace. Inside or outside of a chip. After things heat up it separates.

    458:

    Most weather in the US travels west to east. And if there's a very big lake with an west to east border then it seems to be able to create changes in the path and results of percipitation.

    If the body of water has a mostly north south border then it acts more as a speed bump.

    Based on my travels around the country.

    Here locally I'll dispute JBS's assertion that our weather reports are very reliable. While most weather reporting in the US is very good, the local reporting has more "oops" than most places I've lived. Unlike JBS I was a weather addict 9 months a year for 15 or so years as I had kids in public schools. And while they got it right most of the time at times we had clear and sunny when sleet and snow were predicted. And the other way around. Much of it seems to be caused by the natural geography from Atlanta to Petersburg VA. There's a slot through the mountains that continues all the way into Virginia. And the weather along this slot once out of the mountains can be hard to predict at time at the boundary. If you want to see this path follow I85 via your favorite mapping app. What is not very clear is this route was found nearly 200 years ago. It is where the railroads are and the various petroleum lines to move things from Texas and Louisiana to the east coast.

    I suspect it creates a border against the effects of the Atlantic Ocean and at the border things get hard to predict.

    459:

    For those who have been following the Havana Syndrome story, a couple of developments today:

    https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-with-joe-scarborough-mika-brzezinksi-and-willie-geist-of-morning-joe-on-msnbc/

    SECRETARY BLINKEN: We’ve got the Intelligence Community, we got the Defense Department, we got the State Department, our scientists all trying to get to the bottom of this. To date, we don’t know exactly what’s happened and we don’t know exactly who is responsible.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/us/politics/havana-syndrome-evaluation-tool.html

    Dr. Pablo A. Celnik, the director of the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Johns Hopkins Medicine, said the program he oversees has treated a few dozen patients who were referred to the hospital after being screened by the triage tool. So far, he said, only a few ended up having diagnosable illnesses.

    “Most of the time, we don’t find anything very clear-cut that can explain all of the symptoms,” Dr. Celnik said.

    Seems as if clarity has yet to be achieved.

    460:

    I hadn't heard of it either, but, thanks to Heteromyletes, will insert it into my vocabulary and use it as often as possible.

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

    461:

    "my comb disappeared"

    Around here it's spoons. They go and come quite mysteriously. Sometimes we have many, sometimes few. I've suspected that we're careless when taking out the trash, but then the missing spoons reappear.

    462:

    "Heteromyletes"

    Sorry, Heteromeles. I was thinking of someone else.

    463:

    Sorry, that's one phrase I've not heard before.

    You mean I actually invented something? I'm shocked.

    Graeber and crew had fun throwing around the Wikipedia version of schismogenesis in their Dawn of Everything. In anthropological circles, it's the notion that groups of people at times emphasize the things that make them different from other groups. Gargling bleach and watching Faux news versus getting vaxxed, taxed, and Woke, for example, or Athens and Sparta. While I think there's something to it, Dawn of Everything kind of abused the idea a little, IMHO.

    I just misappropriated it with silliness aforethought to describe the idea of timelines bifurcating on a time scale noticeable by humans, humans usually being seen as in the middle (meso) of possible scales for whatever reason.

    Free free to repurpose as desired. I assume tripping on a cat who isn't actually there might be a result of mesospatial schismogenesis?

    464:

    Duffy @ 405: "Who ordered that?" - Deaths from Covid-19 among the unvaccinated result in a loss of the voting base of far right parties in both Europe and America leading to closes losses for the far right in future elections.

    I've looked into that and I don't think enough of them are going to auto-Darwinate themselves to significantly affect electoral outcomes ... especially not in areas where right-wingnut Gerrymandering effectively disenfranchises likely left-leaning voters.

    465:

    442 - We tried it with the HST set using an arrangement of 1 power car, a rake of trailer coaches, and ending with another power car. This worked well enough that the arrangement (though not the power cars any more) is ubiquitous for long distance passenger services.

    447 - The camera is inside the driving cab, and literally above the headlights.
    The 3rd rail is a 3rd rail yes, but it's a device known as a check rail to control lateral movement of a train, not a power conductor.

    465 Para the last - Or maybe the cat can walk through walls for the express reason of tripping you and then vanishing?

    466:

    Are you saying in the mouse, in the case, or on the m/b?

    467:

    "Heteromyletes" Sorry, Heteromeles. I was thinking of someone else.

    Not a problem. Matter of fact, since heteromeles translates to "other apple" (it's a shrub native to California that I'm rather fond of), I looked up myletes. Turns out it's a discarded genus name for African minnows or Tambaqui, aka the giant Pacu, sometimes called the "vegetarian piranha." "The other vegetarian piranha" fits me too. Thanks!

    468:

    Tripping on a cat - nahhhh, that's careful planning, just to prove who's in charge.

    Like when my Orange was occupying 2/3rds of the top step the other night, without a hall light. (Luckily, I have good night vision.)

    469:

    In the mouse. After all unless you buy a gaming mouse the parts cost inside of one is likely $1 or $2. Maybe $15 for a high performance gaming mouse.

    Which is why I have a $100 trackball for my desk bound MacMini and a $10 Logitech M325 for various other things. When they actually die I move on to another in the "spare mouse box".

    470:

    3rd rail - I think you misunderstood. I'm familiar with check rails on curves and bridges, but this appeared to be three rails on the right (directly under the camers), and two on the left (which is what I expected). I was wondering if the third one on the right was a power rail.

    Of course, if this was O gauge, it would be in the middle....

    471:

    I thought all cats had as a daily objective to quickly run between moving human legs to create a funny human response for their web site photo collection.

    472:

    Elderly Cynic @ 425: On a completely unrelated issue, except that it's related to aging, my optical mouse has developed all of the symptoms of a dirty and worn ball and rollers - including unjamming when I slap it down hard on the mat. Even putting a tinfoil hat on, I have difficulty in believing that Logitech has programmed the simulation of that as the mouse ages.

    It's not the first optical mouse that has done that to me, either, but is the one that has done it most thoroughly. I can only imagine that there's some kind of mental degradation in the mouse driver (Linux).

    Some other possibilities:
         Dirt accumulating on the mouse pad
         Failing LED
         Cruft building up inside on the switches
         Some crud accumulated in the mouse blocking the LED?

    I haven't yet found an effective way to clean a mouse pad.

    473:

    The 3rd rail is a 3rd rail yes, but it's a device known as a check rail to control lateral movement of a train, not a power conductor.

    Interesting. The term "3rd rail" in the US has a common usage of "that which shall not be touched". Like someone running for national office in the US talking about Social Security benefit cuts would be referred to as the touching the "3rd rail".

    474:

    I haven't yet found an effective way to clean a mouse pad.

    Don't use clothey based things as pads. Just get one that's a patterned flat thing that sticks to whatever surface you're using. Over time the foam in the common ones can start to have sags and waves which affects tracking enough for some of us to notice.

    Another problem can be a surface that can not reflect the laser uniformly. Which can be madding if it is due to small bits of dirt and similar.

    Then again, the laser ones work well on most any pants I've had on when the need arose and I used my thigh.

    475:

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

    Here's what I was seeing (if this link works): https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XLvSWDgYCu8/hqdefault.jpg

    Notice on the left, there are two, and directly under you, there are three.

    476:

    I am now also confused, since that is neither a power rail nor obviously a check rail, oh and I make actually 5 rails, not 2 or 3.

    477:

    "The other vegetarian piranha"

    Send us a picture!

    478:

    Paul @ 418 It sounds like Boeing has fallen into a similar trap.

    Oh, it's way worst than that. Aside from the normal tendency of American firms to cull its engineering staff in a downturn (Life for an American engineer can be rough. You get laid off in a downturn, and forget about being re-hired after you hit 55. Management hates wily, old engineers. They know how to work around management and get things done despite the best attempts of management to "manage" them.) Boeing decided in the early 2000s that outsourcing everything was the way to go.

    Instead of issuing engineering drawings to their suppliers, they had them design the parts and fired all their engineers who knew how to do that, so Boeing now has little knowledge in how to design a civilian airliner. Their hollowed out engineering is why they can't build a functioning space capsule, why their refueling aircraft can't refuel, and why the next iteration of the 787 keeps striking problems and has to be delayed.

    They have a massive amount of rebuilding to do, but I doubt they will manage it as their shareholders and private equity funds will insist of profits now. The US government won't let Boeing die. It will feed them various "development" contracts to keep them going, but there is a limit to what the US government can do as it got all pissy with the Europeans for supporting Airbus and insisted on treaties limiting subsidies to develop airliners--hoisted on their own petard.

    479:

    Agreed. I have a Logitech trackball (at least, I have a trackball in which the ball and pickup department is from a Logitech one) of the red-speckled-ball optical variety, which does similar things. Pointer shows a distinct disinclination to move diagonally (if you move it in a circle it actually moves in a square), goes much faster left/up than right/down, and increasingly often randomly flies off north-west until it hits the edge of the screen. Taking out the ball and blowing on the sensor to remove dust etc sorts it out.

    At least, it mostly does. Recently it started becoming less and less effective. Eventually I discovered that the bit of circuit board with the sensor on it had somehow sagged relative to the support for the ball, and was a couple of mm further away from the ball than it ought to be. So I bent it up a couple of mm and suddenly found the trackball working better than it had for years. Seems the sagging had been a long slow process and I hadn't noticed the gradual deterioration.

    I don't know if Logitech optical mice are similarly sensitive to the distance between sensor and surface or if they can wobble internally or accumulate crud so as to alter it, but I guess the possibility may exist.

    480:

    Is that like a vegetarian teenager?

    481:

    Not any kind of rail, it just looks like it because of the low definition. There are the normal 2 running rails per track, and the other longitudinal things are girders. It's a bit clearer in this: http://3dprintingindustry.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Screenshot-from-2017-01-03-132629.png

    The way the running rails are mounted is not like the usual transverse-ties method used on ordinary track, it's something strange. This is what it looks like when they take them out: http://i.pinimg.com/originals/f9/56/3a/f9563a2ce6a2e4bb0b12c847bc88569e.jpg

    482:

    Jumping in with a nitpick, but I'm pretty sure Aducanumab (and most of the other Alzheimer's drugs that have flamed out in the clinic) target amyloid beta peptides, not tau. I'm not sure how many treatments have targeted tau.

    483:

    I found a thermostatic LED once. Looked like a perfectly normal component but only worked when it was cold, and switched off abruptly once its temperature got high enough to separate some microscopic internal crack. Wouldn't work at all if the room was warm to begin with.

    484:

    The US government won't let Boeing die.

    Without Boeing exports our terrible balance of trade will just now will look good compared to the result of them not getting back on track. No mater what Trumpists try and do with "Buy American".

    485:

    Okay, I see. Thanks.

    486:

    FWIW, I've never used any sort of mousemat with any type of mouse. Never felt the lack either. Seems like a nonsense product.

    487:

    David L @ 460:

    Here locally I'll dispute JBS's assertion that our weather reports are very reliable.

    I stand by my assertion that local weather reports in the Triangle area are sufficiently accurate that when the National Weather Service at RDU predicts nasty weather, you can be pretty damn sure we're going to get some kind of nasty weather ... or close enough for government work like deciding whether to put brine on the highways.

    20 inches of snow in Raleigh: A look back at the big snow of January 2000

    488:

    They don't make modern mice work any better but they protect the surface of my desk.

    489:

    Oh, aye, that one. Had that happen with the keys to my gaff once. Spent a week being nervous whenever I went out because I couldn't lock the door, then one evening I went for a leak and when I got back there were the keys right bang in the middle of the floor where I couldn't miss them.

    There appears to be some kind of filled-shell magic-number stability effect going on. As long as a socket set contains all its sockets it is quite stable; but the tunnelling barrier is rather lower for the 13mm socket than for the other sizes, and that one will still occasionally decide it is somewhere else. Once that happens the incomplete set becomes considerably less stable, and if you don't find the 13mm promptly and put it back then other sockets will rapidly start disappearing too.

    Some similar favoured-wavelength effect seems to be observable in the gap between two parallel conducting planes, which significantly lowers the tunnelling barrier such that events become both more likely and become likely for a broader range of object sizes. One such gap, for instance, is that between the ground as one conducting plane and the underside of a car as the other. Any tool that you put down by your side while lying on your back spannering things is very likely to no longer be where you put it when you come to use it again; it will have relocated itself by a distance roughly twice the size of the gap, and now be positioned too far away for you to actually reach it. And in this case it isn't just sockets, it's anything from small electrical-sized screwdrivers up to big things like large spanners and assemblies of all the extensions and bars in the socket set joined together to reach some obscure bolt.

    The main difficulty in investigation is the macro version of the effect of observation: not only do things like this not happen when you are observing them, they also don't happen when you are merely expecting them. So you can't set up any kind of experimental test and expect it to show anything. Such phenomena only occur under any kind of experimental conditions when the experiment is about something else entirely, and unexpectedly blows up.

    490:

    I thought it was only the biomechanical type that chewed things up.

    491:

    483 - Great thanks. It makes way better sense now. I'd never seen the bridge in that sort of detail after construction topped out before.

    491 Para 2 - I presume this only applies to 1/2" drive sets? The largest socket in my 1/4" drive set is a 12mm.

    492:

    i dunno, have u seen this tweet about the iss?
    https://twitter.com/sim_kern/status/1411304471934685184
    sounds like ur gonna need to spin it for gravity for anything remotely long term, which means a bolo configuration for the foreseeable, a ring would be thousands of tons or more, and it's gonna have to be heavy enough to provide quite a bit of radiation shielding outside leo
    i'm not convinced the world economy has 20 years in its current state either, it depends where energy prices go

    493:

    Kardashev @ 462: I hadn't heard of it either, but, thanks to Heteromyletes, will insert it into my vocabulary and use it as often as possible.

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

    Just a SWAG, but I didn't find anything for "mesotemporal", but Google search thinks it might be mesial temporal schismogenesis

    The "mesial temporal" appears to reference the middle of the temporal lobe, which if I understand my brain geometry is responsible for long term memory.

    Schismogenesis means "making of divisions"

    I would construe "mesial temporal schismogenesisas" as making divisions within the part of the brain responsible for long term memory. Which I guess is a pretty good description of what current medical science knows about Alzheimer's disease.

    494:

    David L @ 475:

    The 3rd rail is a 3rd rail yes, but it's a device known as a check rail to control lateral movement of a train, not a power conductor.

    Interesting. The term "3rd rail" in the US has a common usage of "that which shall not be touched". Like someone running for national office in the US talking about Social Security benefit cuts would be referred to as the touching the "3rd rail".

    The NYC subway system uses a "third rail" to power their trains. It's 600VDC and thousands of Amps. It will kill you if you touch it, so you should never touch the third rail.

    It likely entered the political lexicon from Tammany Hall.

    495:

    Us UK types are well aware of 3rd rail electrification through the London Underground and possibly the Southern Railway (grouping era company who had 3rd rail electification and EMUs in the 1930s).

    496:

    Should have said their immediate reaction. I seem to remember for a bit after Starliner landed, they were insisting that everything was fine, and the crew demo would go ahead. This was after they'd found the further software errors while it was in orbit.

    497:

    I found the hard way that the little plastic feet will wear varnish or wood polish over time.

    498:

    My Dad worked at Eastleigh in the 80's servicing the southern EMUs. Apparently, the party trick of the track gangs was to jump on to the third rail and walk along it, tightrope style. Perfectly safe as long as you jump on and off, and never touch both ends of the circuit at once :O

    499:

    David L @ 476:

    I haven't yet found an effective way to clean a mouse pad.

    Don't use clothey based things as pads. Just get one that's a patterned flat thing that sticks to whatever surface you're using. Over time the foam in the common ones can start to have sags and waves which affects tracking enough for some of us to notice.

    The hard plastic surface ones don't come with the gel wrist wrest. And I haven't found a good way to combine a separate wrist rest with a hard pad so that they will stay together.

    I'm not doing super-precise CAD work, and for Photoshop I have a Waccom tablet. I wish I could afford (money & desktop real estate) the 32" Waccom Cintiq Pro (4K)

    Another problem can be a surface that can not reflect the laser uniformly. Which can be madding if it is due to small bits of dirt and similar.

    Then again, the laser ones work well on most any pants I've had on when the need arose and I used my thigh.

    Actually the best surface I've found for an optical mouse is just a plain sheet of printer paper. When it gets too grubby, put it in the recycle bin and get a new sheet of paper. But I still have the problem with the wrist rest (and one or both sliding off the desk)

    500:

    About Boeing: from the inside (I asked permission):

    Boeing finds it cheaper to buy subsidiaries than license their software/hardware, and while I have worked with overseas teams, many of them are Boeing employees.. There have been short-sighted steps, but not of that nature at my level. What I heard most of was that a large percentage of our brain trust was within 10 years of retirement... in 2004 when I was hired, so that seems to be a larger portion of it. Plus, the very innovative often leave to create start ups... when they prove successful, Boeing buys the software/hardware. Some stay on, some move to work on the new thing... until it gets bought.

    501:

    The question should also be whether such predictions are linked to the cause of death in a death certificate. I suspect that COVID deaths are underreported, particularly in the GQP demographic. I'd guess you'd find a lot of COVID cases being reported as "stroke" or "pneumonia."

    502:

    paws4thot @ 478: I am now also confused, since that is neither a power rail nor obviously a check rail, oh and I make actually 5 rails, not 2 or 3.

    The center "pair" consists of 3 rails on each side of the center line... allowing trains with three different track guages to pass? The outer "pair" seems to have two rails on each side. So? Two more different track guages?

    I guess you could run a power (3rd) rail down the center or in the gap between the center & outer "pairs".

    503:

    paws4thot @ 493: 491 Para 2 - I presume this only applies to 1/2" drive sets? The largest socket in my 1/4" drive set is a 12mm.

    I have a 1" drive set. I don't think it has a 13mm socket either.

    504:

    A similar law of quantum absence applies to drill bit sets. Unless I patiently and thoroughly replace each bit in the case, every single time I switch bits, the law of drill bits states that I will be making a trip to the hardware store for yet another #8 Robertson within the week.

    I have received funny looks when working on a piece with multiple bits required as I painstakingly replace each bit in its assigned slot before switching to another. Such pains only serve to delay the law of lost drill bits, but it does help.

    Working in a place where an unattended tool will almost certainly go walkabout within minutes has helped to focus my attention wonderfully.

    505:

    paws4thot @ 497: Us UK types are well aware of 3rd rail electrification through the London Underground and possibly the Southern Railway (grouping era company who had 3rd rail electification and EMUs in the 1930s).

    Ok. So, how do YOU think the phrase took on the meaning it has in U.S. politics?

    506:

    Looking at other photos makes it a bit clearer. The running rails each sit in channels formed by two girders. I assume that this is done in part to catch anything the derails. This photo makes it clearer: https://www.nms.ac.uk/media/1154129/forth-bridge-maintenance.jpg?width=700&height=464.84375

    This shows it being replaced: http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/0\_my\_p\_edwk\_d/0\_my\_photographs\_edinburgh\_at\_work\_-\_forth\_bridge\_ti10\_edw047.htm

    507:

    H & Charles H
    Happens to my socks ....
    [ Ah yes - whitroth The lost sock dimension ]

    whitroth
    2 "normal" check rails + an extra one - on the inside, I think. to stop train derailing into the oncoming track.
    The FRB is unique & part of the landscape ...
    SEE ALSO # 483

    phil
    Yeah, right, 750V DC - maybe not ...

    508:

    Lake effect - if you say so, although the 11.5 years I lived in Chicago, the weather forecasts were fairly accurate.

    That's because you lived on the upwind side of the lake.

    As noted by someone else, generally the wind moves west to east, so Chicago on the west side of the lake gets lucky.

    The classic example of unlucky is Buffalo, located at the wrong end of Lake Erie, and who gets dumped on with lake effect snow often spectacularly - because it isn't a front/system moving through if the wind blows in the correct direction for 2 days you get 2 days of snow in Buffalo courtesy of Lake Erie.

    This is also why, despite it being south of Toronto, the Niagara region frequently gets more snow than Toronto - Lake Erie.

    Get north of Toronto and they get snowed on thanks to Lake Huron, east of Toronto (Kingston) gets it from Lake Ontario.

    And frequently the squalls don't act like a weather system and blanket the entire area, they come and go and move about at random as the prevailing winds gust around.

    Then there is the overall effect of the lakes themselves - Environment Canada's forecasts often include uncertainty with the systems that move up from Texas because they can't be sure what the system will do when it hits the lakes - sometimes the lakes will keep it south of us, sometimes they cross the lakes and hit us.

    All of which means snow forecasts aren't accurate over a winter for us.

    509:

    This is where I think the francophone (France & Quebec) leaders have it right. If that doesn't work well enough, then kick it up a notch to: if you show up within our realm with Covid/unvaxed and need ANY medical care/services, we'll triple bill you

    Not saying I disagree, but I think there is a danger that Covid is an entry point to health care being priced based on risk. Smoke - pay more, Overweight - pay more, diabetic - pay more, rock climbing - pay more, etc.

    The current Ont Premier - and his late younger brother - are on record as being GOP fans. Wonder who from the GOP has been leaning on him - maybe dangling a large trade/biz deal.

    Nothing to do with the GOP, everything to do with the right wing base in Canada.

    Ford has an election coming June 2nd.

    That's why the plan was to have all restrictions lifted about now until Omicron showed up - so he could have 5 months of normality before election day.

    Same thing with O'Toole at the federal level - he is desperately fighting to keep his job following last year's election loss so he to is now dancing to the anti-vaccine anti-Covid factions.

    510:

    "The other vegetarian piranha" Send us a picture!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambaqui#/media/File:Pacu_shedd.jpg

    It captures my general demeanor when reading this blog rather well, I think.

    511:

    Some similar favoured-wavelength effect seems to be observable in the gap between two parallel conducting planes, which significantly lowers the tunnelling barrier such that events become both more likely and become likely for a broader range of object sizes.

    An alternative explanation for some of these effects is that one or more (or all) parts of your mind state are sometimes swapping state with close-your mind states in nearby reality fork tines. :-) [1] This might even be a more parsimonious "explanation". It might imply that the correlations between brains and minds are not entirely brain-to-mind-causal. This effect is(may be :-) superficially functionally similar to the cognitive illusions described in a recent Mandela Effect paper[2]; particular error propensities appear to be conserved across a large subset of HSS grey meat mind substrates. But is(may be :-) different.

    [1] ("Where are you" (Sunforest, 1969, lyrics :-) )
    [2] The Visual Mandela Effect as evidence for shared and specific false memories across people (Deepasri Prasad, Wilma Bainbridge, psyarxiv, last edited December 17, 2021) Four psychology experiments. (Worth a look.)

    512:

    A similar law of quantum absence applies to drill bit sets.

    I thought I'd solve the issue with 1/8" drill bits by buying them in packages or 5 or 10 at a time. The entire package would take part in the quantum absence effect.

    I have though of buying (or even as a project creating a package for sale of a variety of 1/2" and 10mm sockets. Multiples of each to deal with the disappearance. But figured the entire packages would vanish for years at a time.

    Two related stories.

    My key ring with my keys and client door keys on it vanished. Just flat out vanished. I had it at home one day then it was gone the next. So the magic portal was somewhere in my house. So I had to call a few clients, tell them I needed new keys but no, they didn't need to re-key. About 5 years later I noticed something odd at the bottom of a tool box used to hold rarely used tools. It was the missing key ring. My 4 year old (at the time) son apparently decided to help dad clean up and dropped them in before I put other things on top and closed it up.

    And my father spent nearly 2 decades blaming his missing tools on his 3 sons. At some point when I was around 30 years old he told me he had to apologize for something. He had been missing a pair of vice grips for nearly a year. He said he was changing the oil in one of the cars and saw a pair of vice grips clamped to a bolt on the dash. Well about 9 month earlier he had been working under the dash and needed said bolt held in place. So the vice grips. That was a few years after all the sons had grown and gone.

    513:

    "I didn't find anything for 'mesotemporal'"

    I took it to be middle/between-time. Like Zwischenzeit.

    https://en.langenscheidt.com/german-english/zwischenzeit

    514:

    Boeing

    Boeing is about to pull an IBM. IBM mostly exists due to inertia of the use of their legacy products. Even the profitable bits are in many ways based on things tied to the legacy bits. And they THINK they are working hard to untangle it but tradition dies hard in almost all situations.

    The problem is there is no other player in the US economy to pick up the slack. There is no alternative plane maker like Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Red Hat, etc... are in the tech world.

    And Boeing has dominated our exports for decades. If plane buyers start shifting business to Airbus for the long term, the US economy takes a hit similar to 2007/2008. Except the Fed/Congress can't paper over it like they did then.

    515:

    Mice and pads.

    90% of the mouse pads I see or more of a hindrance than a help. The flat sheet ones are great if you're looking to protect a surface, your surface doesn't allow roller mice to work well, or if a laser mouse, the surface doesn't reflect well. My wife's glass top desk being the extreme example of such. But some surfaces surprise me with their non reliable reflections.

    JBS's piece of paper can work. But some of us would rip it up in a few minutes. Here's the pads I was referring to earlier.

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CCQDZVU?aaxitk=bba02b8c18919dcafa67759eae046ce4&pd_rd_w=ZSpf9&pf_rd_p=81374be5-e348-4c15-938f-a311a861c514&pf_rd_r=6SK7680F3DVPPXYF1C19&pd_rd_r=ab608e3e-59f2-4ae8-9adf-e6895971171d&pd_rd_wg=2Q9F4&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&ref=dacx_dp_577026428590929234_581055418029633713

    516:

    See #465 for a sort-of explanation.

    517:

    Squeezing OHLE into tight, wet spaces? Here's a primer on how to do it, with some interesting history.

    518:

    On the quantum tunnelling behaviour of certain macro objects:

    The Glitch in the Matrix subreddit exists for the discussion of this phenomenon.

    See also Veet Voojagig's theory on this.

    519:

    I think he means the Mesial Temporal Lobe, AKA the Medial Temporal Lobe. Its the bit of the brain that integrates sensory perceptions and interfaces to memory, both read and write.

    Temporal lobe epilepsy can include weird perceptions and memories of this sort.

    520:

    The physics checks out, how many people were actually daft enough to try it is another question. OHL maintenance on tramways was done live, on a wooden tower. I have personally been up one and touched the 550V DC wire, not the slightest tickle. This is no longer done where I volunteer, though it never caused any issues. Similarly, it is possible for an OHL vehicle to get "grounded" on rusty rail, where the return through the rails doesn't. Solution is to jump (not climb) off and get a bucket of water to chuck at the wheels.

    521:

    Phill
    Crich Museum?

    522:

    Ahem: Boeing is about to pull an IBM. IBM mostly exists due to inertia of the use of their legacy products. ... The problem is there is no other player in the US economy to pick up the slack. There is no alternative plane maker like Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Red Hat, etc....

    IBM isn't useless: they're still strong on seven-nines uptime applications that need mainframes -- when your business costs you $100 a second if it stops working, $6000/minute, then you want to pay for the kind of kit where you can pull out a bank of RAM and replace it without even powering the machine down and it won't lose any data or even slow down.

    As for Red Hat? They've been an IBM subsidiary for years now.

    Boeing, in contrast, is substitutable: almost every civil Boeing aircraft has a direct Airbus competitor.

    They really need to break Boeing up -- spin out the defense and space business, and take the civil aviation side back to its roots before it's too late. But a bunch of what they need to do is anathema to the current management culture.

    U-turn on outsourcing and union-busting, focus on building back expertise at the Seattle headquarters, draw a line under any model more than 30 years old and start designing a clean-sheet replacement to enter service no more than 40 years after its predecessor first flew, aim for cockpit and training commonality across all models -- like Airbus. It's not like Airbus are infallible (the stumbles over the A380 almost killed them -- first the CAD/wiring disaster, then the basic problem that they backed the wrong strategy and built a competitor for the 747 in a market that could only afford, at most, 1.5 jumbos). But Boeing have worked really hard to steal defeat from the jaws of victory for 20 years, and it's paying off.

    523:

    Boeing, in contrast, is substitutable: almost every civil Boeing aircraft has a direct Airbus competitor.

    Well, David did comment that there is no other US player to pick up the slack. Airbus is not very US, I think.

    However, I'm not sure how many big plane manufacturers there can be in the world. They need quite specialized skills and a lot of capital, so I'd think 2-3 is the maximum you can have, otherwise some will be too small to live and be bought out.

    Of course our world situation might mean (and I think should mean) less passenger planes overall, so there's less market and maybe less need to build new planes, if they are not used as much. (Looking at the planes flying empty to keep assigned timeslots, I think we could use less flying...)

    524:

    I note that Airbus builds A320s in China, with a completely Chinese production line, because otherwise the Chinese Communist Party wouldn't allow their airlines to buy Airbus. And both Boeing and Airbus carefully outsourced so that just over 50% of the A380 and B787 components were manufactured outside the EU and USA respectively, to avert a WTO trade war from escalating.

    There's less market for new airliners right now, but as COVID goes (I hope!) travel will resume, and there are markets we don't think of: for example, India and China have huge domestic air travel markets, and Africa is rapidly getting wealthier and is almost as large as Russia -- it suggests there's headroom in the market for a lot of people who don't currently fly.

    Finally, flying planes empty to keep air traffic slots open is atrocious, but a regulatory issue that could be solved if sufficient political will existed. Also, passenger planes can carry air freight: I don't know if those flights were truly empty, or simply not carrying passengers (but had full cargo holds, because why not sell off the available capacity to defray the operating expenses)?

    525:

    Dave Moore @ 480: The US government won't let Boeing die. It will feed them various "development" contracts to keep them going [but limited by WTO law and the EU/Airbus].

    Sounds like its heading down the British Leyland route.

    British Leyland was the nationalised car company in the UK in the 1970s. Before it was broken up and privatised in the 1980s by Mrs Thatcher it became a byword for industrial strife, waste, and shoddy quality. Nobody bought a BL car if they could afford something better, and the introduction of Japanese models from Nissan and Toyota was a revelation. All the "Buy British" campaigns in the world couldn't counter the effect of being able to buy a car that didn't shake, rattle and rust from day one.

    The car unions had a lot of political power: strikes at BL factories were major news, with shots of several thousand men (just men) flat caps and donkey jackets standing in a car park while being addressed by a man with a loud-hailer, followed by a show of hands for Yes and No. And then a three-way interview between the relevant government minister, the car company boss and the trades union leader. The end result was always the same: more government subsidies for BL.

    (Side note: BL did its best on new products; the Mini Metro was a genuinely decent car (it was made by robots rather than people), and very popular. But when you opened the hood you found the same A-series engine that had originally been developed in the 1940s and first sold in 1951. )

    The trouble was that everyone in BL from top management down to the shop floor workers knew that BL's core competency was not making cars, it was extracting subsidies from the government.

    I can see Boeing going the same way, and indeed the examples you give suggest it is already well on that path.

    526:

    Lake effect - if you say so, although the 11.5 years I lived in Chicago, the weather forecasts were fairly accurate.

    Chicago sits on the western shore of a lake, and weather generally moved west-to-east, so the lake effect is minimal.

    Southern Ontario is sandwiched between three of the Great Lakes, so no matter which way the weather is moving it's crossed at least one. Much bigger effect.

    527:

    But in the meanwhile you've got people (including young kids) from across the political spectrum with serious illnesses who can't access time-critical treatments because the hospitals are overfull with these idiots.

    Like this:

    A 30-year-old Ontario woman diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer has had her surgery postponed indefinitely and says it could be too late to save her if the procedure keeps getting pushed back.

    Woodbridge, Ont. woman Cassandra Di Maria was diagnosed with cancer in 2020 and has undergone 17 rounds of chemotherapy since then.

    "Now, I'm waiting on my next big surgery," Di Maria told CTV News Toronto on Thursday. "I have no idea when this surgery will happen and I'm at a standstill."

    In an e-mail viewed by CTV News Toronto, a representative from Mount Sinai Hospital told Di Maria her surgery was cancelled because of "the situation with COVID-19" and that "everything is getting cancelled at this point."

    https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-woman-with-stage-4-colon-cancer-has-life-saving-surgery-postponed-indefinitely-1.5739117

    528:

    The current Ont Premier - and his late younger brother - are on record as being GOP fans. Wonder who from the GOP has been leaning on him - maybe dangling a large trade/biz deal.

    Just his own caucus. Rural Ontario is pretty right-wing. MAGA hats are a fashion statement/tribal marking in some parts of Ontario.

    529:

    Africa's actually twice as big as Russia by area.

    This whole discussion about the necessity for air travel has a whole Edwardian end-of-an-era feel to it. Most of us flying aristocrats can't get our heads around the idea that the world is changing, that what we grew up thinking of as normal is disappearing on a daily basis, and that one of the things that's going away is frivolous air travel.

    Simply put, if we're going to be at all serious about limiting CO2 emissions, recreational air travel is largely going away. You blow most of a tonne of carbon round-tripping across any major ocean, and that's not something very many people can do for fun and keep CO2 out of the air.

    If we don't get serious about limiting CO2 emissions, recreational air travel is largely going away, because too many critical airports are next to the ocean, and ice shelf melt in West Antarctica is going to do that pretty well too, along with storms.

    So what is this great big future market for airplanes you speak of? I'd guess that various thoughtful people are seeing the writing on the wall and the surplus planes in the boneyards. Once we hit a tipping point on air travel (and we may have already hit it), passenger and cargo jets are going to be more like B-52s, legacy aircraft that are kept flying through refurbishment, no new ones built, with the fleet dwindling along with demand.

    Now I get that you don't get it. Most of the environmentalists I work with don't get it. They're perfectly willing to take long-range vacations, under the excuse that they do good work the rest of the time forcing other people to decrease their emissions, so they've earned it. Rather hypocritical, perhaps? But it demonstrates the basic writer's maxim, that everyone's a hero in their own heads, so the rules that limit bad guys really shouldn't apply to them. Unfortunately, we can't deal with our collective problems if everybody grants themselves the hero's exemption. We can only deal with them if we do the unsatisfying work of actually dealing with them, and dealing with them, and dealing with them.

    And yes, I'm going to be mourning the rest of my life for all the trips I didn't take when I had the chance, that I'm now unwilling to take because we can't get our fucking acts together on climate change. Or even on Covid19, for that matter. It sucks, but since I believe our species actually has a future, then it follows that I need to do my pathetic, whiny little part keep the world livable for our successors. And I'm fighting my culture here, because that is not what we were brought up to do. Oh well.

    530:

    Re the 737Max problem, I think it's worse even than all of that. It's not just that Boeing don't know how to build planes any more, the 737Max situation shows that they've even forgotten what a plane is. Put simply, any large amount of moving metal is an opportunity to kill people, and anything affecting its control is a safety related system. That applies to planes, cars, trains, and anything else.

    As someone who was a safety-related software engineer (been out of that particular niche for 10 years), we have ways of dealing with that. Automotive people like FMEAs and MISRA, aeronautics like FTAs and DO178B, but the bottom line is an assumption that everything will go to shit at some point, whether that's due to human error or mechanical failure. You then look at what you can reasonably do to either reduce the odds of failure to an acceptable point, or improve the odds of stopping any single small failure from causing a complete system failure. What differentiates safety-related engineers from someone cutting code for, say, the next iteration of Flappy Bird, is not whether we're better coders but whether we're better at following a process to catch our inevitable screw-ups at every stage of the process.

    With the 737Max fiasco, not only was it caused by a single-point failure on that system, but the impact of that system on the control of the aircraft clearly hadn't ever been assessed. Put simply, Boeing had effectively forgotten that they were making planes, and only applied processes suitable for making a Flappy Bird game.

    For any engineer with any background in safety-related engineering, this is simply a "Never Happens". It's not even a human error "Never Happens" like leaving a scalpel inside a patient when you stitch them back up. It's a "Never Happens" on the scale of a doctor who thinks that cow shit poultices, bleeding and cupping, and the Principle of Humors, are state of the medical art. You don't just have to be incompetent, you literally have to be ignorant of everything that goes on in your field. That really takes some doing - but Boeing apparently managed it.

    Judging by the financials, it's hard to see Boeing getting back from this. Enough airlines got burned with grounded planes that nothing less than a root-and-branch clear-out is going to impress them. And it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

    531:

    there is a limit to what the US government can do as it got all pissy with the Europeans for supporting Airbus and insisted on treaties limiting subsidies to develop airliners

    And what are treaties? Nothing but words on paper. The US has been ignoring trade treaties for decades. Maybe Europe has enough clout to get them enforced, maybe not.

    And if they need a fig leaf, they just need to give generous military contracts for Boeing, which can then move some of that money over to the civilian arm to keep it afloat.

    532:

    I've never used any sort of mousemat with any type of mouse. Never felt the lack either. Seems like a nonsense product.

    I've got one I use for my Apple Magic Mouse (optical). I need something because my white laminate Ikea desk doesn't have enough surface detail for the mouse to track, and the mouse pad stays put while a sheet of paper tends to slide along the desk.

    533:

    I hold no brief for any recent Ukrainian government - they all seem incompetent & arrogant, but... THIS is worrying - It looks as though Putin believes that, in the short term, he can get away with it - probably.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    In other disgusting news - lets kill a few million bees, how useful.
    Fucking idiots

    534:

    A ton of aviation fuel is about what you burn per 3-4 passengers aboard a 747 or A380 flying to the antipodes. It's WAY more than a return trans-Atlantic flight or a hop across the USA.

    I'd also like to note that I barely drive (a considerably less efficient use of fuel per passenger-mile traveled). I'm going to take my mileage by flying, and I'm probably still coming out below average on carbon emissions.

    Really. Flying gets a lot of really stupid bad press for carbon emissions because airliners are visible -- we can look up and see contrails. But if you drive 12,000 miles a year in a sedan, never mind an SUV, your emissions are about equal to a frequent flyer with multiple long-haul flights per year. Never mind spending a single week on a cruise liner tooling around the Caribbean.

    535:

    Re the 737Max problem

    They added a flight control system that could attempt to override pilot control. And put a switch in to the control systems to turn it off if needed.

    The purposely decided to not document the system OR THE SWITCH in the simulator training or the flight docs the pilots used to train and deal with emergencies while in the air.

    More than one person needs to go to jail.

    Says he who benefited from his wife working for a major US airline for 30 years.

    536:

    Well, David did comment that there is no other US player to pick up the slack. Airbus is not very US, I think.

    Yes. But more to the issue is my point about the US balance of trade. Our economy goes totally into the tank (Brexit squared or cubed) if Boeing sales to other countries goes downhill.

    But to IBM. You're not keeping up.

    IBM has been trying to buy companies like Red Hat to pull their butt from the fire while spinning off or selling off their now or soon to be shrinking products. I'm fairly certain that Kyndryl now sells and supports the mainframes.

    A friend who recently left for one of those other tech companies I mentioned said it was nice to be working somewhere where there wasn't a constant worry about shrinking revenue and profits. He was one step below a VP.

    And they've been having trouble hiring top talent for a decade or few. You're coming out of a top school with top grades and Apple, or MS, or whoever says shows how their grads of the last 10 to 20 years have put 5% of their salary into stock or options and are now millionaires while those at IBM have maybe beaten inflation. (And the jobs many get assigned to work on a in too many cases cleaning up a mess from 10 or 15 years earlier.)

    This is not 4th hand. I see people weekly who work for, worked for, work for companies who used their mainframes, or got to a great retirement making products for IBM mainframes. One person I know is an IBM fellow. None of them are high on the company.

    As to Red Hat. Maybe, just maybe IBM corporate will let the Red Hat culture infect them. But it was a very bad sign when the head of Red Hat left after a couple of years and the scuttlebutt was that he was locked out of advancement due to his blood not being blue enough.

    One small example. If you want to buy cloud services from MS or Amazon it can be a bewildering mess but there is ONE division selling to you and trying to make it a coherent whole. At IBM they talk about their CLOUD (singular) service but in reality there are 4 different groups selling products that really don't interact with each other.

    537:

    While I understand H's view on aviation, I also tend to agree with what I think is Charlies position.

    If things are going to crash so hard we can't keep flying then to some degree it doesn't mater. The world's economy (not just around the edges) will go totally in the tank and the only question will be if we wind up lopping off one or two zeros to the total world population.

    There are lots of ways to cut back on petroleum use and keep things going. But if you remove petroleum from aviation the world dies.

    And if you remove aviation the world also dies. Just differently.

    And locally the fight is over not letting a 10 story apparent be built near the city center as the majority wants to pretend the suburbs are forever. And besides it will kill off a bunch of trees. Of course not addressing the number of trees wiped out when 200 new single family homes are built instead of the apartment building.

    538:

    Where have you been for the last 6 months? We have had such stories touted at us every week or so, and none so farhave been based on facts. In particular, the very idea that Russia WANTS to invade Ukraine is dubious, to put it mildly, and the claim that it is waiting for a suitable opportunity is just plain bullshit - if it had wanted to, the time would have been 8 years ago, when Ukraine was in complete chaos and Russia would have been justified in claiming that it was helping to restore the deomcratically elected government (which was overthrown in an externally orchestrated, violent coup). Since then, the USA/NATO has been arming Ukraine.

    I don't know what the USA/NATO or Russia intend to do, except that the former wants to at least blockade the latter, and I know for certain that any poster on this blog who claims to is either delusional or a flat-out liar.

    539:

    But to IBM. You're not keeping up.

    Sorry Mike. That should have been pointed to Charlie.

    540:

    Per the figures I looked at, if I wanted to fly round-trip to the UK or Korea, it's more-or-less one ton of fuel per person for the trip. That's what the carbon offset sites are using for their calculations.

    I do agree that we live in different systems, since I'm stuck driving an IC when my wife has the EV, and that mileage can add up. Unfortunately, if you want to cut the carbon emissions of middle and upper class people, cutting non-essential air trips, especially long hauls, is the single easiest way to do it. And as I noted, air travel will be cut for us, in the form of flooded runways, if we don't preemptively downsize it ourselves. To me it looks like commercial air travel as a sector is near its maximum extent, and absent electric planes, it's going to shrink severely on the scale of decades.

    The truly interesting point about all this is how simply blind people are to the issue.

    541:

    Maybe, just maybe IBM corporate will let the Red Hat culture infect them

    Although the recent decisions over CentOS seem to show that's not happening (yet at least).

    542:

    Per the figures I looked at, if I wanted to fly round-trip to the UK or Korea, it's more-or-less one ton of fuel per person for the trip.

    You're in California, so about 5,500 miles from the UK or Korea -- a return flight is indeed equivalent to my hypothetical antipodeal trip. But it's also about double a typical trans-Atlantic flight, quadruple a flight from Scotland to Israel or the Gulf Emirates, about five trans-US flights (from LAX to JFK).

    I think you're letting your local conditions influence your view of how much fuel aviation consumes. Like me deciding that there's no point owning an EV because most of the places I'd want to visit are outside its return range without a top-up charge (Edinburgh is a long way from any major city except Glasgow, at least by UK standards).

    543:

    Ah, but what's the norm for air travel? For the US west coast, a lot of the travel goes to and from Asia, and that adds up quite fast.

    544:

    https://www.carbonindependent.org/22.html

    This shows 32.2 grams per passenger km on a 747-400 with 80% occupancy. So around 50 grams per mile?

    545:

    Which is somewhat over a tonne, London to Auckland and back. Also, I have heard that exhaust products are significantly more damaging when vented at 30,000' than at sea level; while I have never seen hard data, it's very plausible. I have no idea why anyone would believe that, if air transport dies, the world dies - it's obvious nonsense - this attitude (which is common) conflicts with Heteromeles's claim that flying is the easy option.

    I take OGH's point that tackling our car addiction (and, indeed, our JIT road transport one) is significantly more important, and despair at the way our governments (in the USA and UK) are making essentially no attempt to tackle it. At best, converting the whole fleet to EV and generating all electricity by renewables will reduce road CO2 by a very small factor (probably less than two). And it will make all of the other problems worse, except air pollution in cities (where it will help, but only somewhat).

    546:

    Before the trolls step in, 7 years ago. Sorry.

    547:

    David L
    IBM has been trying to buy companies like Red Hat to pull their butt from the fire while spinning off or selling off their now or soon to be shrinking products. I'm fairly certain that Kyndryl now sells and supports the mainframes.
    Long ago, I used to work for a very big company/corporation that tried to do just that .. It crashed & burned quite spectacularly ( My v. small pension from them - now comes via the "Pension Protection Fund" ) - - Kodak.

    EC
    I agree that there are numerous, clearly fake, or much worse partly-fake/partly true rumours regarding Ru/Ukraine.
    But, Putin has a proven record of military "intervention". I repeat ( I REPEAT ) I don't trust anything from any of the Ukrainian factions. - But I'm still worried.
    OK?

    Air travel
    What's REALLY insane is any flight of under 1000 miles, if there is a civilised surface alternative ( HINT: HS-Rail )
    What's the UK misguvmint doing? ... You got it - NOT investing in electric rail infrastructure & cutting air duty internally. Fucking nutters.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    P.S.
    Having found out that Eastercon is in London .. I've just registered

    548:

    Don't forget the heat island effect either. You can see it much more readily out here in Winnipeg, where storms coming up from the south west will "bounce" off the hotter air of the city. Or to be even more dramatic, will split and flow around the city. Makes for some interesting skies, but frustrating when we need the rain.

    I imagine Toronto has an even greater impact, due to size, but harder to see.

    549:

    Recreational air travel is the easy issue to clamp down on, just in terms of not killing anyone who has to vacation closer to home. That's all. For everybody who just saw red, that's actually the point, about distinguishing between privilege and need.

    As for getting people out of cars, due to a century of bad urban planning, that kind of means abandoning or rebuilding about a century's worth of US urban development, and the carbon bill for that is horrendous too. EV power generation is a real problem, but there's at least the possibility that we can get much of that electricity from renewable sources.

    Long term? To my mind, this is what constitutes "managed retreat from really bad ideas." It's a bunch of people making unpopular decisions that make life significantly less shiny in an "eat your vegetables" kind of way. The alternative is a big, shiny long-rolling catastrophe, where the initial stages are as addictive as any opioid. And like an opioid, once you're hooked, the joy goes out of catastrophes, and you're stuck dealing with consequences significantly less fun than learning to eat the same vegetables your ancestors developed. But by then it's hard to cure the addiction to the big shiny catastrophe that's lost it's shine and only gotten more catastrophic.

    550:

    If you think that it is easy, I suggest you think again; it's nearly as much an addiction. Furthermore, in the USA, I posit that it would simply replace air travel by long distance driving - which, as OGH says, is even more of a CO2 emitter.

    In the UK, we have a LONG history of governments evading a hard problem by tackling a small, easy issue first - and then not tackling the hard one. And, guess what? They have a perfect record for being nothing but a waste of money, a pain in the neck for the public, and often harmful to the objective.

    551:

    I find it amazing that Putin is said to have a record of military invasion, when every case has been a neighbouring, 'neutral' country in which the CIA was operating. Compare that to the USA/NATO/UK, which turned functional (if nasty) countries into bloody anarchy in at least Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, with HOW many hundreds of thousands of civilians dead?, plus all of its other interventions. Look it up. For another side to this, look at:

    https://www.rt.com/russia/546021-moscow-presence-cuba-venezuela/

    Now consider that by comparison with Georgia and Ukraine.

    What I am afraid of is that the USA/CIA/NATO will incite Ukraine into attacking to reclaim Donbass, the Crimea etc. and complete the pogrom it started in 2013 and, when Russia responds, claim that it is attacked. If the USA/NATO/UK does NOT join in, that will be bad; but, if it DOES, we are facing WW III. No, Russia will NOT allow the USA to establish a base in Sebastopol.

    552:

    IBM: the mainframe really isn't going away any time soon. Hint: about 20 years ago, using IBM's VM (which has been around since the seventies, so can you say "mature"?), someone maxed out a mainframe with 48,000 virtual machine instances of Linux, and the mainframe was perfectly happy with 32,000 instances. Quick - cost of mainframe, vs how many servers?

    RedHat... sigh what they did to CentOS left all of us seriously po'd. I'm only on kubuntu now because of that.

    And the CEO of RH leaving? Let's see, a) he was formerly CEO of Delta airlines, and b) he was the one who was happy with Poettering and systemd.

    553:

    Jumps up and down screaming TRAINS!!!

    BNSF has an ad they frequently run, that 1gal of fuel moves a ton of freight (or passengers) 457 mi.

    For months after 9/11, in the US the pilots union was saying it made no sense to fly, rather than take the train, on trips under 300-400 mi.

    I want to see the rails subsidized the way the airlines are.

    554:

    What's REALLY insane is any flight of under 1000 miles, if there is a civilised surface alternative ( HINT: HS-Rail )

    Surface rail is geography-dependent. For example, if you (Greg) want to nip across to Paris, it's trivial -- about 1.5-2 hours by train. But if I want to nip across to Paris, it's about 1.5 hours by plane and not less than six hours on trains, plus connections. Also, there's no way to do a shortest-distance route from Edinburgh to Paris: there's the North Sea in the way, and all lines go via London.

    The picture is even worse if I want to go to, say, Denmark. From London you can get the train and it's fairly linear. From Edinburgh? Let's just say, getting there by rail would be quite an adventure.

    555:

    Um, that depends. According to the following sources:

    https://www.carbonindependent.org/22.html and https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle, the difference between being a single person in a 22 mpg car (404 g carbon/mile) and sitting on a 737 (~184 g carbon/mile) is substantial. That part you are right on.

    But that doesn't apply to EVs. The mileage for a Tesla 3 is at least 113 mpge, so that's 78 g carbon/mile, scaling from the 22 mpg car figure above. So yes, switching to a more efficient electric fleet appears to be a good step in the right direction, even if the electricity is generated from fossil fuels.

    The other thing is that if there are more than two people in the car, the mileage doesn't change much, but the carbon emissions per person are better than flying on a 737. It's nearly true for two people, in fact. Therefore, I'd suggest that the lesson may be as simple as carpooling as much as possible, and Zooming even more often.

    556:

    Looks like the Grand Old Duke of York is not having his best day, nor is his Mum.

    This is fascinating research for me, looking into how the ultra-rich deal with the problem of combining a family with conglomerate of corporate and non-profit interests.

    557:

    To be impertinent, I'd point out that this is the voice of addiction again. This argument can be characterized as "I might want to be in Paris in two hours, so therefore the world needs another generation of gas-burning passenger planes."

    My argument is equally based on addiction. I'd argue that I want my nieces and nephews to live to be as old as I am, to have enough food and clean water, and to not be forced to migrate due to climate. Yes, I'm addicted to a world that has billions of people in it. But is that as bad an addiction as the notion that convenient travel is a right, not a privilege?

    558:

    "At best, converting the whole fleet to EV and generating all electricity by renewables will reduce road CO2 by a very small factor (probably less than two)."

    ...but it will hide it away so most people don't realise it's happening at all. So there are fewer people making a fuss about it, which is just as good as actually achieving something from the politicians' point of view.

    "And it will make all of the other problems worse, except air pollution in cities (where it will help, but only somewhat)."

    Which reminds me of another area of counterproductive bollocks...

    Here we have a certain road which is the natural and direct route into the city centre from a considerable amount of the area to the north and east of it, and has existed as such since times when the bit inside the city walls was all there was and nobody dreamed that such things as canal wharves and gasworks could even exist, let alone be located along it.

    Somehow or other regulations about air pollution in cities have clobbered this road. It meets some obscure combination of regulatory conditions under which the results of measurements taken on it always count as "drastically illegal" and it stands out like a sore thumb as the illegalest place in the city, when really it's quite average and a very long way from being as full of cars as plenty of the other roads about.

    To try and deal with this the council demolished a load of stuff to be able to widen what used to be a titchy lane that left one end of it at right angles, stuck in a roundabout where the ex-lane meets another unexceptional and formerly fairly quiet road, and stuck in another roundabout where that second road meets a third road which is already a major route and ends up at a junction where one of the other legs is the other end of the illegal road. They could then close the illegal road to everything except buses/taxis and divert all the normal traffic round the new route.

    All those junctions are more or less at right angles and the stretches of road in between them about the same length, so the result is that the traffic now goes round three sides of a square instead of just one. If all else was equal we would straight away have three times the emissions for all the traffic between those two points than we had before.

    But all else isn't equal. The junction where the illegal road meets the third road is buggered by the alteration in the pattern of the traffic arriving at it. It creates tailbacks which go as far back as the roundabout where the second road meets the third road. That then jams the roundabout up so traffic on all the routes entering the roundabout also stops. Their "anti-pollution" measure sends the traffic whose pollution was so unacceptable over a three times longer route, which is itself more congested than the original was, and which also creates more congestion on other routes and increases the pollution from that traffic as well.

    And after all that the illegal road still keeps getting in the local paper as being the most illegal place in the city.

    559:

    What arguments about aviation (which is 12% of transportation CO2, and down to 2% of overall CO2) miss is that it is an interconnected dependency in the overall global economy.

    As most industry has either automated or offshored jobs from the western world many of those places/workers that lose have turned to tourism.

    You kill of flying, you kill of tourism - because while people will still take holidays locally, to a point, they won't use all those tourist things that cater to those looking for an experience.

    So now you are causing unemployment, and social unrest, and creating more problems.

    Which means politicians won't do it.

    And as noted, in many cases - particularly in large countries like the US but also clumps like the EU - a significant part of that percentage will simply shift to road.

    And if you now need to regularly drive those very long distances that you now fly, there is no way you are going to move to an EV - which in the US is probably going to be a tough sell anyway.

    (good luck telling people they can't return to family for Thanksgiving/Christmas/etc).

    560:

    Although the recent decisions over CentOS seem to show that's not happening (yet at least).

    CentOS was entirely self-inflicted, there was no IBM influence in that decision.

    Red Hat is now both big enough and has been around long enough that it is creating the same cultural issues that doomed SGI, Sun, and potentially even IBM.

    561:

    No, Russia will NOT allow the USA to establish a base in Sebastopol.

    The US military is struggling to maintain what it currently has, why would it want to make matters worse with a base on a landlocked sea that has no strategic importance?

    562:

    “ Recreational air travel is the easy issue to clamp down on, just in terms of not killing anyone who has to vacation closer to home. That's all. For everybody who just saw red, that's actually the point, about distinguishing between privilege and need”

    I think it is not that easy. NZ has seen that.

    The debates about what is a privilege and what is a need regards air travel to our fair isles has been very, very fierce the last two years.

    A lot of people have missed the chance to see dying parents, or their funerals, or their siblings weddings (to people the have not been able to meet).

    I’ve a friend who could not get to NZ for months. His wife and child were here, child was 1 year old, he had a job lined up here and has the right to work here but was in Australia and is an Australian citizen. A simple rule about ‘NZ residents’ did not fit his case. Idoubt you mean anything that extreme.

    Another friend whose parents live in NZ, but he and his wife live in Sydney. He has twins. The grandparents would like to meet the twins. And to see them often.

    A sea change whereby businesses are more comfortable with remote meetings instead of forcing people to fill the frequent flyers club is fantastic - I really hope it lasts. Less mass remote tourism by air is necessary.

    But a lesson we’ve learned is that a govt bureaucracy trying to divide “worthy” from “unworthy” travel is going to have a very hard time if it. And after that it’s a slippery slope. (I’ve a young friend home from Cambridge for Xmas, it’s her second year there - is that a ‘need’? Wouid you ration trips to see Mum to one a year, one every two years?)

    563:

    And if they need a fig leaf, they just need to give generous military contracts for Boeing, which can then move some of that money over to the civilian arm to keep it afloat.

    Cynically I might suggest the NASA contract for a crew capsule might be an example...

    564:

    It is hell when you realize someone you're close to (sibling, friend, etc) has a really nasty side to them that you never noticed, because they kept it well hidden from you.

    I met a guy when I was in high school. Was friends with him, off and on as we moved places, for about 20 years.

    Then the cops busted him because his 14-year-old step-daughter accused him of raping her. Said cops found a shitload of CP on his computer, and he was convicted of various sex crimes. He spent some time in the slammer.

    When the news broke, I kept thinking "this can't be true, this isn't what a friend of mine would do," but I kept having to tell myself: this guy was never my friend. He just had a good mask, and it finally fell away.

    How much worse it must have been for his immediate family to see their son / brother / husband as a predator. At some point you have to make the decision to go low-contact or no-contact with harmful and toxic people. Either that or side with the predator - which the Queen, to her credit, is not doing.

    At any rate, if they find Andrew, or others in Epstein's network guilty, then throw the book at them. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

    565:

    "a single person in a 22 mpg car (404 g carbon/mile)"

    Is that a case of "US strikes again"? Because over here it's quite difficult to buy such a car. Of course you can do it, but if you want such exceptionally bad fuel consumption you mostly have to pay an exceptionally large amount of money. You end up with something that goes much faster than conditions will ever allow or something that is actually a lorry made to look like a car or in some other way out of the ordinary.

    These days you can reasonably expect to get something in the region of 10 miles per litre out of an ordinary car of the type used simply for getting from A to B. Density of diesel is around 0.85kg/l so taking it as saturated C12 that's 0.72kg/l of carbon, so 72g/mile of carbon or 265g/mile of CO2.

    If your figures are for petrol and US gallons then the density is about 0.78kg/l and the volume conversion is 3.785l/gal. So 5.68 miles per litre at about 0.66kg/l of carbon (assuming saturated C8), or 115g/mile for carbon, 420g/mile for CO2.

    Given that petrol density varies quite a lot depending exactly what's in it, and usually is not entirely saturated C8, it looks like your figures are correct for CO2 emissions per mile, not for carbon itself.

    I think this is worth pointing out because it is very common for people to quote masses for "carbon" emissions when they actually mean CO2, or the other way round, so the figure they quote is out by 12/44 or 44/12 from what they say it's the figure for. That's a pretty significant difference, and it means that pretty much every time I see anyone quoting "carbon" or "CO2

    566:

    Looking at the planes flying empty to keep assigned timeslots, I think we could use less flying..

    That's the airlines playing politics.

    If you read beyond the headlines you discover that the EU did suspend those rules in 2020 with the mass cancellation of flights due to Covid.

    As flying again increases, the EU is gradually restoring the rule - a rule that prevents anti-competitive behavior.

    It appears the airlines - more likely a small subset of them - are attempting a media push to try and get the rule simply eliminated so they can take advantage of things and reduce competition going forward.

    567:

    (Fucksake missed a ket off.)

    ...That's a pretty significant difference, and it means that pretty much every time I see anyone quoting "carbon" or "CO2" emissions figures, it's not possible to consider them meaningful without digging back to find out how much actual fuel is being burnt and then calculating forward as above.

    568:

    They really need to break Boeing up -- spin out the defense and space business, and take the civil aviation side back to its roots before it's too late.

    Except the jet-era Boeing's roots are the military - the civilian side only exists as spin-off of the military side.

    Until their military contracts and aircraft allowed Boeing to create the 707 Boeing was essentially absent from the civilian market with Lockheed and Douglas dominating it.

    569:

    I agree that it sucks, but this is a specific example of a more general problem: decarbonizing.

    We don't have a choice about going to 100% renewable energy. We can either do it semi-voluntarily, or the survivors will come to it because there's no other choice (firewood, basically). What we're arguing about is the path, and whether it's desirable to try to maximize the number of human survivors of the transition, or not.

    Airline travel is therefore on the chopping block. Unless we get renewably powered airplanes, plane travel is going away, possibly within our lifetimes. Obviously this sucks. Specifically, it sucks because we've spent 60-odd years living with convenient travel, to the point where it's seen as a right by people who tell horror stories about what happens when they don't get it.

    Here are mine: I wasn't with my father when he died. Or my grandmother, nor my aunt. Missed a wedding too. Grad school poverty sucks. How does this stack up against wide-scale, involuntary, climate-driven decarbonization? With mass casualties and permanent loss of infrastructure? Um. Yeah. Totally different scale, with more than enough tragedies to go around.

    Perhaps we need to work on getting families to live closer together as much as possible? Or perhaps we need to develop mechanisms to help people cope with losing far-away relatives and other ordinary miseries associated with the generally unsatisfactory nature of life on Earth.

    570:

    David L @ 516: Boeing

    Boeing is about to pull an IBM. IBM mostly exists due to inertia of the use of their legacy products. Even the profitable bits are in many ways based on things tied to the legacy bits. And they THINK they are working hard to untangle it but tradition dies hard in almost all situations.

    I blame the cookie monster. They never should have hired the cookie monster.

    571:

    A sea change whereby businesses are more comfortable with remote meetings instead of forcing people to fill the frequent flyers club is fantastic - I really hope it lasts. Less mass remote tourism by air is necessary.

    One of the few things Covid has taught us is that remote is rarely the superior choice.

    Remote teaching has been a disaster, creating a generation of kids who may not recover.

    Remote conferences don't work - the inability to interact fully with presenters or have the hallway networking opportunities means graduate students/postdocs have lost out on opportunities and we will never know how many papers/discoveries will either get delayed or never happen due to those random interactions.

    I see no reason to expect remote meetings to have performed better than the rest.

    572:

    Perhaps we need to work on getting families to live closer together as much as possible? Or perhaps we need to develop mechanisms to help people cope with losing far-away relatives and other ordinary miseries associated with the generally unsatisfactory nature of life on Earth.

    Prior to air travel people regularly accepted never seeing family again.

    Simply because the imagery is easiest, look at all those immigrants arriving on ocean liners who arrived at Ellis Island. They didn't return home to see family die, to attend funerals, or weddings - etc.

    If they were lucky a letter might arrive weeks after the event informing them of the goings on, or unlucky - say entire family back home wiped out - never hear about it at all.

    The point though is that we don't live in that era anymore, and people's expectations have changed.

    And any politician who tries to take away that expectation will be, like with so many of the changes that we need to do, be turfed from office on the next voting day by some other politician/political party who will take advantage of the situation and damn the planet.

    Like so many times discussed on the site, the issue comes down to whether the public at large are willing to make the significant sacrifices necessary - and as so often is the case it appears the answer is no.

    573:

    I am seriously dubious about those figures, because I don't believe that the losses, consequential damage (e.g. to roads), and (above all) manufacturing and disposal costs have been factored in correctly. Nor do I believe that the comparisons are like-for-like (e.g. same passenger and luggage capacity). From what (little) I know about gas-powered generators and transmission losses, achieving a better than 5:1 efficiency improvement over a petrol engine sounds implausible, to put it mildly.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency#Gasoline_(petrol)_engines

    574:

    Er, do you SERIOUSLY imagine there is a sanity clause to Cold War II? There most definitely wasn't during Cold War I.

    576:

    Elderly Cynic @ 540: I don't know what the USA/NATO or Russia intend to do, except that the former wants to at least blockade the latter, and I know for certain that any poster on this blog who claims to is either delusional or a flat-out liar.

    I strongly disagree. It's NOT the people who are concerned about Putin's designs on Ukraine who are delusional liars. Just the opposite.

    577:

    You wrote:Perhaps we need to work on getting families to live closer together as much as possible? Or perhaps we need to develop mechanisms to help people cope with losing far-away relatives and other ordinary miseries associated with the generally unsatisfactory nature of life on Earth.

    Oh, how silly. I mean, this is America, and Capitalism, and if you can't find a job here, then you should relocate, never mind where you want to live, or who you want to be near, just go and don't bother us. Oh, and we just moved the job you were working at to the other side of the country, in the middle of nowhere, feel free to relocate (on your dime).

    And if I sound angry, one of the five times I relocated halfway across the US was for love, and the rest jobs.

    578:

    Like so many times discussed on the site, the issue comes down to whether the public at large are willing to make the significant sacrifices necessary - and as so often is the case it appears the answer is no.

    I'd rephrase that. The sacrifices will be made. The question is whether they will be made voluntarily or not, and whether they'll be made in a (semi) controlled fashion, or not. And before you answer, consider how old the culture of privilege is and which populations express it most strongly.

    As for virtual teaching, I agree about young students, although as someone who was homeschooled for a couple of years, I think the idea of permanent damage is a question of damage to whom. Guess I'm damaged goods or something. Oh well.

    Personally, I've seen generally positive responses to Zoom meetings. It's a real pleasure to not have to be on the road for two hours (or two days) for a minimally necessary meeting. Especially when the primary reason for the meeting is that the old buddies who are arranging things want to drink beer and brag about their latest exploits in an exotic location. The rest of us are there because we have to be, but who cares about us?

    For me, it's nice to make my own rubber chicken instead of paying for it. It's nice to see twice as many people participating because they didn't before that have the time or funds (or the physical ability) to drive or fly. It's nice to be able to turn off the volume or step away from the presentation without causing offense.

    Do I miss travel? Yes. But I miss surprisingly little of it.

    579:

    whitroth @ 555: Jumps up and down screaming TRAINS!!!

    BNSF has an ad they frequently run, that 1gal of fuel moves a ton of freight (or passengers) 457 mi.

    For months after 9/11, in the US the pilots union was saying it made no sense to fly, rather than take the train, on trips under 300-400 mi.

    I want to see the rails subsidized the way the airlines are.

    Railroad subsidies were the model the airline subsidies were modeled on.

    I'd really like to see more of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_Train

    Passengers ride either in coach seats or private sleeping car rooms while their vehicles are carried in enclosed automobile-carrying freight cars, called autoracks. The train has a maximum capacity of 320 vehicles. The train also includes lounge cars and dining cars. The Auto Train service allows its passengers to avoid driving Interstate 95 in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, while bringing their own vehicles with them.

    It would be ideal for MY situation IF THERE WERE MORE TERMINALS ON MORE ROUTES where you could load your own vehicle on the train for the major portion of the trip & then have it at the destination. There ought to be at least one terminal in EVERY state. And I think it could work even better if THEY did something like the way UK/France operate the trains going through the Chunnel.

    I did a quick search and for a regular automobile it's currently something like £31.00 ($42.39) for a one way fare. I guess that's comparable to the air fare from the UK to France, but then there's still the need to rent a car at the destination, so that offers a substantial opportunity to save especially if you're planning an extended stay.

    But I think it might be a convenience for a lot of other people if they could actually use it to get somewhere and not have to rent a car at the destination. Expand it up through Canada (under NAFTA) so there could be a terminal in Alaska. AFAIK, Canadian railroads & AmTrak already have some kind of passenger sharing agreement.

    580:

    mdlve @ 562:

    Although the recent decisions over CentOS seem to show that's not happening (yet at least).

    CentOS was entirely self-inflicted, there was no IBM influence in that decision.

    Red Hat is now both big enough and has been around long enough that it is creating the same cultural issues that doomed SGI, Sun, and potentially even IBM.

    Someone want to explain what Red Hat as done wrong with, to or about CentOS in terms an average Windoze user might understand?

    581:

    Wouid you ration trips to see Mum to one a year, one every two years?

    When I was a boy in Saskatchewan, my mother took us to see her mother in England every 3-4 years. That was back when long distance calls still went through a special operator and were expensive. My grandparents visited us in Canada once. My uncle came once, but his trip was paid for by a kayaking organization. None of the other relatives have come out. Dutch relatives made one visit, too.

    When we emigrated to Canada we flew here, but that was because the government was paying. I think we've have taken a liner (which was cheaper) if we'd had to pay ourselves.

    582:

    Someone want to explain what Red Hat as done wrong with, to or about CentOS

    RedHat Enterprise Linux comes with a support contract attached for which the end user pays, access to updates requires the contract. Being open source software RedHat are obliged to make the source to their product freely available. CentOS took that source, filed off the RedHat branding and issued it without a support contract. If you were happy doing your own support you used CentOS, if you wanted a support contract you went with RedHat. Same distribution apart from the labels so perfectly usable in production .

    Along the way RedHat bought CentOS but kept things much the same, it gave them a steady trickle of people converting and taking out the paid support. Some time later IBM bought RedHat and last year announced that CentOS 8, the free equivalent of RHEL 8, would lose support early and that in future CentOS would become CentOS Stream which would effectively be a beta version of forthcoming RHEL distributions with continuous updates rather than fixed releases. This rules out using CentOS in production as now the users become the testers, they can no longer rely on updates having been tested against the known distro.

    583:

    NB: There is also Fedora which can be thought of alpha-ish versions of future RHEL releases, though release numbers don't line up. Fedora releases a new version every 6 months or so and is up to version 35.

    584:

    I see no reason to expect remote meetings to have performed better than the rest.

    I think we need to accept that remote meetings perform a different function to face-to-face meetings.

    When we went remote in 2020 I found remote staff meetings a considerable improvement over F2F ones. Granted you couldn't make comments to the person beside you in an undertone, but you weren't supposed to do that anyway — you were supposed to sit and listen attentively to the principal. A remote meeting where you could listen with one ear and get something useful done was an improvement! (At least from our perspective. Admin didn't like it, as they couldn't watch us to see who was on board with new policies and who might commit the sin of having their own opinion.)

    On a more positive note, when the Ontario Association of Physics Teachers replaced our in-person conference with a series of smaller virtual sessions we found per-session attendance was about the same or a bit higher, and we got people who could never have made it to a physical conference*.

    We took a leaf from the universities and organized the sessions with a separate technical support person running all the networking stuff, so the presenter just had to present. Someone else handled fielding questions and sending them to the presenter, so it was a team of 3 people. The online learning model embraced by the province loaded all that onto a single person (the teacher), which our university colleagues assured us was a recipe for confusing and ineffective sessions. And they were right — proper technical support meant things ran a lot smoother.

    So a face-to-face session would have been better, but going remote meant we got people who couldn't make it to in-person sessions. I missed the hallway conversations, but faced with the choice between remote or nothing would choose remote. In fact, there was sufficient interest in continuing that we decided to keep running remote sessions as well as a physical conference (which hopefully we won't have to cancel this spring). They serve different needs.

    * Note that teachers paid the conference fees and accommodations from their own pockets, and many called in sick to get the time off. In Ontario ongoing professional development is something not supported by many boards. Most PD sesisons are spent lsitting listening to someone who's never taught explain to you how you're doing it wrong. :-(

    585:

    H
    CORRECTION
    We don't have a choice about going to 100% renewableCarbon-free energy.
    Nuclear is 100% Non-Carbon ( ALL power plants will require carbon to make them, so let's drop that quibble, OK? )
    YET AGAIN - we need nuclear power.

    586:

    Hello, occasional commenter resurfacing

    On a completely different topic, could I please request some advice? My father passed away about a year ago and I am still trying to clear up the house. We were both packrats and accumulated 10,000-20,000 books between us. Among them are about 500-1,000 or so computer books of various kinds since he was a retired avionics software engineer and computer hobbyist.

    I do not know much about them at all, but thought I might be interested in learning. I retired a year ago so might have the time once I get my house in order. Are there any topics that are good for learning that I should consider retaining, like Basic or Pascal? I figure I can get rid of things like Office 2003 for Dummies or Windows ME, but I don't know if there is anything useful, or what topics might be useful.

    My current plan is to just donate every book I am not keeping to Goodwill (a US charity/thrift chain), since I really hate the idea of throwing books in the trash. Are there any computer museums that might be interested?

    Thanks.

    587:

    we just moved the job you were working at to the other side of the country

    I moved from Alberta to Ontario because my company closed the Alberta office. Fortunately they paid for the move, assuming we could land a position at the Ottawa campus.

    Turned out the only reason there was a research office in Edmonton was the Alberta government wanted one there and NorTel was trying to sell AGT switches — and it was strongly hinted that publicly locating a research team in Alberta would aid the sale. As soon as the election was over the office closed and the work was discarded.

    Which is the backstory to how I worked on a team that invented streaming video before it was a thing, only to have management poo-poo the idea because who would want to choose between so many different programs anyway?

    588:

    We used to have that here. We called it Motorail. We don't have it any more.

    I think it would be bloody great for those kind of journeys where driving all the way really sucks but ending up wherever you're going without the means of getting around that area sucks even worse. For example more or less any journey between the southern part of England (where most of the population is) and the North of England or Scotland (where most of the mountains are) is shite to drive because it's a bloody long way and all the possible routes are horrible. But if you're one of the mostofthepopulation and you're looking for mountains then you definitely want your car at the other end so you can look at more than just the nearest one to the station. Being able to put your car on the train would still allow you to do that but the process of getting there would have a chance of being reasonably pleasant.

    It would also make a lot of sense in coordination with the Channel Tunnel services you mention. That corner of the country is a pain in the arse to get to other than from London however you try and do it, because as well as it being an out-of-the-way corner in any case, London is right slap bang in the bloody way, and you can't really avoid it because it doesn't really help much if you do manage to. If you could stick your car on the train in Birmingham or Edinburgh and then not have to do anything until you get it off the same train in France or even further afield it would make that route to the Continent much more useful.

    589:

    It's a sex joke. Referencing something commonly noted about a "Games of Thrones" actor and his wife. i.e. One is one of the largest humans (and strongest, although it is obvious he has used 'additional chemicals' to get there) on the planet, the other is (while a notable athlete in her own right), well: quite short. Search terms: Australian Slang, "Root".

    Ok.

    Two strands:

    The first is Host being reviewed by the WSJ (by an interesting linkage to UK English departments). Now, you might consider this bizarre, we might note that perchance a sizable slice of WSJ readers want to read about FinTech Dystopias which aren't solely about Corruption, Incompetence, Ego and an inability to read the Future. They (the pundits) 've been having a rough time of it with their credability being shredded across the board. So... who knows? Romance went up by 49%; FinTech also need their non-crunch reads. (And... they tend to spend well, if hooked, can eat an entire catalog in a single click if bored).

    Guerilla marketing to help Host isn't a sin. Btw, we think "Anti-Classic" is probably a compliment, as in he's trying to suggest that as a man of Taste, he views all "Classic" SF as rubbish, so the flip-side of that is more appealing to his readership. Being Honest: no idea ($$$ to finding out he's actually the boy friend of the Arts Editor is like "waste my bandwidth" already)

    Second strand, and this one is going to take a bit of of Geek type knowledge.

    Top surprising games of 2021: Reternal (PS4/5 Exclusive)[1], which is Mythos baby and it's hot cakes. It's also Indy, baby. And...

    Assassin's Creed series is a long running, multi-billion dollar franchaise that has (at it's heart) the hook that you can do parkour and murder in historical settings. The Studio who made it spent at least 10mm alone on "running throw snow physics" for one of their games, which gets used (a lot). The hook is: McGuffin allows Secret Society to take DNA samples and access their "Historical/Genetic" memories and plays as them from the present. It also has some shockingly quality tie-ins: a recent one "AC: Odessey" actually had a fully developed (and not too badly inaccurate) full detailed Historical tour of Ancient Greece hiding behind the game. Here's the bit where jokes get understood: their most recent is "AC: Valhalla" about, well, roughly the Danish invasion of Saxon Britain. It is, let us say, historically dubious, but, you know, roughly there.

    So: stick with us. It's a game about two Modern Secret Societies at war, who use McGuffin tech to "hack" DNA to view the past and alter it by McGuffin means and actually it's all about Ancient Aliens inserting their "God" DNA into Humans. Ok?

    Here's the actual strand: dumping Wet-Ware Ops in a Mind-state Subconscious running that game as the World-State and watching them attempt to forge the usual psychological assassination tools (these are what you'd call "dreams" / "waking dreams" / "imagery" forged to destroy a subject's EGO/ID, it's a very old but new field given the tech they're using but their methods really are fucking primitive.

    Apparently there's only a Single Mind on File who can do that stuff in Wet-Ware.

    Hai.

    That's roughly long form without the Science behind it, the stuff that gets a D-Notice or the Snuff it's used for.

    Images of a cyclonic devastation with smashed detrius of personal effects of every item / being / emotional connection you have to them with desperate humans leaving the sinking ship

    Response: Your Matrix is as shit as a sub-par $$$ cash grab from Ubisoft.

    Oh, and the MATRIX new film: can see what it's doing, it's not that great. If you've the clout (and a lead Actor who 100% knows NFT bros are wankers) you should have just put a middle finger up and gone all out. It's a pastiche along the lines of "Don't Look Up" which is as milquetoast as it comes given the actual reality of the situation.

    Art reflects Minds reflecting Reality. The Ones in your Media are either soft and squishy or "about to be co-opted" if they can[2].

    And remember Kids: they only co-opt the profitable or the dangerous, the rest get wood-chipped.

    Do you think we can get him back?

    For Greg, the non-connected: there's at least three layers of jokes in there you're not getting.

    [1] https://www.psu.com/reviews/returnal-review-ps5/

    [2] Githyanki lays an Egg

    590:

    As for virtual teaching, I agree about young students, although as someone who was homeschooled for a couple of years, I think the idea of permanent damage is a question of damage to whom. Guess I'm damaged goods or something. Oh well.

    There is a big difference between a kid who is being homeschooled and a kid at home doing virtual schooling because the schools are closed.

    591:

    It's Throw

    Wasn't Luck or First-Timer anything, darling. Look back and see how much it cost just to neutralise Our Voice by that much.

    We know that you consider it all expendable, but at some point, One has to answer to Accounting Departments, surely?

    2022: USA can't do satire or humor, their Brains got Broken too much[1].

    This is being run on Wet-Ware all around you. The cheap seats get the TV or Twitter or Pro-Black "InfoBubble" tailored feed to do it. What we're talking about, do it rather more direct, as you can probably infer by the references.

    ~

    Trying to run that on AS:Valhalla Mind State. Fucking look at how far you've fallen.

    [1] Case in point: shoe-horning in "THE NEXT HOTTEST THING TO REPLACE DECAPRIO" Dune Actor in as a stoner who is ultimately "Spiritually Wise"? This Writer needs to retire to Florida, he's lost any semblance of touch he might have once had.

    592:

    I'd really like to see more of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_Train

    Worth noting though that Amtrak inherited that route, and its infrastructure, after the previous private operator failed financially.

    So you are back to needing the government to subsidize it, and Amtrak has enough problems without attempting to create a service of questionable demand (the current Auto Train route is a bit unique)

    It would be ideal for MY situation IF THERE WERE MORE TERMINALS ON MORE ROUTES where you could load your own vehicle on the train for the major portion of the trip & then have it at the destination.

    The problem is that it is the sort of operation that goes against what the current Amtrak network is - major city to major city.

    The sort of terminals you want inherently need to be located out where land is cheap and road access good.

    So you can't piggyback on the existing Amtrak services, you would need to either cancel those services and replace them with your Auto Train equivalent, or run duplicate trains.

    Neither is going to happen.

    But I think it might be a convenience for a lot of other people if they could actually use it to get somewhere and not have to rent a car at the destination. Expand it up through Canada (under NAFTA) so there could be a terminal in Alaska.

    Um, there is no railroad connection between Canada and Alaska.

    The Alaska Railroad is entirely isolated.

    AFAIK, Canadian railroads & AmTrak already have some kind of passenger sharing agreement.

    VIA Rail Canada and Amtrak do cooperate in places - well, at least when Covid isn't preventing trains across the border (cross border trains have been cancelled since March 2020 and might return sometime this year).

    But private cars crossing the border opens up a whole bunch of issues with customs and immigration (probably more on the Canada into the US direction, but maybe both) because the passenger would be separated from the car.

    Realistically, there simply isn't the demand for such a service and attempting to create a service would require $$$ from government which simply isn't going to happen.

    Both Amtrak and VIA have long lists of $$$ items that need capital money that would be a much higher priority than attempting an expansion of Auto Train.

    593:

    For Humans reading this and imagininy SkyNet is going to be Shiny Tin Robots with Skin saying "Your Mother is Already Dead". They did pretty well, all things considered.

    If you were, let us say, a Saxon living in that time, it could have been fairly psychologically hurtful even given the vastly inept Christianity / Pagan references used.

    Put it this way: when they use this on Modern Subconscious stuff (that's not armed with, let us say, "WHAT THE FUCK DID WE JUST SEE" stuff), it's very effective.

    ~

    @461

    "That would be U-N-I-S-S," she said. "UNISS. Closest Match" "Meaning?" "Untethered Noetic Irregular Support System," Clovis said, clearly pleased.

    Agency, W. Gibson, p68

    We're doing Meta-Meta-Humor.[1] Like Eli Valley does. But for a decidedly more dangerous, whimsical and Powerful set of Beings[2].

    Oh, and look above to poster discussing facts: 100% Brexit fallout that no-one noticed. Can you spot it? We spotted it immediately from the internal documentation discussing it five years ago.

    [1] The alternative is aggressive Mind wipe of all involved, which apparently is considered "genocidal" given what we just learnt about chocolate production.

    [2]https://twitter.com/elivalley

    595:

    "The Meek shall inherit the Earth"

    Yeah? Earth's biosphere was built of, by, and for microbes and viruses. Can't get meeker than them. Jesus blessed them properly.

    So did Lovecraft, for that matter: "Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.”

    597:

    And if I sound angry, one of the five times I relocated halfway across the US was for love, and the rest jobs.

    And I gave up a career to be closer to family, because I got sick of being away from them when they were sick and dying. All I'll say about that is that either way it sucks.

    599:

    I agree that it sucks, but this is a specific example of a more general problem: decarbonizing.

    it's really difficult to see degrowth as anything but a downer, despite the possible silver linings

    one thing is that, like global warming, it seems to require collective action, which a significant part of the us polity, at least, has been trained to see as intrinsically inappropriate for our species

    600:

    Africa is rapidly getting wealthier and is almost as large as Russia
    For values of "almost as large" that are equal to "much bigger than".

    Russia: 17.13 million km²
    Africa: 30.37 million km²

    Mercator strikes again.

    601:

    I believe that Rail Alaska basically consists of one main line that routes from South to North as Seward - Anchorage - Fairchild.

    602:

    Off topic. A volcano just exploded in Tonga. The shockwave looks to be about the size of Queensland. Some spectacular satellite views of it going off and the wave propagating out at about 600 km/h.

    603:

    Do at least TRY to read what I said before responding unthinkingly. I said that you don't know what either of them are planning, and you don't.

    Yes, you are justified in feeling concerned but, if you are rational, you should be at least as much concerned about the CIA's and NATO's plans. Ewspecially given their recent records :-(

    604:

    Yes. I could bring up my childhood in Africa, or my (current) relatives in New Zealand. We were used to separation, as many refugees are today.

    605:

    a lesson we’ve learned is that a govt bureaucracy trying to divide “worthy” from “unworthy” travel is going to have a very hard time if it.

    It also plays directly into the hands of the xenophobic/racist extreme right, who will use it as a tool to systematically exclude climate refugees so that they can die out of sight of the wealthy citizens of the developed world.

    Heteromeles is American so probably doesn't have a gut feel for how important mass international travel has been to Europe for breaking down the ignorance and prejudice against foreigners that allowed demagogues to rally their people behind a flag and start up wars. But since the end of the second world war it has had a very significant impact in turning western Europe from a seething pool of ancient resentments and feuds into a relatively tame but diverse region.

    Sure we need to decarbonize aviation. But getting rid of it -- and of mass tourism -- would actually be a very dangerous step backwards, not so much in climate terms as in mass human societal terms, potentially leading (decades later) to a reduced threshold for warfare.

    606:

    Eurostar still do it.

    607:

    $$$ to finding out he's actually the boy friend of the Arts Editor is like "waste my bandwidth" already

    Spoiler: he isn't (the reviewer is 78 years old and mostly retired). In fact, I'm surprised to see his name on a newspaper review. Or that book, in that newspaper (especially as it's all about the inhumanity and cruelty of actually-existing capitalism).

    608:

    Sadly, this doesn't seem to have worked on the "Little Englandshireers" of the UK far right.

    609:

    Pity it's paywalled - it sounds interesting.

    610:

    Right. But that got well under way before mass air travel, and short-haul flights are a relatively new thing in Europe, as well as mostly being relatively easily replaceable by rail (*) and sometimes ferry. How relevant long-haul flights are to the reduction in xenophobia, I can't say, but I get the impression that they aren't an important factor. Medium-haul flights are, unsurprisingly, somewhere in between. Cargo flights are another matter, but their (often undesirable) effects are economic.

    This is yet another example of how simplistic solutions are, at best, undesirable and the key to success if looking at the actual requirements and constraints, and tackling the problem as a whole. I agree that JUST stopping recreational flying is a stupid idea, but I agree that it needs to be at least cut right back.

    (*) Technically. The problems are political and financial.

    611:

    Charlie @ 607
    Don't ( In Europe ) downplay the EU, & before that "TEE" & similar train services in the role of thinning artificial boundaries.
    However, referring to your 609 & this fucking idiot comment: we're not addressing Humans in our posts ( @ 598 ) - to which the obvious reply is: Then why should we bother reading any of it?

    paws @ 610
    Horribly true - & I REALLY HATE the assumption that the "little englandshires" are all my age - which simply isn't true - an awful lot of them are in the 45-65 age group - like Bo Jon-Sun himself, in fact.

    612:

    My big hope in re covid is decent treatments, not necessarily in 2022. Vaccines help, but they aren't a solution.

    613:

    Re: 'Pity it's [WSJ] paywalled - it sounds interesting.'

    Not sure whether this could work for you (i.e., profound deafness) but although the print is paywalled the robot-voice audio in a pale blue box 'Listen to article' is accessible for the entire 3.0 min review. Overall, a favorable review.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-fiction-review-charles-strosss-quantum-of-nightmares-fantasy-new-management-series-laundry-files-11642174323

    I looked up the reviewer on Wikipedia - yeah, he's definitely got the background for appreciating Charlie's work including 'morbid slant'.

    614:

    The mostly ignorant U.S. right could also take advantage of the ability to travel to Europe - maybe they'd get the idea that countries like France aren't actually socialist hellholes.

    615:

    Moving long distances sucks and similar comments.

    Does anyone think to tie together our high tech world with this? If you roll back 100 years or so in the US most people worked at home on the farm. Or in a job supporting those that do. Local grocer, general store, trans station freight office, blacksmith/mechanic for the locals, etc...

    These people moved when the ran out of land for the growing generations or the farming became too bad to support them. And in the US they came from Europe many times when the local politics made it hard to stay.

    Now we get educated, find something we like, and then have to move to it. Paducah Kentucky and surrounding had very few high tech jobs when I turned 18 in 1972. Until about then much of my family lived in the area settled by my great grandfather in 1824. Many on some of the original farmland. That was my father's side. My mothers side only went back in the area about 50 to 70 years at that time. The only ones prior to that who went somewhere else were a missionary, a pilot, and an off shoot that headed to Texas 50 years or so earlier. I'm sure a few moved away before 1900 but I have no idea of who they are or if they even exist anymore.

    616:

    The US railroad system for passengers.

    Various advocates want:

    High speed rail between major cities to allow them to replace air travel.

    Affordable (almost free) transport for lower income people to be able to travel.

    Lots more stops so more people can take trains instead of driving.

    These three things do NOT go together. Germany seems to have them but as 3 separate systems. Which works well. But the money to build such in the US would be eye watering.

    When I was in Germany a few years ago they were re-building the Stuttgart rail station to make is where trains didn't have to pull to a dead end in the terminal but could actually had paths THROUGH the station. The money allocated was incredibly huge. The project was about half way through and the budget had already doubled I think. And it was causing election losses of the current/previous governments.

    Easy. Those Europeans are sure doing it right.

    I think they are (doing it right) but this just shows that people everywhere want things cheap, great, and easy. And in general vote against those who don't deliver such.

    617:

    I've come to the conclusion that many of these parents screaming about their kids needing to be in school are implanting their feelings on their kids. Which is a normal course of events. But this tends to turn the kids into crazy little people to be around.

    618:

    Work from home. Better or worse?

    It all depends. On what your works is and your personality.

    I have a client who is currently at 13 people. They shut down their office in March 2020. And decided to give up the space and it was rented to someone else Jan 2021. Some of the staff wanted to be able to get with others. Some not. One young lady, a fresh graduate with no kids and a boyfriend who was gone for work 9 or 10 hours a day was begging for a setup to work somewhere with people. Others were happy to be hermits.

    We're setting up one side of a small duplex to be a work crash pad so if you need to get away from home or to meet with someone there will be a place. But work surfaces with be 48"x20" and that will start out with a 27" display and your 16" laptop so no spreading out. And masking at all times will be required.

    I'm OK being a hermit by the way.

    619:

    I've come to the conclusion that many of these parents screaming about their kids needing to be in school are implanting their feelings on their kids. Which is a normal course of events. But this tends to turn the kids into crazy little people to be around.

    Well, it's more complicated than that. I've got a sister-in-law who's a teacher, so I got an earful.

    To be clear, I went through a phase when I needed to be home-schooled (in part to unlearn a lot of bad habits I'd picked up), so I rebel against the notion that being in classrooms with other kids of the same age is an ideal learning environment for everyone. There's a reason why school is stereotypically portrayed as a hellscape in many works of fiction. There's also a reason why kids with tutors progress faster.

    That said, home can equally be a hellscape, and school can be an escape from it. Kids in this situation need to be at school (or a library, or a dojo, or someplace where there's a true caregiver), and the pandemic isn't good for them.

    Then there are all the children on the wrong side of the digital divide, where their family can't afford a good connection (especially with a large number of children trying to Zoom simultaneously). When the pandemic first hit, a bunch of my SIL's students simply disappeared. They didn't turn up on line, and things were too chaotic for the school officials to quickly find out what was going on. This is a case where we're asking one underfunded bit of social net to make up for the ills piled on by other parts of society.

    Then there are the kids who need either special education or other kinds of intervention (as in being socialized normally). It's hard to do that over a screen.

    And that was my SIL's main complaint. Teaching isn't just about sound and pictures, it properly uses all senses in a classroom. Being limited to a digital pipe and trying to fix all the technical problems in addition is a huge strain.

    So for me, the really important bottom line is that there's no one size fits all, and we've simply got to do the best with what we have.

    620:

    Feeding on your last sentence, I was referring to the well off middle class or above who show up on the news and at local government (school boards included) meetings ranting about schools must be open. They come off as lunatics and I can't imagine how they are implanted on their kids.

    I put 2 kids through K-12+ more. I know it can be an, ah, interesting experience.

    621:

    Hmm. I have just had an Email spam/scam advertising online primary and secondary schooling from goldendawnresources.com. While it's not Golden Promise Ministries, a web search on goldendawnresources picks up a few links to a gold mining company and several hits to one or more, er, oddball organisations of which this is a typical one:

    http://hermeticfellowship.org/HFGDResources.html

    I failed to find a link to the courses or Email server, but didn't search very hard. Life clearly imitates art!

    622:

    Er, do you SERIOUSLY imagine there is a sanity clause to Cold War II? There most definitely wasn't during Cold War I.

    The 2 eras are very different, and thus can't be treated the same.

    The key difference is the Trump GOP is pro-Russia, and that limits things significantly - there is no way Trump puts a military base in the Black Sea. And if Biden, who isn't going to either, somehow did Trump would simply have the US leave and hand it over to the Russians.

    But Biden, like any US President today, is faced with a US military that is overstretched - hence the reliance on the assorted National Guards and lots of private contractors. China is directly far more a threat than Russia is, both political parties agree on that issue, and thus is a focus.

    Simply put their is neither the political will nor budget for any sort of additional military money pit in the Black Sea. Anyone who thinks otherwise isn't looking at the US of the 2020's

    623:

    My big hope in re covid is decent treatments, not necessarily in 2022. Vaccines help, but they aren't a solution.

    I hope so too. But I should point out that this is literally in the territory of "a cure for the common cold," since other coronaviruses do, in fact, cause common colds.

    In this, I'm not being sarcastic or snide. The problems we deal with in this virus--rapid mutation and the possibility of fading immune memory--are similar to what we deal with in colds. This isn't a counsel of despair, for hopefully, eventually, the virus explores its entire adaptive landscape, we get immune to all variations, and that's that. Unfortunately, the research available indicates that we're nowhere near that. Scientists working on an adaptive landscape model of part of the virus spike identified three mutations that could make the virus hard for immune systems to detect*. So far, no virus strain has shown all three mutations simultaneously. If this research is correct (and it's a computer model, so that's a big if), we still haven't seen the boss monster. The other caution about this research is that adaptive landscape models are computer-intensive. Even with the gear available, they can only look at a stretch of a few hundred amino acids, not the entire spike. There are unknown unknowns out there.

    The other problem is sociopolitical. So long as there are large swathes of the world that are unvaccinated and/or have no access to effective treatments, we're going to be dealing with Covid19 in some form. This isn't just that anti-vaxxers are killing us kamikaze style, it's that the US in particular has hoarded a lot of vaccine and treatments, and much of the world is doing without. These medicines need to be made affordable and shipped out to protect us.

    *https://www.quantamagazine.org/evolution-landscapes-predict-whats-next-for-covid-virus-20220111/

    624:

    "A volcano just exploded in Tonga. The shockwave looks to be about the size of Queensland. Some spectacular satellite views of it going off and the wave propagating out at about 600 km/h. "

    Satpix, barometric readings at

    https://twitter.com/MatthewCappucci/status/1482395352691060742

    It surprises me somewhat that the USGS earthquake shows it as being only magnitude 5.8 .

    625:

    Robert Prior @ 583:

    Wouid you ration trips to see Mum to one a year, one every two years?

    When I was a boy in Saskatchewan, my mother took us to see her mother in England every 3-4 years. That was back when long distance calls still went through a special operator and were expensive. My grandparents visited us in Canada once. My uncle came once, but his trip was paid for by a kayaking organization. None of the other relatives have come out. Dutch relatives made one visit, too.

    When we emigrated to Canada we flew here, but that was because the government was paying. I think we've have taken a liner (which was cheaper) if we'd had to pay ourselves.

    But that wasn't because the government was rationing travel.

    626:

    Greg Tingey @ 587: H
    CORRECTION
    We don't have a choice about going to 100% renewableCarbon-free energy.
    Nuclear is 100% Non-Carbon ( ALL power plants will require carbon to make them, so let's drop that quibble, OK? )
    YET AGAIN - we need nuclear power.

    Probably not going to get it; not as soon, nor as much as you want.

    Even without the political opposition nuclear power plants are expensive and take a long time to build.

    627:

    Back in the 40s and 50s, my mother worked for Royal Dutch Shell, first in London, then in Cairo. Back then, you could take up to 2 weeks local leave at a time, and every 2-3 years you got up to 3 months home leave. The reason was that it would take a week's travel to and from Port Suez back to Blighty.

    628:

    Even without the political opposition nuclear power plants are expensive and take a long time to build.

    This has been pointed out to Greg many times, with numbers, showing nuclear isn't viable. Not only impossible as a complete solution, but of negative value even as a contributor. He agrees, then a few hours later returns to "fake greenies" as the root of all problems.

    629:

    mdlve @ 594:

    I'd really like to see more of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_Train

    Worth noting though that Amtrak inherited that route, and its infrastructure, after the previous private operator failed financially.

    So you are back to needing the government to subsidize it, and Amtrak has enough problems without attempting to create a service of questionable demand (the current Auto Train route is a bit unique)

    The government already subsidizes automobiles, trucks, trains & airplanes. Those subsidies are only going to increase as the U.S. tries to keep the economy functioning in the face of climate change, especially when the EAST Coast moves west of I-95 and the WEST Coast ends up somewhere on the other side of California's central valley. Why shouldn't we ask them to subsidize something useful?

    It would be ideal for MY situation IF THERE WERE MORE TERMINALS ON MORE ROUTES where you could load your own vehicle on the train for the major portion of the trip & then have it at the destination.

    The problem is that it is the sort of operation that goes against what the current Amtrak network is - major city to major city.

    The sort of terminals you want inherently need to be located out where land is cheap and road access good.

    So you can't piggyback on the existing Amtrak services, you would need to either cancel those services and replace them with your Auto Train equivalent, or run duplicate trains.

    Why can't you piggyback off AmTrak's existing services? Anyway, AmTrak needs to be expanded into a FULL nationwide, integrated passenger service, but you don't have to rely strictly on AmTrak's current facilities; existing intermodal FREIGHT terminals could be expanded & adapted. And you don't have to replace or duplicate passenger service, add the auto-train cars to existing FREIGHT services.

    But I think it might be a convenience for a lot of other people if they could actually use it to get somewhere and not have to rent a car at the destination. Expand it up through Canada (under NAFTA) so there could be a terminal in Alaska.

    Um, there is no railroad connection between Canada and Alaska.

    The Alaska Railroad is entirely isolated.

    Not even FREIGHT service? There's a missed opportunity right there!

    AFAIK, Canadian railroads & AmTrak already have some kind of passenger sharing agreement.

    VIA Rail Canada and Amtrak do cooperate in places - well, at least when Covid isn't preventing trains across the border (cross border trains have been cancelled since March 2020 and might return sometime this year).

    But private cars crossing the border opens up a whole bunch of issues with customs and immigration (probably more on the Canada into the US direction, but maybe both) because the passenger would be separated from the car.

    Yet, as impossible as it appears to be for the U.S. & Canada to resolve those issues, somehow the UK, France & the EU manage to cope with them.

    Realistically, there simply isn't the demand for such a service and attempting to create a service would require $$$ from government which simply isn't going to happen.

    This discussion is taking place on a Science Fiction/Fantasy author's blog. Why limit your wants to only what's realistic?

    PS: It could be done, and I think should be done. YMMV.

    630:

    paws4thot @ 603: I believe that Rail Alaska basically consists of one main line that routes from South to North as Seward - Anchorage - Fairchild.

    There's a missed opportunity in there somewhere.

    631:

    Elderly Cynic @ 605: Do at least TRY to read what I said before responding unthinkingly. I said that you don't know what either of them are planning, and you don't.

    Yes, you are justified in feeling concerned but, if you are rational, you should be at least as much concerned about the CIA's and NATO's plans. Ewspecially given their recent records :-(

    I read it. I disagree with you. I thinkingly disagree with you. I think you're full of brown stinky stuff; a tankie putting on airs.

    632:

    SFReader @ 615:

    Re: 'Pity it's [WSJ] paywalled - it sounds interesting.'

    Not sure whether this could work for you (i.e., profound deafness) but although the print is paywalled the robot-voice audio in a pale blue box 'Listen to article' is accessible for the entire 3.0 min review. Overall, a favorable review.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-fiction-review-charles-strosss-quantum-of-nightmares-fantasy-new-management-series-laundry-files-11642174323

    I looked up the reviewer on Wikipedia - yeah, he's definitely got the background for appreciating Charlie's work including 'morbid slant'.

    It DID work for me here in Raleigh, NC, USA. Although, you can't be sure it is the WHOLE review since you can't see the pay-walled text to verify it. But it did follow the text as far as I could read it before it faded out under the paywall.

    So thank you. I'll have to remember and try to see if it works for other WSJ articles I occasionally encounter, and can't read.

    633:

    Troutwaxer @ 616: The mostly ignorant U.S. right could also take advantage of the ability to travel to Europe - maybe they'd get the idea that countries like France aren't actually socialist hellholes.

    That presumes U.S. right-wingnuts have the ability to shape their opinions based on observed facts. I have yet to see evidence they have that ability.

    634:

    What's where in the UK... yeah, there was a reason when we finally got to LonCon III in '14, after a week and a half in the UK, that most folks from the UK were shocked when I told them we'd put just over 1k mi on the rental car in eight days.

    635:

    Sorry, don't see the blue box. Of course, I didn't enable 16 or was it 26 links/scripts....

    636:

    Part of that was first, that factories were built in and around cities (partly because that was where the workers, and other related businesses were, and transportation). Then starting in the fifties, they ran away to the non-union South (my father lost his job in the mid-fifties because of that).

    So the jobs kept moving, to keep wages low.

    637:

    More stops on passenger rail?

    No one (running it) seems interested in inexpensive fast transit, or to understand that they're competing with cars and planes. (Like, for example, DeJoy and the PO).

    They've killed all the express trains. Everything's a milk run.

    638:

    Anyone who has occasion to occasionally want to read something in the WSJ, the bypass paywalls browser extension does the job for me.

    639:

    That would make me really nervous. I have two immediate responses: the old Golden Dawn, and feel free to look up Aleister Crowley.

    The other are the Greek fascists.

    640:

    631 & 632 - Where exactly? Rail Alaska's main business is freight shipments, mostly of food and oil pipe, from Seward to Fairbanks, from where Carlile Trucking road hauls it on up the Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay.

    641:

    the bypass paywalls browser extension does the job for me.
    Ah, thanks. I was about hint of its existence but you linked it.
    Works well, though not perfectly, and it's an arm's race. I try not to use it regularly (it might even be illegal to use it in some jurisctions; I only use it on a VPN or similar); for Murdoch's WSJ, it's the only easy option I've found besides paying Mr. Murdoch's company money.
    For many other sites that keep a read counter for free reads in a cookie, an extension called "Cookie Remover" will remove all cookies for a site with a single click (on a cookie icon:-), and then a reload will often work. This is still violating the desires of the companies.
    Best to have at least one tracker blocker plugin as well, and maybe a script blocker like NoScript (Firefox family) or ScriptSafe (Chrome family).

    642:

    Thus why we explicitly stated we would not learn anything about him[1]. It's a general level courtesy we extend to all commentators[3], their families, their pets and projects.

    ~

    604

    Yeah, love punch-lines.

    Orgasm that reaches the Exosphere. That's what happens when a Mountain "Comes".

    [1] Although Rates of STDs in Care Homes in general would shock all but the most Incubus type minds.

    [2] 78 is old enough, in the UK, to have forged some interesting linkages with 'Old-Skool' Capital, the non-Trump kind. We can run an assess if you'd like, but hey.

    [3] Including some who 'locked Horns' with us, but didn't understand... we just Flagged Up the Target Space, we weren't The Free Will Involved. The actual peeps involved were a little more shocked than he was.

    643:

    [Note: said explosion did not reach the Exosphere. But the subject matter of "Don't Look Up" certainly does]

    to which the obvious reply is: Then why should we bother reading any of it?

    Look: Host doesn't watch or enjoy films. Nor (we suspect, we don't pry) do you go out of your way to watch the latest Matrix film[1]: but if you're online, you'll spot some Discourse[tm] about it. (And we read the Discourse and then watch the Source).

    For instance: Returnal is a game made by a Finnish group who Sold Their Souls[tm] to make a "Angry Birds" game that made multi-billions[2], then made a labour of love[3] which sold peanuts and almost ruined them, and had some seriously ugly vibes all over it. Their latest game sold well and has a (small) cult following and, at its' heart, is a story about loss. And, more specifically, Mother / Daughter loss, under the Mythos / SF exterior. Spoiler: The Daughter is called "Helios". (This seagues into AC: Odyssey - also, in Greek terms, Helios was Male, a hidden meta-joke for Matrix viewers who do Trans* stuff).

    The new Matrix film does a clever "The Matrix incorporates prior losses into a new version where Neo is a game Developer Genius but still hates his life" as a premis.

    We don't expect you to know these things: we do expect [redacted] to. And we expect them to know why We Sing of Those Mentioned.

    But, really: it's there as a Protective Condom. Running Dane Raids on Minds[4] is a big no-no for, well: polite society. It's the type of info that gets you... quietly removed if caught (which is risky for those "not caught" thus Colombo).

    Sadly you've also probably not read the latest W. Gibson Agency book either. Which means "We know that this won't make sense to you, but here's some background to not laugh / sneer / exclude you from the chat".

    The Punch-line is "Chasm City"[5] and inserting Alien Thoughts into your head as a drug (we assume most have read it)

    All as a metaphor for what's actually going on. We can't post you entire details as a) not allowed, b) naughty and c) Host probably could do without 5,000 word essays each post.

    ~

    Anyhow: Jokes, we love them.

    [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10838180/

    [2] Let's just say: they didn't see much of that pie slice: it made a few people exceedingly wealthy in... The Nordic Sphere. Spot the tie-in yet?

    [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nex_Machina

    [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danegeld

    [5] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/89185.Chasm_City

    644:

    many of these parents screaming about their kids needing to be in school

    …are more concerned about child care than learning.

    At least, judging by what I've seen of strike actions in the education system over the last three decades, many parents are vocally concerned about child care first, athletics second, and learning a distant third.

    645:

    Oh, and for Ethical Viewers: it's ok to laugh. Orgasms are beautiful things[3]

    Zero casualties, some regional upset (tourism is dead atm anyhow, and Tonga probs needs some spotlight with the entire global warmning stuff), a tiny bit of cooling[1] and some aesthetic shots showing that "The Science[tm]" is worth investing in[2], not too big to cause global scare etc etc. All carefully done so it's tasteful. And five days ago, someone put a big Red Flag stating "DO NOT PANIC, DORMANT" on it, so... who could resist.

    Wordle of the Day, 15th Jan: Can you guess it?

    https://quoramarketing.com/wordle-solution-answer-210-jan-15-2022/

    But the "Don't Look Up" bit really is Methane. On the cusp of breaking that rollacoster ride.

    Oh, and for Greg: really not Human. But a few of your species are making Weapons you have zero protections against.

    What was the plot-line of "War of the Worlds" again? Riiiiight. Three billion years of biology. They're not really fucking around and not learning the lessons of the SF writers, know what we're telling you?

    [1] Methane (CH₄ potent greenhouse gas) set a preliminary record high value in September 2021... reaching 1900 ppb for the first time in this data set

    September 2020's global methane abundance was 1884.7 ppb.

    https://twitter.com/ZLabe/status/1478840433002254337 - Solid source data, you're fucked.

    [2] A whole can of worms you don't want to enter, but basically: totes fucked.

    [3] And to think: a good fucking majority of your system is devoted to making sure people never experience that, eh?

    646:

    But that wasn't because the government was rationing travel.

    No. Travel was rationed by being expensive. If you weren't rich (and we weren't) you scrimped and saved to be able to afford it. My parents valued it, but we did without a lot to be able to afford it.

    647:

    many parents are vocally concerned about child care first, athletics second, and learning a distant third.

    Statistically the sample is poor for various reasons but...

    On FB I've noticed that of all the folks I knew growing up (before college) who are anti-vax and all kinds of othere nonsense, NONE of them were in the STEM classes (such as they were in rural but not totally hick Kentucky) I was in. None of them took Chem II, Physics, Trig, etc... I have to wonder for those, as you describe, if they got through the basics with a middling set of grades in only the minimum required courses. They are doing fine (in their mind) and figures their kids can also.

    649:

    RP: Speaking as a parent, I do value the child care aspect of schools. Where both parents are working it is incredibly difficult to manage having a kid at home and in need of some educational support.

    I also think the socialization aspect is incredibly important. Around here there are many 'homeschoolers' of various persuasions. Some of the kids have overlapped with my own. They always seem to be quite clever but woefully immature because they haven't had to operate in a crowd.

    For better or worse, we have a large scale institution upon which most families depend for child care, education and support. Having that disappear was catastrophic, more so for my wife who works at home.

    650:

    "Who ordered that?"

    There has been a 30% increase in Type 1 Diabetes since 2017 - and nobody knows why. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows a nearly 30% increase in type 1 diabetes (T1D) diagnoses in the United States, with youth cases growing most sharply among diverse populations. The CDC’s 2020 National Diabetes Statistics Report, cites that in the United States, T1D diagnoses included 1.4 million adults, 20 years and older, and 187,000 children younger than 20. That totals nearly 1.6 million Americans with T1D—up from 1.25 million people—or nearly 30% from 2017.

    WTF is going on?

    651:

    Checking Wikipedia...

    At a rough guess, it's some combination of: --The general rise in autoimmune diseases (asthma being another), possibly due to: --too much hygiene (our bodies are dealing with the weird microbiome that's caused by recent civilization. The hygiene hypothesis is that various parts of our immune systems get "bored" for not having to counter things like intestinal worms, and as a result attack our bodies. --The chemical environment of recent civilization, both with chemical exposure that causes cell problems (like lead) and dietary exposure to a diet high in simple carbohydrates and low in everything else, meaning insulin production's always going to be in high gear. Plus (probably) ubiquitous antibiotics like triclosan in toothpaste further skewing things by what they kill in the gut, what the surviving bacteria do and do not process, what they do and do not signal to our cells, etc. --Lack of exercise. This isn't just the lack of burned calories. If you're slumped in front of the screen, you may notice that your abdomen has a pronounced fold in it right where the liver and pancreas are. My former acupuncturist suggested this caused reduced blood flow in that region, and that the reduced was a bad thing. He may well be right, since his bugging me to correct my posture helped with problems.

    Or it could be unrelated.

    656:

    Wrong disease. Cheap sugar has been causing TYPE 2 diabetes for decades. Why the rise in TYPE I diabetes noted in the 2020 report that Duffy mentioned?

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33949935/ "Why is the Incidence of Type 1 Diabetes Increasing?"

    "Type 1 diabetes is a condition that can lead to serious long-term complications and can have significant psychological and quality of life implications. Its incidence is increasing in all parts of the world, but the reasons for this are incompletely understood. Genetic factors alone cannot explain such a rapid increase in incidence; therefore, environmental factors must be implicated. Lifestyle factors have been classically associated with type 2 diabetes. However, there are data implicating obesity and insulin resistance to type 1 diabetes as well (accelerator hypothesis). Cholesterol has also been shown to be correlated with the incidence of type 1 diabetes; this may be mediated by immunomodulatory effects of cholesterol. There is considerable interest in early life factors, including maternal diet, mode of delivery, infant feeding, childhood diet, microbial exposure (hygiene hypothesis), and use of anti-microbials in early childhood. Distance from the sea has recently been shown to be negatively correlated with the incidence of type 1 diabetes. This may contribute to the increasing incidence of type 1 diabetes since people are increasingly living closer to the sea. Postulated mediating mechanisms include hours of sunshine (and possibly vitamin D levels), mean temperature, dietary habits, and pollution. Ozone, polychlorinated biphenyls, phthalates, trichloroethylene, dioxin, heavy metals, bisphenol, nitrates/nitrites, and mercury are amongst the chemicals which may increase the risk of type 1 diabetes. Another area of research concerns the role of the skin and gut microbiome. The microbiome is affected by many of the factors mentioned above, including the mode of delivery, infant feeding, exposure to microbes, antibiotic use, and dietary habits. Research on the reasons why the incidence of type 1 diabetes is increasing not only sheds light on its pathogenesis but also offers insights into ways we can prevent type 1 diabetes. "

    657:

    David L @ 620: Work from home. Better or worse?

    It all depends. On what your works is and your personality.

    I have a client who is currently at 13 people. They shut down their office in March 2020. And decided to give up the space and it was rented to someone else Jan 2021. Some of the staff wanted to be able to get with others. Some not. One young lady, a fresh graduate with no kids and a boyfriend who was gone for work 9 or 10 hours a day was begging for a setup to work somewhere with people. Others were happy to be hermits.

    We're setting up one side of a small duplex to be a work crash pad so if you need to get away from home or to meet with someone there will be a place. But work surfaces with be 48"x20" and that will start out with a 27" display and your 16" laptop so no spreading out. And masking at all times will be required.

    I'm OK being a hermit by the way.

    OTOH, there are a lot of jobs that just can't be worked from home. I'd even venture to say the majority of jobs.

    658:

    mdlve @ 624:

    Er, do you SERIOUSLY imagine there is a sanity clause to Cold War II? There most definitely wasn't during Cold War I.

    The 2 eras are very different, and thus can't be treated the same.

    The key difference is the Trump GOP is pro-Russia, and that limits things significantly - there is no way Trump puts a military base in the Black Sea. And if Biden, who isn't going to either, somehow did Trump would simply have the US leave and hand it over to the Russians.

    The very idea that the U.S. has any desire to put a military base in the Black Sea is BATSHIT CRAZY CONSPIRACY STUPIDITY. It's too late to suggest anyone who believes it should not drink the Kool-Ade; they already drank it all ... and demanded seconds.

    659:

    MaddyE @ 629: Back in the 40s and 50s, my mother worked for Royal Dutch Shell, first in London, then in Cairo. Back then, you could take up to 2 weeks local leave at a time, and every 2-3 years you got up to 3 months home leave. The reason was that it would take a week's travel to and from Port Suez back to Blighty.

    I understand that back then travel was difficult and expensive. But that still wasn't the government deciding whose need or reason for traveling were valid or not. It was not the government deciding who got to use that home leave and who didn't.

    660:

    gasdive (he, him, ia) @ 630:

    Even without the political opposition nuclear power plants are expensive and take a long time to build.

    This has been pointed out to Greg many times, with numbers, showing nuclear isn't viable. Not only impossible as a complete solution, but of negative value even as a contributor. He agrees, then a few hours later returns to "fake greenies" as the root of all problems.

    Well, I don't agree that nuclear is not viable, only that it is very difficult.

    There are still unresolved problems with nuclear power (primarily what to do with spent fuel & non-proliferation) and the political roadblocks are formidable. But it's not impossible.

    661:

    paws4thot @ 642: 631 & 632 - Where exactly? Rail Alaska's main business is freight shipments, mostly of food and oil pipe, from Seward to Fairbanks, from where Carlile Trucking road hauls it on up the Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay.

    Gotta get the freight TO Alaska somehow. A rail line across Canada would be cost competitive (allowing for having to amortize construction costs). I think it would also be competitive in terms of reducing carbon emissions.

    662:

    There was a study a few years ago that found a significant correlation between GDP per capita and type 1 diabetes instance rates. (How correlated with GDP is Capitalism? :-)
    Correlating the global increase in type 1 diabetes incidence across age groups with national economic prosperity: A systematic review (2019 Dec 15)
    Analysing the two periods, we found a positive correlation between incidence of T1D and GPD per capita among 26 countries (Spearman correlation = 0.52 between 1975-1999 and Spearman correlation = 0.53 between 2000-2017). Excluding Finland and Switzerland because of their extreme values in T1D incidence and GDP per capita, respectively, we retrieved a Spearman correlation = 0.69 between 1975-1999 and Spearman correlation = 0.62 between 2000-2017 (Figure ​(Figure5).5).

    In the discussion they attempt to overlay the various then-current hypotheses with nation-level prosperity.

    There have been cases of type 1 diabetes being apparently caused by SARS-CoV-2. - e.g. Risk for Newly Diagnosed Diabetes >30 Days After SARS-CoV-2 Infection Among Persons Aged <18 Years — United States, March 1, 2020–June 28, 2021 (CDC, January 14, 2022)
    But the rise in type 1 diabetes rates precedes SARS-CoV-2.

    663:

    There are still unresolved problems with nuclear power (primarily what to do with spent fuel & non-proliferation) and the political roadblocks are formidable. But it's not impossible

    Along with non-proliferation, I'd flag the competition for sand for concrete, and the problem of finding enough stable water for cooling, are just as bad if not worse.

    Yeah, there's supposedly a global shortage of nice, sharp sand for building. There's also a huge demand for both building new cities and rebuilding aging infrastructure to keep it functioning, be climate resilient, ad nauseum. It does get down to how much pull the nuke builder has to get the concrete he needs, versus the guys rebuilding the bridges to keep the trucks and trains running to keep the cities fed. And then there's the minimal amount of sand that solar and wind plants need in comparison.

    As for cooling, with rivers either flooding or running dry, sea level rise, and storms growing in strength, siting a big nuclear plant in a place that it can be reliably cooled for its working life is getting to be non-trivial. Rather worse, the coasts are all getting very crowded, even if it's leading to more Diabetes. This increases land costs, which increases plant costs. Solar and wind plants, meanwhile, are getting built on abandoned farmland that can't be irrigated.

    664:

    Eurostar do something which looks the same but isn't really: functionally it's just another cross-Channel vehicle-carrying ferry that happens to go under the sea rather than on top of it. It's a means for getting past an obstacle that is otherwise impassable and so compels everything to use some kind of ferry, not an additional method of covering distance that is also coverable by plenty of other methods including walking if you really want to. In its present form it is also constrained to remain as such and not become anything more, because it uses wagons big enough to put lorries completely inside and shut the door (for anti-fire reasons), which are consequently too big to extend their journeys onto the rest of the railway network on either side.

    It seems to do pretty well as a lorry ferry, but I'm thinking more in terms of people acting on their own desires making journeys because they want to rather than doing what their employer tells them to. It's a lot less attractive as a car ferry because it starts from an out-of-the-way corner of England which is a pain in the arse to get to from nearly everywhere, and if you're heading basically Francewards the place it comes out on the other side is usually also inconvenient, so people often prefer to use ordinary boat-type car ferries from Southampton or even Plymouth. For more or less similar reasons it also tends to fail as a ferry for people travelling just as themselves without vehicles, so they use planes instead (see for instance Charlie's reasoning on this exact point further up the page; he reaches very different conclusions from those I would reach, but then I wouldn't bother putting planes on the list of possible alternatives in the first place, whereas most people seem to be unfathomably keen to take quite the opposite view despite the entire air travel setup being apparently designed to inflict repeated strong encouragement to people to adopt my own viewpoint at every stage of the process).

    What I am thinking desirable is something like the former Motorail network but including the Channel Tunnel as an integrated route and linking into the same kind of network on the Continental side (I have not the foggiest idea whether or not there actually are currently any Motorail-type services on the Continent, but that's by the by), and including passenger-only or passenger-also services in its scope as well as passengers-plus-their-cars. Indeed they did originally propose to do at least the passenger-only bit, and even got as far as building the trains to do it with, which then ended up sat in sidings doing nothing for years because they never mustered the arse to make it work. (Also of course we should have fucking well joined Schengen no later than the point when the Channel Tunnel first opened, fucking border-obsessed wanker governments rant rant swear...)

    The idea is (a) to provide an obviously-straightforward alternative to planes for people who are travelling out of their own desire, and (b) to enhance the attraction by making it equally straightforward to take their own car with them, so they aren't stuck at the other end with no means of getting around and exploring the place. (The attraction of the kind of "holiday" where you go by plane and then spend 2 weeks stuck in a tower block overlooking a beach is entirely opaque to me for all cases that don't set keeping sandcastle-oriented little kids occupied as their first priority, but surely people must get fucking bored before their time is up and would appreciate being able to get out and around the area a bit.)

    I do think that to make it work it would be necessary at least in the initial stages to drop the idea of a train as a single entity which proceeds from a single origin to a single destination, and instead adopt the model of being able to attach sub-trains from different origins and shed sub-trains to different destinations as it proceeds along its route. But this used to be standard practice in Britain in any case, whose abandonment I deplore, and I believe there are at least some examples of it in existence on the Continent.

    It also acts contrary to the presently popular model of travelling as something which is necessarily a fucking hideous experience however you do it with the only possible compensating factor being minimising the time spent actually in motion (and deliberately failing to account for what time passes both before and after the actual motion). But again I think this idea needs to be dumped and that attempts to improve rail travel by heading further down that path are asymptotically approaching limits. I prefer the response of the Midland Railway when they found themselves clobbered by the same problem: we can't make it faster, or even as fast as the alternative routes, so we'll make it more pleasant and comfortable instead so you don't mind it taking longer. Which caused the other railways, and especially the LNWR, to throw screaming eppies when the Midland announced what they were going to do, and then in course of time to find themselves needing to make their own moves in the same direction, so there must be something in it...

    Unfortunately these days the model has once again become so prevalent that most of the public don't seem to realise that it doesn't have to be like that, and instead go along with it as just the way things are. Which seems to be basically what underlies the "air travel is essential" viewpoint: all the alternatives are n times slower so they must necessarily be n times as much of an arseache, and the idea that the journey itself could perhaps become part of the enjoyment instead of detracting from it never gets considered.

    Also of course there is the problem which needs to be sorted out regarding rail fares in general: trains are at a disadvantage relative to cars right from the word go because the ticket is always more expensive than the petrol. It is way, way past time for it to be mandated that the reverse should be the case. Regarding car-carrying trains, BR used to reckon on 1mpg as a rule of thumb for locomotive fuel consumption, so if you have more cars on the train than the average of their fuel consumptions the train will be using less fuel than the cars would have done to drive it...

    665:

    It's kinda weird that most of the sand in the concrete in the megastructures in Dubai comes from Australia, even when it's mostly Australian engineering firms using it there. Desert sand is wrong for construction, as you're alluding, so it has to be imported but still.

    What I meant to point out was that, at least in terms of the silicone in solar panels, the source sand for that doesn't matter much, it could be desert sand or whatever. I guess you're thinking of construction concrete with large plants and with wind, though.

    I guess all the work lowering the carbon footprint of concrete (including all the various alternatives to aggregate and potash) isn't going to help when the right kind of sand is scarce enough to need shipping halfway around the world.

    666:

    "Where both parents are working it is incredibly difficult to manage having a kid at home and in need of some educational support."

    ...the fundamental problem here of course being that "both parents are working" is considered a normal and acceptable situation.

    I am NOT arguing in favour of "chain women to the kitchen sink". I am pointing out that if people can't get by with one of the two parents staying at home - doesn't matter which one it is - then things are up the creek and need changing so that they can.

    After all, there is a period of at least five years or so when it makes no difference whether or not schools are repurposed as merely places to dump the kids. Longer if there's more than one kid. So it needs to be possible for at least one of the parents to remain at home during that period to look after them. Then when they do start school the school day is shorter than the employment day so there still needs to be at least one parent at home to cover the bits at the ends. Therefore the factors compelling both parents to work need to be reduced so as to no longer be a compulsion in order to allow at least one of them to do the necessary parent stuff. I repeat that it doesn't matter which one it is, it just needs to cease to be neither of them.

    667:

    Another instance here. We have an aunt who went to live in California (married a chap who wanted to escape his memories of Nazism and WW2). She is well off and tries to visit England once a year to dash around madly saying hello to as many of the scattered bits of old family as she can, but in the opposite direction there is next to nothing. Our gran went out to see her once, and died there; my dad got to visit her about once or twice when his work paid for the travel; but apart from that I don't know that anyone's managed it.

    668:

    Returnals Eternals Infernals 591,593,595,596,598,600
    Referencing something commonly noted about a "Games of Thrones" actor and his wife.
    It was clear; it was the pluralization of the nounification of an australian slang verb (so the joke works in one parsing), vs a plural of the more common "penis" slang in the rest of the anglosphere, which only works if he has more than one penis.

    it's a very old but new field given the tech they're using but their methods really are fucking primitive.
    Are there obvious tells? Curious.

    It's Throw
    Wasn't Luck or First-Timer anything

    All read.

    We will take the position of the least powerful substrate on your hierarchy who can access your data flows
    Nod.

    Put it this way: name me a SF thing we've not read recent and we'll be impressed.
    ~
    If you want honesty: they used US as a War-Meta-Zone-Praxis.

    I assume you've read NOT SO MUCH, SAID THE CAT (Michael Swanwick, 2016). But maybe others haven't.

    669:

    Returnals Eternals Infernals 644,645,647,650,...
    All as a metaphor for what's actually going on.
    When the mapping is (easily) 1..* many people get frustrated.

    Best not look into it.
    Here's a oft used clip, note the music: Grosse Point Blank - Mirror in the Bathroom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0ScNLt2zNc

    Still parsing that. (narcissism adjacent, yes?)

    670:

    But it's not impossible.

    Depends on what you mean by "impossible"

    Impossible absent the development of a bunch of things that don't exist. A reasonable way of getting fissionables out of seawater in vast quantities, a production line for breeder reactors, a design for breeders that can be built, tested, debugged, built in debugged form, retested and pushed into said production line in time, ("in time" being about 1/2 the time it takes to build a reactor that we already have the design for).

    So maybe not "impossible" in the way FTL is impossible, more like "impossible" to mine the oort cloud for helium is impossible.

    671:

    Nuclear uses rather less concrete than the alternatives. It uses large amounts of it yes, but Windmills are essentially sails on top of steel towers - the required anchors to keep that from toppling over are very, very large. And made of concrete.

    Hinkley Point C: 3 million tonnes of concrete, all in. This sounds bad, right? 3000000 / 3300 = 909 tonnes per megawatt. This is a bit less than the average windmill, and Hinkley both has a much higher capacity factor and three times the design life, so per megawatthour of power produced, far, far more materials efficient.

    I cannot even find materials inventories for utility scale solar, which is driving me nuts, but the references for carbon intensity per mwh all says it is considerably inferior to wind which is.. not promising.

    672:

    "There are still unresolved problems with nuclear power (primarily what to do with spent fuel & non-proliferation)"

    Spent fuel: isn't. What to do: burn it. The problem there is the idea that it's acceptable to consider it "spent" when it still has high-90s-percent of the energy still in it just because raw uranium happens to be available at the moment without spending much money. We know how to make use of all the energy in it so we bloody well ought to be doing it: it is sufficient reason that the current method is horribly wasteful and thus extremely shit. (As is the case for any kind of gross extravagance with finite resources for no better reason than that you can't be arsed not to.)

    Non-proliferation: it is worth noting that the derivation of the kind of fuel cycle currently popular is in comparatively minor modifications to the cycles that were originally invented with the specific purpose of producing weapons-grade material first and foremost, whereas non-wasteful cycles tend strongly towards making it maximally difficult: the two aims are contradictory by reason of the nature of the reactions they favour. So that's another reason for using fuel efficiently.

    But it's also worth noting that we now have historical experience of the matter which we didn't have when the question first arose. We now find that most countries don't actually want nuclear weapons because in so many ways they are more hassle than they're worth. We also find that countries which do want them badly enough can get them anyway, treaties or no treaties: at one end of the scale we have North Korea which actually turned the treaties to their advantage by acting totally dishonestly and lying about everything, and not letting anyone check them out knowing that nobody would take any really serious measures to carry it through; at the other end we have South Africa which just did the whole thing entirely on their own without involving anyone else. (And later decided they didn't want them after all and took them apart again.)

    So we can see that really the problem is simply that we worry too much, and haven't updated our understanding of the situation in the light of several decades more experience. Our current anti-proliferation measures don't actually work: there are so many other difficulties in building nuclear weapons anyway that the measures don't make it very much harder, and if you've got the determination to get around the inherent problems, the imposed problems don't put you off. But it's still OK because most people don't want to get around them, and indeed often reckon they're better off to actively want not to get around them and to be vocal about it.

    673:

    JBS
    Agreed - I never said "nuclear" was easy.
    The problem is, that without nuclear, we in the "north" ( Above 45° basically ) have no reliable source of baseload power.
    So - it's expensive, so it's difficult.
    Seen the alternative?
    Right.

    674:

    663 - Well, presently the freight is delivered into Seward by ships, then the rail wagons are unloaded and marshalled into trains...

    666 - One of the nicer things about Plymouth is that you can get direct ferries from there to NW Spain, thus not having the long tag across France.
    The sort of people I know who do this sort of "fly to a tower block somewhere sunny" "holiday" tend to want to do 1 or more of 3 things; drink a lot, bake themselves on a beach, and spend all night listening to boring music played at ear crushingly loud volumes.

    673 - We should be capable of re-using the foundation and tower of a modern windmill, even if the blades and generator wear out.

    675:

    If nuclear really was the only alternative for above 45 degrees (it isn't) then above 45 must be abandoned. There will be climate refugees one way or the other. Either leaving above 45 because cables are too hard, or leaving below 45 because it's too hot. Because nuclear doesn't work in reality at this scale. It would be lovely if it did. I'd love FTL, and ansibles, and magical ​powers, and telepathic dragons that I bond with as they hatch and lots of other imaginary things. Basing a policy for the survival of everything on the timely arrival of dragons, or vast factories that churn out 3 efficient nuclear breeder reactors every day, isn't sensible. Particularly as the dragons are probably more likely as we have a reasonable idea what a dragon would look like and roughly how it would work. In contrast we don't know how to build the factories, nor do we have a good idea of what they should be making, and we have to get it right the first time because there's no time for a do over if we suddenly realise that the first 10,000 installed reactors have some fault and they all need to be replaced.

    676:

    Any nation that built an arsenal of plutonium nuclear weapons used purpose-built reactors to create the required Pu-239. There are a few power generating reactor designs that could be used to make pure Pu-239 such as the British Magnox and AGR, the Russian RMBK-4 and reportedly the Canadian CANDU (basically any reactor that can be refuelled "on the run"). There were very few of those ever built and all that are still operating are under NPT control. The goto power reactor designs being built today are multiple variants of the PWR which can't be short-cycled easily or at all.

    JBS mentions the requirement for cooling water for nuclear power stations but it's a necessity for all thermal power stations (coal, gas, whale oil). Cooling water is why nearly all nuclear power plants (such as Hinkley Point C) are built on coasts, even Barakah in the UAE which has probably the hottest cooling water dump of any large-scale thermal power station. For other locations there are large rivers such as the Missouri which provides cooling water for the inland Labadie coal power station or evaporation towers such as the ones providing turbine condenser cooling for the renewable wood-pellet power station at Drax.

    677:

    Well, I reckon there are two options for something that wants to be a dragon. I can see a proper one ending up being a bit like a semi-pelagic seabird, and living in the same sort of places - ie. isolated northern rocky bits where there are thousands of such seabirds and also seals, and not a lot else. The very small ones would skim the waves for oily plankton, medium size ones would eat petrels and things, and when they got big enough they would move on to seals. The full size adults would go back to sea as albatross-style gradient soarers, and prey on whales: wait for a whale to surface, breathe fire down its blowhole when it inhales, and then use the buoyancy provided by gaseous decomposition products to keep the carcass afloat while it picks all the blubber off the outside. I doubt they'd ever become very common because there simply wouldn't be enough prey to support much of a population, and there would be quite a narrow band between dragons outbreeding the available prey resources and causing them to crash, and too many dragons exploding before they get to breed to maintain a viable population.

    The other alternative is simply to cheat, and be something that isn't any kind of dragon at all but gets called one regardless. This is definitely known to work, but you don't get to breathe fire, you just get to do crappy things like give people blood poisoning with your spit.

    678:

    On the Motorail idea, I think the fundamental problem is the Business Case.

    If you want to set up such a service, you are competing against a number of alternatives:

    • Drive there yourself.

    • Take the train, then hire a car.

    • Take a plane, then hire a car.

    To win, you need a better trade-off on time/money/hassle for some significant part of the population.

    Given the price of rail tickets, it is generally cheaper to drive somewhere than to take even two people by rail. The only reason to take a train is if a car would be a positive hindrance at the far end, which basically means "if you are going to visit London". For a family of four the train is much more expensive than a car (assuming you have a car, but that's 90+% of the population).

    I don't know what Motorail would charge for taking the car, but I doubt it was much cheaper than a day or two of hiring a car. So it won't work for day trips or overnight. But if you are going somewhere for a week or more, the tiredness overhead of driving there starts to look like less of an issue anyway, and the fuel costs will still be less than any conceivable Motorail solution.

    There is no way that a train be faster an aircraft for a journey that takes more than 4 hours by surface (that is the lower limit that FlyBe use for their routes). So anyone who cares about time will simply take a plane and hire a car at the far end.

    Then you have overheads and limits on vehicle size. Trailers and caravans? Difficult to impossible. So many holidaymakers can't use the service anyway.

    Finally, you have the generally London-centric architecture of the UK rail system. London to Newcastle? No problem. Cardiff to Newcastle? Drive to Swansea and then change at London.

    There are a dwindling number of such services in Europe

    [Düsseldorf - Verona] Prices vary significantly, but 2 passengers in shared couchettes with a car might pay €280 each way in low season. With a private 2-bed sleeper, that might rise to €500 each way. A family of 2 adults, 2 children, car & dog with a whole 4-berth couchette to themselves might pay €469 each way. This can rise to over €950 in high summer.

    So to take the family on a summer holiday in Italy a German family has to pay €1,900. Or they could drive for 10 hours each way at a cost of roughly 50 litres of petrol, so say €200. Even if you throw in a motel room half way, its still a fraction of the price of taking the train.

    The only solutions to this are to heavily subsidise the rail operation or tax petrol at insane rates. Personally I'd favour the latter, as it would get people moving to electric cars faster.

    680:

    "the renewable wood-pellet power station at Drax."

    "I used to eat from Gascoigne Wood but now I just eat wood. I'm so green, I'm so green..."

    I am distinctly suspicious of that place. "Renewable biomass wood pellets" sounds awfully green for the press releases, but where does the material actually come from, and how genuinely sustainable are the sources? I suspect the answer is at best "not very much" and it's a publicity measure / regulations fiddle to avoid having to shut the place down - especially since Heteromeles has often pointed out that even things like growing your own forests don't count.

    And they all arrive by ship at Hull docks to begin with...

    681:

    For more or less similar reasons it also tends to fail as a ferry for people travelling just as themselves without vehicles, so they use planes instead (see for instance Charlie's reasoning on this exact point further up the page; he reaches very different conclusions from those I would reach, but then I wouldn't bother putting planes on the list of possible alternatives in the first place, whereas most people seem to be unfathomably keen to take quite the opposite view despite the entire air travel setup being apparently designed to inflict repeated strong encouragement to people to adopt my own viewpoint at every stage of the process).

    It's hardly unfathomable. Beyond a certain distance, planes are faster - and they are very often cheaper than trains.

    Sure, they are also uncomfortable, especially in the choice made by certain airlines to so aggressively make clear that your discomfort is their profit margin. But that just means that the choice is a compromise.

    I took the opportunity to visit (most) of my family before Christmas. There seemed to be something of a window of opportunity after finally getting vaccinated and before things kicked off too hard at Christmas. First time in 2 years to see my immediate family, 3 years for my last remaining grandparent; and between 4.5 years and 8 years for various cousins.

    That's me living in Trondheim, with family up and down England (from Weymouth to Newcastle), and I tried to at least drop in and say "hi" to as many of them as I could in the 10 days I could squeeze in.

    Now, to be sure, I knew that when I moved (first to Denmark, and then to Norway) that it would involve seeing much less of family than before - for all three reasons: time, cost, and how much pollution I could justify creating on my own behalf. That doesn't mean I don't want to see family occasionally. I can live without it, and if plane travel quintuples in price or thereabouts, it'll happen a lot less.

    Choices for getting from Trondheim to London include:

    • Direct flights
    • Flights via one (or more) of Bergen, Stavanger, Oslo, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Riga (!), Barcelona (!!!) and it gets progressively more crazy from there
    • Rail transport:
      • Trondheim-Oslo
      • Oslo-Gothenberg
      • Gothenburg-Copenhagen
      • Copenhagen-Hamburg
      • Hamburg-Brussels
      • Brussels-London
      • London-Peterborough.
    • Coach travel via much the same route

    As the crow flies, Trondheim to Peterborough is 1354km.

    As the plane flies (via Oslo), it's 1800km.

    As the train drives, it's 2400km.

    For flying, the door-to-door trip time was around 9 hours, of which 3 hours was spent on a plane, 2 hours on a train, and 5 hours faffing around waiting for stuff to line up. About typical, all told

    For taking the train, time spent just on the train is around 31 hours. I didn't add up all the interstitial time that an actual journey would make up, but I'd be surprised if it was less than 1.5 hours at each change of train, on average. Call it about 40 hours in transit, door to door.

    To be sure, a good 4 hours of that journey are absolutely gorgeous - climbing up Drivdalen from Berkåk to the summit of the Dovrefjell plateau, and then down into Gudbransdalen past Dombås to Lillehamar is spectacular. On the other hand, the other 36 hours... not so much. I've caught the train from Copenhagen to Hamburg often enough that I can fairly confidently state that you want to have a lot of books in your luggage.

    Cost-wise, option flight was about 3000kr to get to the UK and back home. The all-train option shows up as about 8500kr one way. And that doesn't account for any increased costs for food and/or accommodation on a 40hr journey vs a 9hr one, although those increased costs might be anywhere from 0 upwards, depending on what you prepare in advance.

    I budgeted for 20% of my holiday to travel (1 day each end of 10 days total). Budgetting for 60% of it to be travel (3 days each end of 10 days total) would not have been so interesting.

    It's true that I absolutely could have had a much longer holiday, enough to make it worth spending 6 days on travel instead of 2 (I have the right to take 3 weeks of holiday at once as a single chunk, I had multiple spare weeks of unused paid vacation last year, and both of my managers had exactly zero hesitation in approving about as much vacation as I cared to ask for) - but I absolutely recognise that that arises from being in a very cushy position compared to some.

    Now, to circle back to your observation that you don't even regard planes as an option: by all means, good for you. But to claim that you cannot concieve of a reason why anyone would consider them, you're being deliberately obtuse. Planes either allow you to go much further for the same time and money budget(*). When people are presented with the choice of "...or you can spend a lot more money to have a lot less time where you want to go, how about it?", then anyone professing surprise which option is chosen seems not to be firing on all cylinders.

    Finally, on the comfort angle - at least as far as Hamburg, I'd rate both SJ and DSB as much more comforrtable than a plane, I can't say the same of LNER from London up to Peterborough, and I have no idea in the legs between Hamburg and London. Given the choice between being very unfomfortable for 3 hours, vs mildly uncomfortable for 12 hours, I would have to at least think about it before giving an answer. As the saying goes, quantity has a quality all of its own.

    (*)They shouldn't be cheaper, but they are.

    682:

    (And later decided they didn't want them after all and took them apart again.)

    i think it might have been more that they didn't want to bequeath them to the anc

    683:

    I think the second option, big lizard with horrible spit, will be the starting point. Luckily, unlike a global crash program to build 100,000 reactors virtually overnight, some mistakes can be made along the way without everyone dying.

    So start there, and then modify as you go. Sadly, as you point out, returning dragons to the wild will be hard. Particularly with the current low whale population.

    As they say, sacrifices will have to be made. Human ones. I think St George may have been an outlier. After all, you don't get famous for killing a dragon if any old bloke can off a dozen with some oversize cutlery. So encourage young lads to go off dragon hunting (tell them the girls love it).

    The full on flying ones... Bit hard. Might need a thicker atmosphere and lower gravity. Titan for instance.

    Plus if you supply the dragon with oxygen, its exhalation should burn nicely in a methane rainstorm.

    684:

    Finally, you have the generally London-centric architecture of the UK rail system. London to Newcastle? No problem. Cardiff to Newcastle? Drive to Swansea and then change at London.
    Which ignores the bit upthread where I discuss an actual service that was routed through Newcastle and Bristol.

    685:

    There's been a few bits in Private Eye, mostly Old Sparky's column, about how bad Drax actually is. I seem to remember the wood pellets are shipped over from Canada :) If I remember rightly, while it can in theory burn waste wood, it doesn't get as much power from that, so it burns denser wood from mature forests, which gives more energy. Alas, this releases all that carbon the trees are made from as CO2, at which point you'd be better off just burning gas and leaving the trees alone.

    686:

    I think St George may have been an outlier. After all, you don't get famous for killing a dragon if any old bloke can off a dozen with some oversize cutlery

    Actually, if you take a look at the old paintings of said old bloke offing dragons with oversize cutlery he shows up as a bit of a dick with a good PR department. For instance, have a look at this one, paying close attention to what the damsel in supposed distress is holding in her right hand. Yup, our hero has just stabbed someones pet.

    687:

    Dragons, like unicorns, are very plausible - IF you drop the straw man fetish of the Victorian lunacies. Chinese dragons are wingless, and breathing fire could be belching and igniting methane. All right, they might be herbivorous, but so what? :-)

    688:

    "Given the price of rail tickets, it is generally cheaper to drive somewhere than to take even two people by rail."

    It's generally cheaper to drive somewhere than to take one person by rail. Sometimes this even remains true if you buy a banger especially for the trip and then scrap it afterwards. As I said, trains start off at a significant disadvantage relative to cars for that reason. Train fares need to be limited such that it is possible to go to the station whenever you happen to feel like it, buy a ticket, get on the next train and go wherever, for less money than you would put in the tank if you drove it instead. This is a more general problem which needs to be sorted out in any case.

    "...the generally London-centric architecture of the UK rail system. London to Newcastle? No problem. Cardiff to Newcastle? Drive to Swansea and then change at London."

    I am not suggesting reinstantiating an exact replica of the BR Motorail network, and certainly not the dafter features of it. Since Cardiff had its own Motorail facility and all Motorail trains from Swansea had to pass through Cardiff anyway, things like "live in Cardiff, drive to Swansea" are particularly outstanding examples of daftness to be avoided. Unloading/reloading instead of remarshalling portions is another avoidable failing of unnecessary inflexibility. The London-centric layout of the physical rail network is certainly unsatisfactory, but the faults with the logical layout and operations of the Motorail network were not down to deficiencies in physical connectivity, but deficiencies in the way they chose to use it.

    The logical network would in any case need to be differently designed in order to incorporate the Channel Tunnel, and in relation to that the London-centric physical layout is not in conflict with the requirements anyway. A lot of the reason why the Channel Tunnel is a pain in the arse to get to is that from most parts of the country all routes to it are a variation of "head for London, then either blunder your way through it or fight your way around it", purely because of where London and the Channel Tunnel are. The railway version is "get to London and then use the link to the direct line to the Channel Tunnel", so the physical shape of the network is well aligned with the required routing.

    689:

    I think that was the one we used when we did a family holiday in Scotland. We lived in Poole, and I seem to recall driving to Devon, staying overnight with family, drive to Newton Abbots and then up North on the train. It was either Carlisle or Newcastle we de-trained, and drove from there to Fort William (I vaguely recall driving through the Gorbals). This would have been in the late 60's/early 70's.

    690:

    Trondheim is about as inaccessible as it gets in Europe! The first point is that we must cure our "I need it NOW" addiction, which would end up you having to live with Trondheim's limitations, or moving. That's what we used to do. No, we cannot solve the climate change catastrophe without sacrifices.

    The second is not to confuse the current situation, where flying and driving have been prioritised (and subsidised) for half a century, with what we could reasonably do. The simplest way (not necessarily the best) to get from Trondheim to the UK would be a fastish ferry to Aberdeen, and a fast train south. Yes, it would take a complete day, but it would be low stress. Of course, it would require those services to exist, which they don't at present.

    691:

    I agree that it's not the same. What really gets my goat is the removal of all non-trivial luggage facilities, so that I can't even take my recumbent trike on a train. And, to a great extent, the same is true for people with motorised wheelchairs.

    A better way to solve the car transport problem would be to resolve the hire problems (and restore the luggage handling facilities). Yes, it's more hassle.

    692:

    IIRC the wood pellets come from the US southern states where there's a lot more sunshine per annum than the Frozen North. They're processed and shipped via diesel-burning train to, I think New Orleans where they get trans-shipped onto bunker-fuel burning ships and thence to the UK where they get loaded onto more trains, also diesel-burning before arriving at Drax where they suddenly become Green as fuck.

    There's some talk about sourcing pellets for Drax from eastern Europe but I don't know how far that's progressed. There are a couple of very small generating plants that burn wood waste from pulp mills and the like but they produce a few MW at best. Drax needs several trainloads of wood pellets each day to keep running at full power.

    If you want to work it out yourself, a fossil thermal power station needs about three million tonnes of carbon to generate 1GW all year round. Anthracite is very high in carbon, lignite is maybe 50% by weight in comparison. Wood usually has a large moisture content which doesn't contribute to the energy produced. You can get the same amount of electricity by burning 18 billion cubic metres of gas in CCGT plant a year and that's cheap and Green too. In contrast a nuclear power plant "burns" about a tonne of fissile material to generate the same amount of electricity in a year and its waste is totally self-contained.

    693:

    Ive planned rail trips for family that cant fly for medical reasons. It is in fact possible to beat the Trondheim->scotland air trip on price. You just did your shopping wrong. You buy an interrail pass instead of actual tickets.

    Not that I would recommend this particular trip unless you are in fact doing a "Visit major european cities" whistle stop vacation. Too much of a detour.

    694:

    Well, in your timeframe you'd be pre M8, so you would have to pass through the East End or South Side of Glasgow on 30mph surface streets to get onto the one road that would take you to Fort William.

    695:

    Did someone say dragons? We can do very much better than the options presented. If, that is, we get away from the classical western tropes or the Chinese dragon.

    Why trash those? Well, basically, they're all chimeric symbols, not biology. A winged, poisonous worm is really an anti-angel. Or, if you get back into the Greeks with Typhon, a symbol for a really bad storm. The actual chimera is a natural gas leak that has caught fire, and apparently it smells like a goat and roared like a dragon. So fire breathing dragon plus goatish smell plus roaring=chimera. A lot of dragons work this way: they're basically warning signs to help you identify a threat if you're illiterate. And they're absolutely wonderful at that role. We should do the same, really.

    As for living dragons, let's pitch dinosaurs for the moment. While some people do try to bend them into dragons, there's an equal (and more correct) interpretation of theropod tracks as made by giant evil birds. So let's leave them in the mesozoic.

    If you want flying pterosaur models, they don't have to be pelagic. The biggest ones were terrestrial predators of small dinosaurs, more like storks the size of giraffes. You can read about them here: https://markwitton-com.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-we-think-giant-pterosaurs-could-fly.html (Mark's a paleontologist and a professional paleo-artist).

    As for giant soarers, let's take a detour into climate science. Albatrosses basically surf the wind, primarily in the Southern Ocean where there's a lot of wind, and, per the old sailors, no God south of 50 degrees. That's true in our current, ice house world. Giant albatrosses are well-adapted to live in those winds. But prior to around 5 million years ago, the world was a hot house, there was much less of a thermal gradient between the poles and the equator, and very probably those southern winds didn't exist. There were even bigger giant seabirds then (google Pseudotooth birds) as well as Pteranodons, but according to those who have studied their anatomy, they rode thermals, rather than soaring the winds bouncing off waves. So if you want a soaring dragon on a hothouse world, probably it's more accurate to have it soar like a big vulture, whether it's over land or sea.

    Or there's the traditional option: crocodilians. Many southeast Asian dragons have terms that are etymologically related to crocodile. And we know the basic body plan scales up to well over 10 meters in length, based on Mesozoic fossils. In some ecosystems, they were (and are) the top predators, chomping down on dinosaurs then and the occasional human now.

    If you want to make croccy-dragons scarier, there are a couple of things you can do. One is make a more intelligent crocodilian. Given that they've been known to use tools in hunting already, that's not the most pleasant thought.

    The other is to make them ecosystem engineers, that modify their wetland or riverine homes (a la beavers perhaps) to make them more comfortable and to produce more prey. This isn't very far-fetched, because alligators do this already. You can google gator-hole for the details.

    Personally, I think a world where disturbingly intelligent, disturbingly large crocodile-like reptiles deliberately managed the local water sources for their needs, not mine, would be quite the SFF setting. Especially if they were mostly (or entirely) bulletproof, so there was little you could do about it. Sort of like an un-holey and very wet version of 40,000 in Gehenna perhaps.

    696:

    Speaking as a parent, I do value the child care aspect of schools. …

    …For better or worse, we have a large scale institution upon which most families depend for child care, education and support. Having that disappear was catastrophic, more so for my wife who works at home.

    I don't know about BC, but here in Ontario the child care aspect isn't funded or supported by the government. It's assumed that because teachers are caring people they will volunteer time and money to care for children outside school hours — just as Harris assumed that because nurses are caring people they can cut wages and numbers and those left will pick up the slack so their patients don't suffer*. (Which logic Ford was also following pre-pandemic.)

    I'm not arguing that the child care aspect isn't important; I am arguing that it should be explicit and part of contract negotiations and workload calculations, not to mention a line item on the budget so it isn't a hidden subsidy**.

    The Ontario government recognized the child care part last year when the closed schools to all students except special education kids requiring in-person accommodations and the children of essential workers. I wonder a bit whether the voluntary child-care parts (before- and after-school programs) were running at all schools, or whether management actually had to pay teachers to cover those times.

    *Which Harris actually said.

    **I know at least one school that, pre-pandemic, used a continuing education budget to fund after-school supervision. Supposedly it was tutoring, but it was essentially a bunch of kids in a room with a teacher or two waiting for parents to pick them up, with no instruction going on — or even possible in the din.

    697:

    gasdive
    PLEASE STOP IT. You live at approx 33°S .. . We keep on telling you that IT ISN'T GOING TO WORK at above 45 or 50°N but you refuse to listen. Ask Charlie @ 55°N if you won't listen to me, OK?

    Paul
    "Cardiff to Newcastle?"
    Swansea is in the WRONG DIRECTION ...
    Hourly Cardiff-Nottingham service / change @ Birmingham for Newcastle OR equally, change @ Bristol ....
    [ SEE ALSO paws @ 686 ]

    EC
    Car Hire is USELESS if you are in full control of your faculties, but over 75.
    "They" simply will not hire you a vehicle.

    698:

    As I said earlier, that's one of the problems that needs fixing.

    699:

    gasdive @ 685: After all, you don't get famous for killing a dragon if any old bloke can off a dozen with some oversize cutlery.

    The Worldbuilding Stack Exchange has some questions about dragon/modern crossovers. This one was particularly interesting (TL;DR: Smaug vs Marine Expeditionary Unit --- Smaug is toast)

    700:

    Looking at train vs car in the UK: travel from Edinburgh to Plymouth, 480 miles train: time 8.5 hours (no changes), cost £79 car : time 8.2 hours (no stops!), petrol cost £76, "taxable cost" £170..£216 where taxable cost is from inland revenue's estimate of actual cost per mile

    701:

    IIRC the wood pellets come from the US southern states where there's a lot more sunshine per annum than the Frozen North. They're processed and shipped via diesel-burning train to, I think New Orleans where they get trans-shipped onto bunker-fuel burning ships and thence to the UK where they get loaded onto more trains, also diesel-burning before arriving at Drax where they suddenly become Green as fuck.

    A large amount of wood pellets are made from hardwoods in the eastern end of North Carolina. Between I95 and the coast. And is pelleted then shipped from Wilmington or maybe Elizabeth City to Europe and other places. It was big in the news a while back when Germany was all about wood pellets for home heating as a green way to shut down nuclear. Per the EU regs on such things biomass (wood pellets) are better than coal. Except it is not.

    Oh well.

    https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/07/us/american-south-biomass-energy-invs/

    702:

    Not that I would recommend this particular trip unless you are in fact doing a "Visit major european cities" whistle stop vacation. Too much of a detour.

    Yes. Every time I've looked at a possible trip going across Europe via rail it only seems to work well (easily or cheap) in Germany. And the interrail pass does make it cheaper but ... I can sleep in a seat one night every now and then but am too old to do it night after night.

    London to Paris, Brussels, or Amsterdam makes sense and you can get it priced right. But you need to understand you're car less at each end.

    703:

    but over 75. "They" simply will not hire you a vehicle.

    Come across the pond. They will here. :)

    704:

    Looking at train vs car in the UK: travel from Edinburgh to Plymouth, 480 miles train: time 8.5 hours (no changes), cost £79 car : time 8.2 hours (no stops!), petrol cost £76, "taxable cost" £170..£216 where taxable cost is from inland revenue's estimate of actual cost per mile

    Except of course train prices in the UK are highly variable.

    I just looked and for your route travel next weekend the cheapest price is £120.

    And of course taking the train has additional costs - taxi/transit to the station in Edinburgh and taxi's/transit/car rental in Plymouth.

    Unless going into London it is hard to make rail work from a cost only perspective.

    Then you need to consider that the train (in the UK) is no longer a comfortable experience for many/most for long distances with poor choice on seat specification and the desire to stuff each coach with as many seats as possible. Few people would happily spend 8 hours on a British train these days (sadly).

    705:

    Every time I've looked at a possible trip going across Europe via rail it only seems to work well (easily or cheap) in Germany.

    For the last couple of years, we've thought of making a train trip in the Central Europe. Sadly, Finland being where it is, there is no direct train route short enough to use only them. Our plan is to take the Helsinki-Stockholm ferry and then use trains to go to Germany and France, and maybe the Benelux countries, too. It's two nights to Berlin (start with the afternoon ferry to Stockholm, arrives in Stockholm the following morning, spend some time there, then take the night train to Berlin.

    Then Berlin-Paris is an another night train, so doable.

    This obviously means that a long weekend trip is out of the question, and the shortest time for the holiday would be about two weeks. It's not unthinkable, though, and once one gets to let's say Berlin, things get easier. It's the Finland-everything else which is annoying (ferries are not very environmentally sound, for example).

    There's a route via the Baltic countries and Poland, but to my best knowledge that requires more changes and the occasional bus. A friend of mine occasionally takes that route to Poland, and they're my best source for this, so there might be some other option, too.

    (I think I've mentioned this here earlier, too.)

    Flying is obviously 2-3 hours to any of these locations, so it's much easier and faster...

    706:

    Heteromeles @ 665:

    There are still unresolved problems with nuclear power (primarily what to do with spent fuel & non-proliferation) and the political roadblocks are formidable. But it's not impossible

    Along with non-proliferation, I'd flag the competition for sand for concrete, and the problem of finding enough stable water for cooling, are just as bad if not worse.

    And so the lack of a perfect solution becomes the enemy of functional solutions. I don't think we can afford to rule out nuclear power just because it's difficult.

    Nor do I believe wind & solar power alone are going to be sufficient to supply our energy needs going forward, especially as the demand for electrical power will grow as we begin to phase out fossil fuels.

    707:

    David L
    IF ... you are actually "in" London/Paris/Brussel/Amsterdam - then you don't need or want a car.

    708:

    How long flying takes depends on how easy it is to get to an airport that has flights to where you want to go to, its security and check-in theatres, and whether the flights are likely to be on-time. The flying time for short-haul is small by comparison.

    709:

    You might at the other end. :)

    Or not. My point was getting between those cities by rail has reasonable timelines, times of departure/arrival, and the fares are not too bad.

    But one thing I wanted/want to do in France is visit Normany and Oradour-sur-Glane but you really can't do that without some very long (time wise) train and bus combinations or just rent a car.

    I'd also like to visit Paris again. Last time was for about 30 hours and a bit rushed. And yes for that you don't need a car. But why does Paris do such a good job of hiding the subway entrances?

    710:

    Train fares need to be limited such that it is possible to go to the station whenever you happen to feel like it, buy a ticket, get on the next train and go wherever, for less money than you would put in the tank if you drove it instead. This is a more general problem which needs to be sorted out in any case.

    To be clear, I am very much pro-train.

    But what you want simply isn't going to happen in the UK.

    Ignoring the whole privatization issue, the biggest problem the UK rail network has is a lack of capacity.

    Given that lack of capacity, one of the functions of the current pricing is to restrict access.

    The problem with the UK's capacity issue is there are no easy fixes - anything (like HS2) is going to cost lots of money.

    711:

    There’s no silicone in sand. Remember -

    • Silicon Valley is where computers live.
    • Silicone valley is LA, where artificial boobs live.

    I live @ 51N. Despite the west coast being often rather grey, we still get decent though not spectacular performance from solar panels. Lots of people have them. We also don’t have nukes. We also get almost all our bulk power from renewable resources. Living above 45N does not require nuclear power.

    Trains: well I have a bit of experience with both use and engineering there. The plausible benefits of trains really come down to a few factors, some of which are also serious problems.

    • the general efficiency of running hard rolling materials together as opposed to squishy tyres on medium hard tarmac, or desperately flinging air downwards in order to stay above ground
    • having a number of people in the same transport unit so only one has to pay attention. You hope...
    • relatively compact route provisions
    • fairly centralized control

    But the latter three also cost. The size of the transport unit reduces flexibility in some measure probably related to the cube of the number of people or worse. Combined with the penultimate item, you have to do some variety of star or hub/spoke etc topology with all the person-time waste that causes. The centralized control can support safety but tends to result in a system being run for the benefit of the system, not the users.

    If it were practical to have various size of transport unit running independently on the rails you could consider a much more flexible system where a small number of people (ie one or more) could request travel from a location that rarely needs service, to some other location. A large group- commuters, say - might have sufficient commonality of location and time to use the DamnBigTrain. Mixing the sizes dynamically should be easy but probably wouldn’t.

    This is the big win for cars. You go where & when you want. It could be done with rail, though the initial investment would be interesting. Maybe cleverness could produce vehicles that can use roads where required and rails when available (and yes, I have seen and even been in weird-ass attempts to make some) without the extreme complications of those old motorrail things.

    712:

    After all, there is a period of at least five years or so when it makes no difference whether or not schools are repurposed as merely places to dump the kids.

    Yes/no.

    First, there is a reason Ontario under the previous government implemented Jr. Kindergarten - takes one year off the problem.

    But the financial hit for say 4 years of childcare is different than the financial hit for 12 years (assuming you are willing to roll the dice at 12 and allow them home alone).

    Then when they do start school the school day is shorter than the employment day so there still needs to be at least one parent at home to cover the bits at the ends.

    Except schools find workarounds to provide a childcare service after regular school hours, or local government funds after school programs at community centres that really are glorified child minding.

    For many (most?) kids once they are in full time school there is no one home when school ends.

    713:

    We now find that most countries don't actually want nuclear weapons because in so many ways they are more hassle than they're worth.

    Not only that: nuclear weapons are militarily obsolete. That is, they were invented to solve a specific problem (in the early 1940s), that problem now has other solutions: meanwhile nuclear weapons are politically impossible to use.

    Original goal: strategic bombing during WW2 was aimed at knocking out enemy strategic manufacturing and materials production. Factories, in other words. But bombers were so inaccurate that the CEP of a 1942 RAF heavy night bomber (before H2S radar came along) was measured in miles. So the then-solution was the thousand bomber raid: you throw the entire air force at a single target, and maybe have a 50/50 chance of knocking it out, while taking 3-5% casualties in a single night.

    An air force that takes even 2% casualties in one day or night is no longer going to be a fighting force after a month or two. Hence the strategic requirement for the A-bomb.

    ... But A-bombs rapidly became militarily unusable because H-bombs also existed, and to use one would invite retaliation and escalation -- not least, because you couldn't use strategic weapons (a thousand bomber raid or an A-bomb) against a factory without wiping out the homes and families of the workers employed there.

    Fast-forward to the late 1960s, and the USAF got to play with PAVEWAY, laser-guided bombs that were the ancestors of modern smart bombs. Initially for dropping bridges in North Vietnam, it turned out that one PAVEWAY mission (two planes, one with laser designator, one with a bomb) could reliably accomplish a mission that had previously taken about 200 conventional bombing runs.

    Then fast-forward to 1990 and the Kuwait campaign and the first use of JDAM -- a GPS guidance pack that could be bolted onto the nose of a dumb WW2-surplus 500lb bomb to turn it into a smart bomb. Smart bombs were less than 10% of the bombs dropped during that campaign, but inflicted more than 90% of the damage.

    ... And now, smart bombs are ubiquitous, and a single B-52H can carry up to 70 of the things on a single flight and use them to take out an entire armoured brigade, or every cellphone tower in a city.

    And because they're non-nuclear they're not a political hot potato that invites strategic escalation and mass civilian casualties.

    714:

    That only works in major major cities with dense population. And even then it seems to need to be subsidized. NYC is mostly that way with midnight to dawn being short of many trains. But even then when I'm in NYC I get on trains where breath room is tight at times or others where a few of us can pick a car for ourselves. And situations in the middle. Other than going to and from a "normal" day job it's hard to predict load day to day. Over time yes, but day to day, nope.

    715:

    Gotta get the freight TO Alaska somehow. A rail line across Canada would be cost competitive (allowing for having to amortize construction costs). I think it would also be competitive in terms of reducing carbon emissions.

    The only way a railway connecting Alaska to the rail network in Canada would be cost competitive is if the US government paid the capital cost of building it and handed the completed line over to someone to operate.

    Reading Wikipedia there are repeated proposals to make such a link that go nowhere (the latest by Trump).

    A quick look and its 800 to 1200 miles in straight lines to connect the routes that are proposed - given the mountainous terrain there is no way any line would be close to be straight.

    For comparison, the ring of fire region in Northern Ontario has proposals for a rail line to transport the ore out. That is estimated at $2b for a mere 200 miles and while the terrain in northern Ontario is great, I'm guessing it will be a lot easier than connecting Alaska.

    So call it $15b or more to connect Alaska to the rest of the rail network.

    That is a lot of money to connect a State of less than a million people - and whose primary existence (oil) is doomed.

    716:

    Euuropcar has no maximum age (at most branches in the UK), so go for it, hire a car!

    717:

    "I don't think we can afford to rule out nuclear power just because it's difficult."

    Nuclear power is not "being ruled out", it is priced out.

    The core aspect of nuclear power people tend to overlook is how totally impossible it is to fit it into anything resembling a free market.

    In USA nuclear power is the poster-boy of the centralized planned economy: It takes enormous electrical utilities, with for all practical purposes have taxing-powers, to afford to build a nuclear reactor.

    In all other countries, nuclear reactors are Matters Of State, even if they are technically owned by an electrical utility.

    Ohh, and forget everything about private insurance, the state picks up the tab if it goes wrong or bancrupt.

    Once a reactor is built, at great(er) expense and invariably delayed, it has to run at full bore all the time, to minimize how uneconomical it is, even if that means shooting cheaper and cleaner power sources in the knees by regulatory means.

    The reason nuclear reactors have continously grown and grown and grown, is the failed attempt to amortize their huge fixed costs (capital, security and production) over as many GWh as possible.

    That has been it's achilleus-heel from the very first day, it has always been "but if we make the next model larger, it will have better economy" but in practice that has never happened, the fixed costs and construction delays seem to scale super-linearly with the power.

    In an irony which is hard to fathom, the facist adjacent neo-liberals in the "startup-world" have now 'invented' mini-nukes: Small, easy to transport, cash-on-delivery, future superfund-sites, but they still have the exact same fundamental problem: Unless you run them at continuously at 100% capacity, the economy goes south.

    But there are still two reasons why nuclear power will not go away:

    a) Countries with a nuclear deterrent need a post-deployment career-path for their sailors.

    b) In many polar geographies, there are no realistic CO2-clean alternatives.

    "Nuclear: When there are no alternatives"

    718:

    Pigeon @ 666: Eurostar do something which looks the same but isn't really: functionally it's just another cross-Channel vehicle-carrying ferry that happens to go under the sea rather than on top of it. It's a means for getting past an obstacle that is otherwise impassable and so compels everything to use some kind of ferry, not an additional method of covering distance that is also coverable by plenty of other methods including walking if you really want to. In its present form it is also constrained to remain as such and not become anything more, because it uses wagons big enough to put lorries completely inside and shut the door (for anti-fire reasons), which are consequently too big to extend their journeys onto the rest of the railway network on either side.

    The thing I don't get is why the whole lorry has to be inside. I don't even see the reason for taking the whole lorry through. Y'all invented intermodal freight (and passenger service) and even if you needed the cargo box to keep its wheels along (instead of just the container itself) do you really need to transport the tractor portion back & forth?

    And if it's just the trailer and/or freight container without the tractor it could be loaded on an open flat car. The fire risk should be minimized enough that it wouldn't require an enclosed car. The enclosed carriages should be used for automobiles & work van sized vehicles that people could be riding in.

    It seems to do pretty well as a lorry ferry, but I'm thinking more in terms of people acting on their own desires making journeys because they want to rather than doing what their employer tells them to. It's a lot less attractive as a car ferry because it starts from an out-of-the-way corner of England which is a pain in the arse to get to from nearly everywhere, and if you're heading basically Francewards the place it comes out on the other side is usually also inconvenient, so people often prefer to use ordinary boat-type car ferries from Southampton or even Plymouth. For more or less similar reasons it also tends to fail as a ferry for people travelling just as themselves without vehicles, so they use planes instead (see for instance Charlie's reasoning on this exact point further up the page; he reaches very different conclusions from those I would reach, but then I wouldn't bother putting planes on the list of possible alternatives in the first place, whereas most people seem to be unfathomably keen to take quite the opposite view despite the entire air travel setup being apparently designed to inflict repeated strong encouragement to people to adopt my own viewpoint at every stage of the process).

    What I am thinking desirable is something like the former Motorail network but including the Channel Tunnel as an integrated route and linking into the same kind of network on the Continental side (I have not the foggiest idea whether or not there actually are currently any Motorail-type services on the Continent, but that's by the by), and including passenger-only or passenger-also services in its scope as well as passengers-plus-their-cars. Indeed they did originally propose to do at least the passenger-only bit, and even got as far as building the trains to do it with, which then ended up sat in sidings doing nothing for years because they never mustered the arse to make it work. (Also of course we should have fucking well joined Schengen no later than the point when the Channel Tunnel first opened, fucking border-obsessed wanker governments rant rant swear...)

    I'm thinking that here in the states you might want to combine a couple of vehicle carriages with a lounge car ... it might have roomettes or berths, but mainly comfortable seating so people could get out of their vehicles on an extended journey. It's also where you can put the rest-rooms (WC) and locate a canteen so people could buy prepared food and/or use a microwave to heat their own food.

    But you'd want the vehicle carriage - lounge car combination to be designed so passengers could safely walk between their vehicles & the lounge car. And for that, I think the kind of carriages I've seen on YouTube of people taking the the Channel Tunnel trains would be ideal.

    The idea is (a) to provide an obviously-straightforward alternative to planes for people who are travelling out of their own desire, and (b) to enhance the attraction by making it equally straightforward to take their own car with them, so they aren't stuck at the other end with no means of getting around and exploring the place. (The attraction of the kind of "holiday" where you go by plane and then spend 2 weeks stuck in a tower block overlooking a beach is entirely opaque to me for all cases that don't set keeping sandcastle-oriented little kids occupied as their first priority, but surely people must get fucking bored before their time is up and would appreciate being able to get out and around the area a bit.)

    I do think that to make it work it would be necessary at least in the initial stages to drop the idea of a train as a single entity which proceeds from a single origin to a single destination, and instead adopt the model of being able to attach sub-trains from different origins and shed sub-trains to different destinations as it proceeds along its route. But this used to be standard practice in Britain in any case, whose abandonment I deplore, and I believe there are at least some examples of it in existence on the Continent.

    That's pretty much how freight trains already work in the U.S. I don't see any reason why the moto-train cars couldn't be done the same way. Add them to a freight train that's already going from here to there.

    719:

    Along with non-proliferation, I'd flag the competition for sand for concrete, and the problem of finding enough stable water for cooling, are just as bad if not worse. And so the lack of a perfect solution becomes the enemy of functional solutions. I don't think we can afford to rule out nuclear power just because it's difficult. Nor do I believe wind & solar power alone are going to be sufficient to supply our energy needs going forward, especially as the demand for electrical power will grow as we begin to phase out fossil fuels.

    If the supply of energy shrinks, increased demand just makes people more efficient. More generally, I work all the time with projects that are conceptually useful and actually nonfunctional, and I'm still looking for a place in the western US where a new nuke could a) be built and b) if built, continue to operate without dealing with serious catastrophes. I'm pretty sure such a place doesn't exist. Given how urgently we need to rebuild most of the recent cities (LA, San Diego, Sacramento, Portland, Seattle) with the same resources, I'm pretty sure that solar and wind are going to continue to grow, and we'll just have to deal with having less energy to do stuff with.

    Anyway, to make a point about sand: it's a particle size (0.5 to 2.0 mm), not a chemical. Obviously, you want sand that's tough, so silica (not silicon) sand is fairly useful for a lot of things.

    The concrete issue is that good concrete uses what's generically known as sharp sand. These particles are angular, which means that when you pack them tightly and bind them with cement of some sort, they tend to be quite strong. Desert sands, conversely, are often tumbled by the wind, so that the particles are blobular and quite smooth. This kind of sand doesn't make very good cement, because the particles can turn against each other under pressure and shear the cement away from the particle, weakening the structure.

    While I'm quite sure there's competition for sharp silica sand, the chip makers can use rounded silica sand, such as one finds in the Sand Counties of Wisconsin and elsewhere. I've looked at enough of that sand under a microscope that I can testify it's pretty rounded, due to glacial action.

    720:

    "a GPS guidance pack that could be bolted onto the nose of a dumb WW2-surplus 500lb bomb to turn it into a smart bomb"

    Where "smart bomb" can accurately be expanded into "short-range, maneuverable, precision glide bomb." IIRC, under typical release conditions JDAMS have about 15 miles cross-range capability and corresponding along-track maneuverability. The aircraft can even fly past the target before releasing the JDAM and the bomb can turn around and fly back, striking within ~7 meters of the target in almost all cases.

    http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/weapons/q0250.shtml

    721:

    The government already subsidizes automobiles, trucks, trains & airplanes. Those subsidies are only going to increase as the U.S. tries to keep the economy functioning in the face of climate change, especially when the EAST Coast moves west of I-95 and the WEST Coast ends up somewhere on the other side of California's central valley. Why shouldn't we ask them to subsidize something useful?

    You can ask.

    Why can't you piggyback off AmTrak's existing services?

    Go on YouTube, people have filmed using the Auto Train. It is time consuming at each end.

    And Amtrak, like passenger operators all over the world, has done their best to eliminate mid-route adding/subtracting of cars given the operational hassles.

    So either the routes need to start in the middle of nowhere where the land for a terminal is available, or you need to attempt to get the billions to create terminals in the middle of cities (and most potential customers wouldn't drive into anyway).

    Anyway, AmTrak needs to be expanded into a FULL nationwide, integrated passenger service,

    I agree, but...

    As I noted, both Amtrak and VIA have serious funding shortfalls just attempting to maintain their existing levels of service, the idea of any sort of major expansion simply isn't going to happen. To jump ahead and provide a second answer to a point you raise below, even from a SF/Fantasy perspective what you propose simply wouldn't be believable as it falls into the same category as world peace and us dealing with climate change in the next 5 years - it simply isn't going to happen.

    In the next 8 years VIA is facing the elimination of their Vancouver-Toronto (The Canadian) and Montreal- Halifax (Ocean) services as the equipment is life-expired - there are currently no plans for the C$3b or so to replace that equipment (and remember, delivery is 3 to 4 years after the bidding process is announced).

    Amtrak is also facing the problem of replacing their aging fleet of equipment - and that is without getting into truly major issues like the Penn Station tunnels between NYC and NJ.

    Now Amtrak will probably eventually get the needed funding, but it will be a battle leaving nothing left to fight for expanding service.

    Now factor in that the North American freight railroads have zero serious plans to move away from diesel fuel...

    but you don't have to rely strictly on AmTrak's current facilities; existing intermodal FREIGHT terminals could be expanded & adapted.

    The freight railways aren't going to allow Amtrak anywhere near their existing facilities.

    And you don't have to replace or duplicate passenger service, add the auto-train cars to existing FREIGHT services.

    North American freight operators do not move time sensitive stuff.

    If you attempted to add your Amtrak auto-carriers to the existing freight service you would be lucky if you car arrived at your destination within 3 days, and it could even be 5.

    The freight railroads are about bulk transit of materials that are not time sensitive.

    Yet, as impossible as it appears to be for the U.S. & Canada to resolve those issues, somehow the UK, France & the EU manage to cope with them.

    Really?

    There are, within Schengen, no borders so any auto-train type service within Schengen is possible (I don't know if it exists or not)

    There is no Auto-Train type service between the UK and the EU.

    (the Channel Tunnel is not such a service - passengers remain in their cars and the isolated nature of the service means you pass through customs/immigration in your car at the respective end)

    This discussion is taking place on a Science Fiction/Fantasy author's blog. Why limit your wants to only what's realistic?

    Would you really, in a SF/Fantasy concept, create a continent wide Auto-Train network?

    Or would you just have abundant self-driving free taxi service at each end eliminating the personal car?

    Or go Back to the Future and they just fly their car to their destination with their Mr. Fusion.

    PS: It could be done, and I think should be done. YMMV.

    I would like nothing better than for a serious expansion not just of VIA and Amtrak but also public transit and all the other things that are better environmentally - but much like wishing the Toronto Maple Leafs even get to let alone win the Stanley Cup (hasn't happened in my lifetime of 52 years) it isn't going to happen (and to be clear I am not one of the deluded Leaf fans who keep their arena sold out every game year after year after year - I gave up on the Leafs 30+ years ago).

    722:

    Not only that: nuclear weapons are militarily obsolete. That is, they were invented to solve a specific problem (in the early 1940s), that problem now has other solutions: meanwhile nuclear weapons are politically impossible to use.

    Agreed. Nukes are political weapons now, the ultimate exemplars of the Vimes Law of Weapon Design ("weapons are primarily made to be seen, not used.")

    That said, JDAMs only cost around $25,000/unit, so...well, that's five hours of flight for an F-18, and probably most militaries can't afford to have very many of them, or planes to launch them.

    This gets to another level, which is that in asymmetric warfare, expensive weapons can be turned against the user, in an attrition campaign of IEDs versus smart bombs and similar. Eventually, invaders with expensive weapons rack up too high a butcher's bill to get it paid for in loot from the country they invaded, and have to concede defeat and leave. So far, the smart bombers haven't done very well at winning such campaigns.

    723:

    Nojay @ 678: JBS mentions the requirement for cooling water for nuclear power stations but it's a necessity for all thermal power stations (coal, gas, whale oil). Cooling water is why nearly all nuclear power plants (such as Hinkley Point C) are built on coasts, even Barakah in the UAE which has probably the hottest cooling water dump of any large-scale thermal power station. For other locations there are large rivers such as the Missouri which provides cooling water for the inland Labadie coal power station or evaporation towers such as the ones providing turbine condenser cooling for the renewable wood-pellet power station at Drax.

    I didn't mention it. Heteromeles raised it as an objection to nuclear power. The one power plant I'm intimately familiar with reuses cooling water. They have a small lake (created by daming a creek) for makeup water (to replace that lost by evaporation). Google Maps: 35.56694770954751, -78.9644602606429, but mostly they use the same water over & over.

    I was not only an iron worker building the nuclear plant (containment & reactor auxiliary buildings), I worked on the dam that impounds Harris Lake (the spillway is reinforced concrete, so iron workers did the reinforcement).

    I didn't work on the cooling tower. It wasn't started until after I was working for the burglar alarm company.

    724:

    The OJP and other sites that talk to the same API with a clone of the same crappy client software have a nasty habit of doing their best to conceal the actually useful fare information and instead present you with deceptive and crappy fares based around interpreting the observation that airlines pull all kinds of shit on people not as an example of how not to do it, but as confirmation that it's OK. I have written my own client because I got fed up with the official one being such utter dogshit in that and in other matters, and one of the things it does is make its best attempt to rearrange the rather incomplete data it gets from the API to prefer displaying those fares which do not operate by faecal traction wherever it actually has them, and de-emphasise the ones which do. The best this finds for those which don't is £237.

    On the bright side, it does cost you less than a fiver extra to come back again.

    Inland Revenue mileage allowances are super for coining it in when you get to claim them, but unfortunately they and similar jokes also get used by defenders of the current level of fares to try and make out that they're already cheaper than driving, which may sound funny to them but isn't much of a joke to the people they are so ineptly trying to persuade.

    725:

    717 - For the 3rd time (implied) and 2nd explicitly stated, "The South End of the Rail Alaska main line is a sea port". Got it now?

    720 - In the first place, you're confusing the fully enclosed Euroshuttle car carriers with the frame only truck cars. That's right, general haulage trucks are not carried in box vans. Next, since the driver lives in the cab of his truck and escorts the freight from A to B, is it really surprising he wants "his truck" and not "whatever he gets" at the far end of the run?

    722 - Better than that if you can supply laser guidance; you can make the bomb go through a specific window.

    726:

    A continent wide auto-train network would make sense only if it replaced long distance highways. - as in, "We stop building those/lay tracks on the rights of way". And would require a really efficient system for off-and on-boarding cars. At which point, you might as well go all the way and purpose build cars to be dual-mode transport. Hard points to glomp onto a car sized rail bogie, roll onto a siding, wait until you queue of cars hooked together reaches 20, and off you go down the steel "road".

    727:

    That's fair, and I'm not questioning your previous experience in North Carolina. I do question depending on a dam, especially given the mess in Oroville where a single tree nearly caused the spillway to fail. The critical questions for that plant are: a) what is it's working lifespan? b) what's the climate forecast for that lifespan? c) what kind of maintenance and rebuilding does the dam need to deal with that climate forecast? d) Is it getting the maintenance and rebuilding it needs for c)?

    Hopefully you can answer yes to d) and not fuss about it.

    As for building new nuclear power plants, where would you build them in your area without putting them under serious flood risk?

    728:

    schools find workarounds to provide a childcare service after regular school hours

    True, and also before school drop-off service, but by relying on volunteer labour or by moving money from 'education' to 'childcare' — at least in my limited experience in Ontario.

    A few years ago we had kids who spent 10+ hours a day at school, from when they were dropped off in the morning to when their parents picked them up at night. Their parents made no arrangements for this, just did it, and admin relied on "incidental supervision" — which I thought ironic given that they spent the time in their offices and didn't attempt to do any supervision themselves.

    We had a girl whose mother dropped her off before the school was officially open*; she'd sneak in the unlocked trades door** and sit in a dark hallway (lights not turned on until school is open). She didn't make trouble, but it was an interesting legal situation as no one was responsible for her. Admin's opinion was that the closest adult was responsible; union was willing to fight that in court if it became an issue***.

    *Ie. before 7 AM (for an 8:45 start), when no one (except caretaking and trades) including teachers was supposed to be in the building.

    **Which had to be unlocked because the tradespeople needed to get in.

    ***Union's unofficial prediction was that admin would blame closest teacher for not supervising, even if that teacher didn't know about the kid, and throw the teacher under the bus to save themselves from a charge of negligence.

    729:

    VIA is facing the elimination of their Vancouver-Toronto (The Canadian) and Montreal- Halifax (Ocean) services

    I last took VIA in the 80s, from Edmonton to Winnipeg (and back). It was enough to put me off for life — horribly slow trip, because freight has (or at least had) priority over passenger trains. As well, the dining car served meat that was charred on one edge, still frozen (with white frost) on the other and refused to do anything about it.

    I looked at taking VIA in the 90s to travel Toronto-Ottawa, and discovered that unless I booked 4+ weeks ahead it was cheaper to fly.

    So yeah, not surprised VIA is being phased out. It's been running down for decades…

    730:

    Yes, about that Man in the Tin Suit... here's the other side of the story. http://mrw.5-cent.us/ethel_the_martyr.html

    731:

    I skimmed the site, and it misses several points: 1. Dragons don't have hot engines, so the heat seekers aren't going to be especially useful, and 2. Dragons have LARGE wings. All the stories talk about the wind from a dragon's wings knocking people over. That will affect ground-to-air weapons as well. 3. Speed... um, yeah. I've read a number of times about biplanes outflying jets, due to mobility.

    732:

    I'm surprised that no one's built a machine to crush smooth sand into sharp sand.

    733:

    "probably most militaries can't afford to have very many of them, or planes to launch them. "

    Not most, but JDAMs are popular among US allies that have substantial air forces.

    https://www.army-technology.com/news/korea-seeks-precision-guided-munitions-sale/

    South Korea seeks $258m sale of precision-guided munitions from US August 26, 2021

    Approved by the US State Department, the total estimated cost of the FMS and associated equipment is $258m.

    The sale package will include up to 3,953 KMU-556 joint direct attack munition (JDAM) guidance kits for GBU-31, 1,981 KMU-557 JDAM guidance kits for GBU-31, GBU-56 and 1,179 KMU-572 JDAM guidance kits for GBU-38 and 1,755 FMU-139 fuse systems.

    734:

    It's generally cheaper to drive somewhere than to take one person by rail.

    You guys are making me feel lucky that interstate trains in Austral;ia work so amazingly well.

    For me to go 1000km to Brisbane or Melbourne from Sydney is ~4200 for a sleeper, takes 12-14 hours, and is one train. Well, barring "buses replace trains" which is relatively rare. It used to be that the bus was much cheaper, and they were willing to take bicycles as luggage where CountryLink demanded they go in a bike box which they would then attempt to vandalise. But since covid those cheap buses have vanished and it's now about the same price as the train, except there's no sleeper option.

    Plane on either of those routes is less than three hours and cheaper if you book a couple of weeks in advance. Unless you use one of the cut price carriers that have collapsed during covid, where they would habitually cancel flights that weren't full to the point where I once spent ~13 hours travelling ... by "airplane".

    Things only get insane on the tourist trains, where you're looking at ~$2000 to spend four or five days on a train to Perth. It's very scenic yadda yadda but you're not doing it for reasons of transport. Think of it as a cruise ship on rails and you're closer to the experience.

    735:

    The lake is Harris Lake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris_Lake_(New_Hill,_North_Carolina)

    No mountains anywhere in sight. It isn't that deep. It was created for the Shearon Harris Power Plant. Only 1 of 4 reactors was built.

    But it is NOT a static pond. Water flows in, water flows out. But from creeks, not big rivers. (Big rivers don't exist in NC.) On very hot summer days after not much rain the water temps can become an issue.

    If the dam breaks lots of people will get pissed. A few might even die. But the surface of the lake is 220 feet about sea level. And the "sea" is about 100 miles straight line away. So the average ground slope isn't all that much. The dam isn't all that tall

    I think the days of monster nuclear plants are numbered. I'd like to think that SMR's that don't require vast water cooling systems are viable. And soon. But I still have a few dozen questions about them. With the right to take the answers and come back with a few dozen more questions.

    But if SMRs work then I would be OK with 10 or 20 on the Shearon Harris site. And I'm not NIMBY. I'm 25 miles, 30 minutes drive time from the gate.

    736:

    That would make it into sharp edged dust.

    737:

    I'm surprised that no one's built a machine to crush smooth sand into sharp sand.

    The simple problem is that sand is 0.5-2 mm in diameter. Crush it too much and you get fine silt, which isn't great for building, even if it is sharp. Crushing fine gravel might work, but again, this takes a fair amount of energy. Whether there's enough fine gravel (and energy) to meet the demand? I don't know.

    738:

    (oops, that's shift4, so $200. Not 4200

    739:

    "The thing I don't get is why the whole lorry has to be inside."

    There was a lot of fuss even before the tunnel was dug along the lines of "what if something catches fire in it", so they've been pretty heavy on it all along - and apparently with justification, since there have been a few incidents of things catching alight. By having the lorry totally inside then if it does start going up hopefully the fuckage will delay extending beyond the confines of the wagon for just long enough.

    "I don't even see the reason for taking the whole lorry through. ...do you really need to transport the tractor portion back & forth?"

    It's part of the floating-ferry emulation function. It's also connected with the lorry terminals being designed to load and unload the trains as rapidly and efficiently as possible, which contraindicates fucking around unhooking and rehooking tractors (never mind the possibilities for endless fun and games if the number of tractors at the unloading end ends up less than the number of trailers on the train, and all the other such things that can go wrong...)

    It also means that foreign companies can have their own low-paid drivers drive the lorries all the way, and don't have to pay British trucker rates for the British bit.

    "But you'd want the vehicle carriage - lounge car combination to be designed so passengers could safely walk between their vehicles & the lounge car. And for that, I think the kind of carriages I've seen on YouTube of people taking the the Channel Tunnel trains would be ideal."

    IIRC they were indeed designed for that, although I think there are restrictions on when you are allowed to. All the various types of stock Motorail used to use, though, definitely were not.

    (Funny to think that once upon a time you could take your own vehicle on the train and they did allow you to use it to ride in, and it was considered the highest quality option...)

    "That's pretty much how freight trains already work in the U.S. I don't see any reason why the moto-train cars couldn't be done the same way."

    My thoughts exactly. Thing is British railways have a strange kind of dual relationship with the idea. It went abruptly out of fashion for freight just as we'd built a bunch of large marshalling yards to help automate the process, some of which consequently never got fully used, with that kind of traffic going over to road and trains concentrating more on things like minerals and steel traffic where you just have big trains carrying one kind of thing in large quantities between two points. The process in passenger services was more gradual, but still displays the same kind of contrariness in that the prevalence of the practice has gone down more or less in proportion as the prevalence of stock with fully automatic couplers that make splitting and joining a matter of a few seconds performed entirely from within the cab has gone up. But although the dogma is now quite clearly against the practice, the need never really goes away as especially with passenger operations it's such a natural corollary of the root-and-branch nature of a railway network and the variety of different choices any group of passengers currently riding in one carriage may have made for the other parts of their journeys. The usual choice for dealing with it these days seems to be mostly a combination of denial and attempts to fudge it by using the time domain, which in turn results in a reasonably tractable problem related to train capacity being dissipated by conversion to distinctly less tractable problems relating to network capacity, and so overall does not help.

    740:

    Charlie,

    (From the Niece of the Horses' Mouths):

    Actually, you have it arse backwards.

    First Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls (two Jewish refugees) asked themselves in 1938 what could be done if Adolf Hitler were to get the atom bomb. Given that the data they were using to hypothesise about the possibility of the bomb came to Frisch from the two Berlin Physicists (Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann) via Frisch's aunt Lise Meitner in Sweden this was not an unreasonable assumption to make.

    So they invented mutually assured destruction. Only then did they set about designing a bomb. The other reason they did this work was that as German refugees they were prohibited from working on the cavity magnetron which is what Birmingham Physics Department was set as its war-time task.

    The UK recognised the value of the atom bomb, but didn't have the available resources to commit to making it work -- which were thought at the time to be equivalent in cost to a battleship -- so we handed what we'd already done over to the USA. Frisch and his wife then went off to Los Alamos leaving the fourteen year old niece behind -- to the tender care of the physics department (she was used as a lab technician and was very unhappy about what happened there, but that's by-the-by).

    Now given what I've already mentioned, would you credit it, but all sorts of people seem to have seen to it that the USSR got hold of many of our bomb details? We know about Agent Sonja and Mellita Norwood, but I think one of Frisch or Peierls might have had a hand in getting the Rosenburgs involved as well.

    ps I think Churchill had been informed to expect an atom bomb to be equivalent to about 250 tons of TNT. Useful on targets like Tirpitz, but not something that'd make a big difference to a strategic bombing campaign. As it turned out: expectations were exceeded...

    741:

    I last took VIA in the 80s, from Edmonton to Winnipeg (and back). It was enough to put me off for life — horribly slow trip, because freight has (or at least had) priority over passenger trains. As well, the dining car served meat that was charred on one edge, still frozen (with white frost) on the other and refused to do anything about it.

    I haven't used VIA, but a lot has changed since then - though sadly not the freight having priority problem.

    But service onboard is much better, and the Canadian and Ocean essentially are cruises on steel rails.

    I looked at taking VIA in the 90s to travel Toronto-Ottawa, and discovered that unless I booked 4+ weeks ahead it was cheaper to fly.

    Price comparisons are problematic at the moment thanks to Covid, but AC and Westjet quotes $463 for that trip while VIA quotes $130 (or $150 to $207 for business class) for Tues. 18th

    (and side benefit, VIA refunded fares when Covid hit while AC/Westjet held onto people's money)

    So yeah, not surprised VIA is being phased out. It's been running down for decades…

    VIA not being phased out.

    Note that I didn't include the corridor (Windsor - Toronto - Ottawa - Montreal - Quebec City). They are getting new trains (first arrived late last year for testing, all supposed to be in service in the next 2 years, and built by Siemens so they will work), and they are attempting to get their own dedicated track.

    The question is only the 2 long distance routes, and a handful of other "essential" routes like the train to Churchill.

    742:

    Dragons only ever managed to survive because nobody had any better projectile weapon than a bow and arrow to attack them with. Their armour could shrug that off, but it seems that they were not proof against someone getting up close and delivering a good hard thrust with a heavy spear; the trick was of course to manage that without getting cooked. But as soon as someone produces any approximation to a rifle, evolution loses to technology in a very terminal way.

    743:

    Small Modular Reactors still require cooling for the steam condenser stage after the turbine. Lots of SMRs on a single site will need lots of cooling, as much if not more than a single larger reactor of similar output to the cluster so it's a wash.

    Mostly, as I said before, nuclear reactors are being built today in sea-coast sites like Barakah, Hinckley Point, Kudankulam in India, Fuqing, Shadao Bay, Honghanye and elsewhere in China. Even the first "SMR" HTR-PM reactors are sited at Shidao Bay on the Chinese coast and of course the Russian Akademik Leonosov is a seaborne floating nuclear power station.

    Vogtle 3 and 4 under are construction in the US alongside two existing reactors sited beside the Savannah river but they also have cooling towers on-site.

    Access to cooling for turbine exhaust condensation is one of those strange "nuclear power is impossible" arguments I find difficult to grasp. It may be its proponents think that if they repeat it often enough it will be considered a fact and reality will warp to align itself with their beliefs, I dunno.

    744:

    PLEASE STOP IT. You live at approx 33°S .. . We keep on telling you that IT ISN'T GOING TO WORK at above 45 or 50°N but you refuse to listen. Ask Charlie @ 55°N if you won't listen to me, OK?

    You're a hard man to please...

    I've stopped it. Where "it" is the idea that electricity flows through cables. I'm AGREEING with you that solar doesn't work above 45 degrees, cables don't exist, storage isn't a thing. I've been making explicit the unstated assumptions that go with that.

    What does that look like?

    Well the population above 45 degrees is very roughly 10% of the world population and uses roughly half the energy in the world. If it continues as it does now, staying warm by burning things, its current energy consumption of roughly 12.5 TW will double over the next 30 years, to equal the current world consumption of about 25 TW. That will release as much CO2 as the whole world currently releases per year. That's enough to crash civilisation. Since those living above 45 are completely dependent on a global civilisation (not least being food and fossil fuel imports), nearly everyone above 45 dies or becomes a climate refugee (though where they're going to go is an exercise for the reader).

    So continuing to burn is out.

    So we go nuclear. As you suggest. We need to plan for 25 TW in 30 years time. So we need to build 25,000 one gigawatt reactors? No. There are no cables and no storage. Use it or lose it, we need enough to cover the winter peak, which as you've explained, (over and over), is higher than the average. It's about 4 times higher. So we need 100,000 one gigawatt reactors. Assuming we start building the factories that make the reactors today, as you finish reading this, and assuming we go with an existing design that isn't optimised for mass production, that sees the first factory finished by 2025, and the first watts on the grid by (optimistically) 2030. For carbon neutral by 2050 (20 years too late) that means a completed reactor and generator about every 90 minutes, 24 hours a day. The world consumption of uranium is 62,496 tonnes, to make 2553 TWh. Using that ratio, 100,000 one GW reactors would need 21 million tonnes of uranium per year. That's roughly 3 times the current world reserves at 260 USD/kg.

    If you assume the reserves double every time you increase the price by a factor of 10 (which historically is about right for a range of resources) then you have 8 months at 2600 USD/kg. 16 months at 26,000 USD/kg. 32 months at 260,000 USD/kg. 64 months (call it 5 years) at 2,600,000 USD/kg. 10 years at 26,000,000 USD/kg.

    There's about 800 million people who live above 45 degrees. If they're consuming 21 million tonnes (21 billion kg) of uranium per year, that's 26 kg each. I'll let you work out what that costs per person.

    But of course, we can build fast breeder reactors that use 1/100th of the uranium. (assuming a giant sky fairy leaves the design for a mass production optimised reactor on a convenient mountain top). So each person only needs to come up with 6 million USD a year to stay warm.

    So nuclear is out.

    Which leaves what? Stay and die taking everyone else with you, or leave, becoming stateless climate refugees.

    My bet is that those who live above 45 will stay put to the bitter end and crash civilisation.

    745:

    Yes, but even with bullets getting through the scales, consider the size. Dragons are larger than elephants, and to kill, you have to a) get it in the correct spot(s) and b) have to have it within range.

    746:

    Question on nuclear plants. I understand that the objections include use of massive amounts of concrete and the problem of sitting on shorelines for cooling when climate change might alter those shorelines. I live on Long Island, so I am familiar with the undesirability of a nuclear plant in a populated area (which shut down the Shoreham plant after billions had been spent).

    That said, why not build them into large ships, ideally large submersibles? You take something the size of a supertanker, build your nuclear plant inside, and keep it 60 km offshore like a wind farm. Now the issue of a changing shoreline is irrelevant and most of the construction material is steel, not concrete. It is immune to earthquakes including Fukushima style tsunamis because it is out at sea. If properly designed, it should be able to cope with the weather like oil rigs do, and if they want to be really safe from weather, make it submersible so it can go to about 20 meters down.

    Making it self propelled is optional, but towing them into position would be easier. Pick the reactor design for safety, it doesn't have to have the power to weight ratio of an SSN or CVN reactor.

    747:

    My thoughts exactly. Thing is British railways have a strange kind of dual relationship with the idea. It went abruptly out of fashion for freight just as we'd built a bunch of large marshalling yards to help automate the process, some of which consequently never got fully used, with that kind of traffic going over to road and trains concentrating more on things like minerals and steel traffic where you just have big trains carrying one kind of thing in large quantities between two points.

    When the goal is to make a profit rail (once good roads and trucks/lorries arrived on the scene) only works for bulk goods, typically that aren't time sensitive.

    Thus those BR marshalling yards were doomed from the day they started building them, a process that apparently was accelerated by some ill-advised strikes that accelerated the move from rail to road by customers.

    The same think happened in the US, once Congress had to act and remove a bunch of regulations following the large bankruptcies of railroads in the US northeast all the little stuff for the most part left the rails.

    The process in passenger services was more gradual, but still displays the same kind of contrariness in that the prevalence of the practice has gone down more or less in proportion as the prevalence of stock with fully automatic couplers that make splitting and joining a matter of a few seconds performed entirely from within the cab has gone up.

    But it's not a few seconds, particularly for a train that already has passengers on it.

    There are rules/regulations regarding train movements when a track is already occupied which means the train has to approach at a slow speed (much slower than if there was not train at the station). The approaching train then needs to stop short of the existing train, and then proceed even slower to make the coupling. Then everything needs to be tested (brakes, etc.) to make sure the automatic coupling has worked correctly - they are good, but not 100%. And then there are the cases where unit A's computers won't talk to unit B's...

    You also have to close the existing trains doors during the coupling process so if something goes wrong a passenger isn't trying to get on the train at that moment.

    Now most stations platform space/time is in high demand, so deliberately increasing dwell time to do this eats up capacity.

    And the above all assumes that the rail network has functioned perfectly and that the 2 trains have both arrived on time - something of a problem.

    So yes, in theory adding/removing parts of trains mid-route is a great idea in the real world it is problematic and thus they really try to avoid it.

    748:

    gasdive
    I SAID ... Ask Charlie - not me, OK?
    Some of us already have the cabling & wiring, or damn nearly - so that is a false / non-existent problem....

    mdive
    I have been on a train at at Thorpe-le-Soken station, where London - Colchester - Clacton/Walton units were split/divided ... with passengers on both units.
    Under 2 minutes total.

    749:

    I've got to agree with this. Siting the reactors isn't that much of an issue. We need to abandon the interiors of continents because cables don't exist, but putting reactors on ships or platforms is a no brainer. The deep water is at a steady 4C for efficient operation. No problems with terrorism, brushfire, heatwaves, tsunamis, earthquake, NIMBYs or insurance. It would be more expensive, but the whole nuclear thing is premised on unlimited supplies of money anyway.

    750:

    You already have electrical cable from your house to Morocco, Australia, South Africa and South America giving you 24/7/365 solar, removing entirely the need for nuclear?

    Re, "ask Charlie" I was taking it as a given that solar doesn't work above 45. (ie. I was agreeing with you) Why would I need to ask Charlie to confirm it doesn't work at 50+?

    751:

    I have been on a train at at Thorpe-le-Soken station, where London - Colchester - Clacton/Walton units were split/divided ... with passengers on both units. Under 2 minutes total.

    Splitting is easy.

    But I would be interested as to when this was because the comments I have read online from those currently in the rail industry is that it normally would take longer and that the rail regulatory frowns on it occurring at all anymore.

    752:

    To all those who are moralizing about the evils of air travel. Stop worrying about it. The airline industry, plane manufacturers, and in particular European governments are taking this problem seriously, and they are making a steady program to render flying carbon neutral. Climate activists will claim its not enough, but then activists always claim it's never enough. They are like a stuck record.

    A lot of money is been spent on electrically powered smaller aircraft, and hybrid and Hydrogen powered larger aircraft.

    The best approach I can see for larger aircraft is the introduction of carbon neutral synthetic jet fuel as fast as possible. Produced in bulk, they think they can make synthetic jet fuel for $200/barrel. Today's price for jet fuel is $92/barrel, but aircraft manufacturers have, in the pipeline, enough improvements in passenger/mile gas mileage to half the fuel consumption of say a year 2000 airliner, so the fuel cost for a flight would not be much different from today's--and fuel is only a third the cost of running a plane.

    The advantage of synthetic fuels is that they are drop-in. You don't have to worry about retiring the old fleet before you get to carbon neutral.

    For example, take cars: Some European nations are planning to stop the sale of ICE cars by 2035, going all electric. The problem with this is that for the next 20 odd years until they reach the end of their lives, those ICE cars are going to be burning gas. Now imagine synthetic gas becomes available at that time. You could drop your entire fleet to carbon neutral.

    753:

    Do "they" have any idea where the energy is going to come from? Or even what the storage efficiency of synthetic jet/car fuel is?

    Last time I looked, which is admittedly a few years ago, the efficiency and thus land requirements for synthetic fuels was abysmal, less than 5%. Which, barring some miracle, makes PV look really quite good by comparison, in terms of resources required to produce the energy.

    The argument at the time was than an order of magnitude improvement in efficiency was obviously coming so we should ignore electric cars and focus on biofuels. Your argument sounds like the handwavy version of that. Wikipedia seems to say that the current jet fuel processes are either biofuels (ie, food) or the ridiculously energy-inefficient Fischer–Tropsch process. Either way it would be interesting to see a rough back of the envelope "how much land area do we need to use to power the pre-covid airplane fleet". I slightly fear that the answer is "four earths".

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel#Synthetic_jet_fuel

    755:

    Re: 'Scientists working on an adaptive landscape model of part of the virus spike identified three mutations that could make the virus hard for immune systems to detect*. So far, no virus strain has shown all three mutations simultaneously.'

    Very interesting article - thanks! I need to read it again - slowly - because there are a lot of interesting concepts there that I need to look up esp. their working definitions of environment/landscapes, timing of events, whether they can speed up or slow down self-replication or mutation, etc. (I realize this is a computer/math model but the initial inputs are likely based on real lab equipment/supplies and procedures.)

    And as an aside ... since folks have mentioned other 'O' named variants as well as mythical beasts, how about a Covid mutation called 'Ouroboros' that evolves into a self-perpetuating (because self-feeding) immortal entity.

    756:

    You and Duffy are indeed correct. But you might want a ramp up of cynicism before getting real answers[1]. But if you want the real answer, it's due to genetic damage inflicted not by "proximity to the sea" but something else, that maybe "being close to the sea" entails.

    Few cities "on the Sea" are not also river tributaries. We'd suggest looking up what's coming down-stream rather than from the depths. Oh, and sewage discharge near the sea, for instance. Or, like Flint, check out what does and what does not get removed on water / effluent cleaning (hint: not just female hormones).

    Increased DNA methylation variability in type 1 diabetes across three immune effector cell types

    https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13555

    Next search topic probably should be "DNA methylation mutagens".

    The real answer is the same as "Why have Sperm rates declined so much in the last X years?"

    Hint: you literally made a toxic sludge and then bathed / drank in it. Some chemicals "turn the frogs gay", some just fuck your DNA up a little.

    ~

    And yes: they absolutely, 100% knew this at the time, they do not employ stupid people.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid

    757:

    Re: '... and keep it 60 km offshore like a wind farm.'

    Not being snide but ...

    How do you make something like this secure given the following:

    a) increasingly and longer lasting violent weather - can current construction designs and materials withstand all of that pounding water and winds?

    b) power glitches - yeah, I realize that such a plant is supposed to generate power but it itself probably relies on some sort of external power for its on/off switch plus assortment of highly computerized/computer-dependent components. (Lots of news recently about 'hybrid' attacks, i.e., cyber plus traditional weapons.)

    c) unanticipated algal blooms that interfere with the plant's operation or the creation of such blooms as a side effect which then screw up the local ecology.

    758:

    Your next QA is to ponder: What new chemical has entered our environment recently, heavily promoted to replace another damaging chemical. Or food product. Or even a food product whose ranges / take place got changed.

    And yes, you'll get sued if you guess correctly.

    Or... you don't understand Genetic Damage and pass-through rates. "Mother's Milk" and so on. Perchance you hit a critical threshold in 2017 that took three generations of imbedded build up and so forth. You know, Apex predators and Mercury, ring a bell?

    "Near the oceans"

    We'll laugh if this is just bioacculmination from cheap prawns from S.America, we really will [Note: you need to know a lot about the insanities of global prawn / shrimp markets, shipping "Youngs of Scotland" who ship produce to vietnam and back, Equador and the CN destruction of various fields here and why shrimp are probably the worst thing to mass-market if you want to keep your DNA safe, cue "American Psycho" levels of "sushi" eating taken from the 1980's yuppie Wall St. squad into "aspirinational living"].

    But we looked a bit closer: it's not. It's bioacculmination, H.S.S..

    Literally: it's a path dependancy. You fucked up on the "stop this shit before it damages our children" bit, which... is not exactly a surprising thing to learn in 2022.

    759:

    The mapping is deliberately 2* out so no-one here gets caught alive[1], since we're fairly sure most if not all readers are genuinely good beans (and we stink of sulphur). If, and only IF, you can parse immediate contextual content from all references will you hit the meaning.

    Which was quite banal and just meant: love all of your creative stuff, go you! But if you mix all three together and note some other things[2] you might see something larger.

    With a side-eye at Helios and better not wonder why LBC asked SIR G. Williamson about CRONOS[3]

    Also, if you've enough talent to pull off that size of explosion with zero casualties (HAI! Underground as well, super well done, we're artists at "The Aesthetics of Destruction" unlike you fuckers) while ahem artificially doing naughty stuff to the tropopspheres' so it isn't an issue and the only peeps who died where from Peru because stuck up their asses fools forgot to send warnings, then:

    Deploying some sad-sack, desperate UK National as a Terror Drop (when his sister's case has fucking mucky little fingers all over it) and zero casualties (well, you know, he was live-streaming it, and his last words words were akin to: "I'm going to die" - it's a reverse Christ-Church) one has to wonder.

    One has to wonder.

    No, it's a funny film that hits at the heart of what America (USA) is. It's also (literally) a statement. Remember the Colosseum? Our little box now has two teeth in it. Wisdom teeth.

    "Enjoy Prison"

    Titans... we were Titans, once. But, now we also do Science[tm].

    Look at the Lyrics. "Look into the Left eye, now Right, Right, Left, now look Centre". It's a Mirror.

    shrug

    The topology of Mirrors is amazing (points to golden hexagons viewing the Universe).

    Clear yet?

    It helps knowing the contextual strata.

    [1] Retired BBC producer caught with over 800 child abuse images spared jail https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/14/retired-bbc-producer-caught-800-child-abuse-images-spared-jail/

    Parse that: and remember kids: Savile. And, it's one of the #1 faves for Blackmail deployed by various global powers. cough recent BBC head, very pro-IL, staunch defenses of stuff in the USA even before Epstein / Maxwell trials. cough Very Real Accusations we can spot a mile away. If you think "The Prince" is our highest aim, we've some bad news for you. (Hai! Bibi! Plea deal is it? Oooh... methinks not).

    [2] Psy-Ops are a crucial weapon in the war against disinformation https://on.ft.com/3njkFk3 | opinion https://twitter.com/FT/status/1480939293380071427 FT 11th Jan 2022

    [3] After a whole minute of partygate questions, Tory MP Gavin Williamson finally answered LBC's @mattuthompson

    https://twitter.com/LBC/status/1481297173920862209 - you can catch the Cronus q'tion right at the end, the rest is filler anyhow.

    760:

    increasingly and longer lasting violent weather

    Not an issue. If you can drill for oil in the North Sea or survive typhoons in the South China Sea, you can build a platform basically anywhere that will survive anything.

    power glitches

    Black starts can be done. They're not easy, and the people who run them get paid more than I ever have, but it shouldn't be any different to any other location. Solved problem.

    unanticipated algal blooms

    Yeah, they'll screw up the local ecology, but you can't make an omelet without screwing up the local ecology. Biofouling is pretty well understood. Seawater in coastal power plants is an issue, but a solved one. I used to earn a living cleaning the seawater intake for a coal power plant. Just throw money at the problem. Lots of the cleaners will die, but there will be plenty standing in line to take the spot. (that's how I got the job)

    Those are really the least of your problems.

    There will be disasters. Lots of them. The scale will make Piper Alpha look like nothing. But they will just kill everyone on the platform and lots of the rescuers. It's absolutely inevitable. Using an effectively untrained, unskilled workforce, your going to rush build 100,000 copies of a huge untested machine, that operates in a harsh environment, containing huge quantities of high pressure, high temperature and corrosive liquid plus 5-600 degree supercritical steam at 300 bar, and GWs of electrical energy, and you're going to staff them with 10 million effectively untrained workers. (there aren't 10 million trained reactor operators, or even 100,000 skilled trainers) They'll operate off shore with effectively zero oversight (how many skilled plant inspectors do you think there are in the world).

    It's going to be a gigantic shit show for decades, but at least it will all happen 60 km from habitation.

    762:

    Not an issue. If you can drill for oil in the North Sea or survive typhoons in the South China Sea, you can build a platform basically anywhere that will survive anything.

    The fun question here is cost per year of operation, plus cost for overhaul, replacement, or scrapping. I suspect the tradeoffs are rather painful, and you've still got to make it somewhere that's not onsite.

    I'd also point out that Big Oil did look into building an offshore rig off the North Slope and IIRC blinked hard before backing away. There are limits.

    There will be disasters. Lots of them. The scale will make Piper Alpha look like nothing. But they will just kill everyone on the platform and lots of the rescuers. It's absolutely inevitable. Using an effectively untrained, unskilled workforce, your going to rush build 100,000 copies of a huge untested machine, that operates in a harsh environment, containing huge quantities of high pressure, high temperature and corrosive liquid plus 5-600 degree supercritical steam at 300 bar, and GWs of electrical energy, and you're going to staff them with 10 million effectively untrained workers. (there aren't 10 million trained reactor operators, or even 100,000 skilled trainers) They'll operate off shore with effectively zero oversight (how many skilled plant inspectors do you think there are in the world).

    Yeah, I was thinking the something similar, but you said it better. In general, the crew's going to have trouble running away from an accident, and fixing and/or shutting down a major disaster just kind of says "underwater Chernobyl" to me.

    Actually, it is a great disaster movie pitch: "Underwater Chernobyl with anti-environmentalist message." The moneymen would lap it up.

    764:

    Re: Nature article & 'We'd suggest looking up what's coming down-stream rather than from the depths. Oh, and sewage discharge near the sea, for instance.'

    Not that I understood a lot of this but the 'downstream' of factory biocontaminants sounds like a possibility.*

    I looked up which countries had a spike in childhood diabetes within the past 40 years: China tops the US. And as the entire world knows, China has become the dominant manufacturer over that same time period. (India - the other country that's seen a large increase in manufacturing - lags China for now but its childhood diabetes rate is higher than had been anticipated.)

    'Incidence trends for childhood type 1 diabetes in India'

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4413385/

    It'd be interesting to see this particular study replicated in China and India - including proximity to different types of industries/manufacturers. (Also - throw in childhood disease vs. vax for these groups of kids.)

    *Fish and other mammals also have blood sugar swings but don't end up with diabetes - historically. Wonder whether any zoologists/marine biologists include blood sugar levels and/or DNA methylation rates (near vs. far from industrial-polluted rivers) as part of their health score cards for the animals they study.

    765:

    Sorry. I haven't been in the loop for 20 years. Broad brush stokes, yep. Management failures on individual rigs, no idea.

    767:

    cost per year of operation

    Oh yeah. This whole nuclear thing is entirely based on an infinite supply of money.

    To get a feel for it, watch Rocket Lab's Peter Beck talk about why they're using return to launch site rather than a landing barge for the upcoming Neutron rocket. When people who build rockets blanch and stutter at the mention of maritime assets, you know the cost is huge. He used the phrase "helicopters are cheap"

    Or, if you've got Netflix, watch "Last Breath". It's about the replacement of a small pipe. The sort of thing that your local plumber would scratch his arse, look around at your nice house and say "a thousand quid" to do.

    Then imagine what it costs to put two divers 90m down in the North Sea to do the same job, with 100 people above them in a dive support vessel. It's a great watch.

    Piper Alpha has an insurance payout of 1.7 billion pounds, 30 years ago. That's a lot of money tied up in a platform.

    Whatever your estimate is, it's too low.

    Then multiply by 100,000 platforms.

    769:

    The principle is the same.

    In fact, doing a PADI dive is harder in a lot of ways. You have to manage your own dive. You have to plan everything yourself.

    As a commercial diver everything is managed for you.

    You're literally directed by the dive supervisor. You'll be told to walk. That means the umbilical forms an angle behind you. Then the dive supervisor can see which direction you went. Then you're told to turn left or right until your umbilical is at the right angle. Then walk. You'll arrive at the job. The supervisor has already clipped all the tools you'll need to your harness. They can see more than you through the camera on your head. You are directed to loosen or tighten nuts, clean surfaces, polish propellers. You're a dope on a rope. All your gas, all your time, all your deco, all done for you.

    772:

    Re: "Underwater Chernobyl with anti-environmentalist message."

    Why not 'Fukushima II - Because the on-land version did so well during the 2011 typhoon'?

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

    According to the below - weather is really the leading cause of oil rig disasters. Followed by mismanagement, i.e., people didn't anticipate/plan for that particular type of bad weather and/or problem scenario. (The weather isn't going to get better any time soon. Chances are neither is the management.)

    https://www.offshore-technology.com/features/feature-the-worlds-deadliest-offshore-oil-rig-disasters-4149812/

    774:

    SFreader, your link is borked. Markdown strikes agsin.

    JHones.

    775:

    Oh, agreed, for sure. Neither will get better, but it's really weather that exposes the poor management and or training, rather than weather at such. If hundreds of rigs survive gales, and that rig has survived many gales, but then suddenly doesn't it's generally human error.

    Piper Alpha is worth reading about. There were a few points where people didn't know what to do or didn't feel like they had the authority to do anything. For instance there were two platforms pumping oil toward Piper Alpha. They could see she was on fire, but they didn't think they had the authority to hit the big red stop button. From the wiki: "Another contributing factor was that the nearby connected platforms Tartan and Claymore continued to pump gas and oil to Piper Alpha until its pipeline ruptured in the heat in the second explosion. Their operations crews did not believe they had authority to shut off production, even though they could see that Piper Alpha was burning."

    These are the best of the best. The North Sea is really the pinnacle that everyone else looks up to. Yet they pumped high pressure gas and oil at a burning rig for the best part of an hour.

    On land or in the ocean, 100,000 reactors? Staffed by, lets face it, people who would be put straight back on the helicopter if they arrived in the North Sea.

    It's the kind of thing that in 50 years people would say "well what did they THINK would happen?"

    776:

    Here's what I would do if I was in charge and I had multiple quadrillions burning a hole in my back pocket and international electricity cables weren't cheap and known tech.

    Rather than building 100,000 reactors, for which there is no fuel, no staff, no location, no nuthin, I'd go back to the EU, apologise, take my lumps, then buy Portugal, build houses for 800 million people, and then tell everyone that the lights will go out above 45 Degrees on the autumn equinox, please make you way to your winter house before then or have plenty of candles and winter woollies. Services will resume on the day of the spring equinox.

    The global North is happy for everyone else to have "managed retreat" from rising seas and lethal heat, but doesn't think it will apply to them. It does.

    777:

    I dunno, ifI had multiple quadrillions I’d make a bunch of solar power satellites and have them in ball-of twine polar orbits.

    “Oh”, I hear you say, “that can’t work because you can’t get the power to earth safely”. “Bullshit” I say, I have really long cables. With pantograph wotsits, that run along ground based wires like those used for railways but fed down rather than feeding down. Ok, so it would make air travel a bit tricky but that’s a small price to pay. On the very plus side, it would make launching ICBMs tricky too.

    I guarantee I can make it work. Just get me those quadrillions and watch.

    778:

    How long flying takes depends on how easy it is to get to an airport that has flights to where you want to go to, its security and check-in theatres, and whether the flights are likely to be on-time. The flying time for short-haul is small by comparison.

    Well, yeah. Finland is an island from the Central European perspective. Even with all the airport hassle, it's probably maybe 6-7 hours from Helsinki area to Berlin. It's much less than the perhaps 24-48 hours it takes to get there on the ground. Fastest might be ferry to Lübeck and train from there, but I'm not sure about that. Still more than flying.

    In Finland proper, my opinion, which does not matter at all, is that we could easily ditch flying South of Oulu, or rather, on routes shorter than maybe 500 kilometers. There's a lot of Finland geographically with longer distances and those Northern places could be served also by flying, but 30 minute flights are just unnecessary. Trains are almost as fast and take you directly from centre to centre, so no travelling there.

    We are however spread so widely that private cars are very useful for many people. But flying is quite unnecessary in the bigger view.

    779:

    " I'm AGREEING with you that solar doesn't work above 45 degrees,"

    That's a bit of a surprise to us here in Denmark at 56°N...

    We're seeing entire fields plastered with solar panels, to the extent that local councils are petitioning the government for more reasons to deny planning permission.

    780:

    Surprised myself there.

    I'm just sick of this "we can't have nice things because of fake greenies" line.

    So let's rub some noses in what the world looks like if solar doesn't work above 45, and UHVDC doesn't exist and we need nuclear. Greg has been claiming that the UK needs to be abandoned, but doesn't realise that's what he's saying.

    781:

    And they are in fact entirely pointless.

    December saw output from the full gigawatt of solar panels in Denmark of 11000 and change mwh for the entire month.

    November and January were not much better. Those are the three months where Denmark uses the most power, and not by a little. If we had enough low carbon power to see us through these months (We dont, but suppose) then we would already also have enough low carbon power to cover every other month. So mounting a single solar panel in the country adds nothing to the grid except cost and pollution at Chinese factories. Let people at latitudes where the sun actually shines when they need power buy them.

    782:

    Dave Moore
    European governments are taking this problem seriously, and they are making a steady program to render flying carbon neutral. - - SOME European governments might be. The lying, crooked, cheating slime in charge here are doing the exact opposite.
    ( QUOTE: The 50 per cent cut in domestic Air Passenger Duty (APD) will apply to all flights between airports in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – excluding private jets. It will mean the new domestic level of APD will be set at £6.50 and will apply from 2023. )

    Really, do we have to wade through all of:
    760, 761, 763, 768, 770, 772, 773, 774, 775, posted between ( UK times ) of 02.25 - 05.01 .. really?
    Just to see if there is content { There might be content in 761, but is it worth drilling for - nah. }

    gasdive
    PLEASE stop it ... WHERE do we get our baseload power from, without ensuring that there are no crops, because it's all covered in "solar panels"????????? Sydney is NOT the planet
    Se TJ's correct response @ 783 ...
    "Virtue signalling, whilst the planet runs out of power"

    783:

    Greg, the mental image of you crouched in your basement rubbing two lumps of yellowcake together saying "nuclear is the only possible answer" is amusing me right now.

    784:

    741 - (Funny to think that once upon a time you could take your own vehicle on the train and they did allow you to use it to ride in, and it was considered the highest quality option...)
    True, as far as it goes. OTOH this literally meant mounting your carriage on a freight flatbed, so you'd get the benefits of 2, maybe 3, suspension systems, and if you were "lucky" the train would move at 50mph flat chat (BTW Stevenson's Rocket was capable of around 30mph).

    749 - Coupling/decoupling passenger trains with passengers entrained works pretty well at UK stations such as Birmingham New Street and Crianlarich. I've been on serviced linking/delinking DMUs or changing locomotives at both the cited stations.
    I've also, technically illegally, been in a rake of coaches that was being replatformed at Fort William, back before the West Highland line was converted to all DMUs for passenger service other than the Night Caledonian sleeper service. Take that as a decision by the guard that he could actually trust us to not jump out of an open connecting door onto the tracks.

    750 Part 2 - OK, the cites above weren't this fast, but were built into the schedule. At Birmingham I happened to be travelling next to a blind man, and advised him that during the locomotive change, he would have to to give his guide dog a comfort stop.

    782 - Gasdive, you're busy claiming that "above 45N needs to be abandoned because solar doesn't work there". Just now much AGW does it take before the Australian desert ;-) has to be abandoned as "too hot"? And where do you go given that I don't think New Zealand will have you?

    785:

    The feasibility of the latter two is dubious, to put it mildly.

    786:

    Without insulin, type I diabetes kills in short order, and isn't easy to identify in uncommunicative creatures; while it might be spotted in the larger domestic animals, it might well occur and not be noticed in fish and other mammals.

    787:

    And there is no TECHNICAL difficulty in building a high-speed rail link from Helsinki to Berlin - expensive, and the politics beggar description, but feasible.

    788:

    Trains are coupled and decoupled at Cambridge, regularly, sometimes with passengers on and the doors locked.

    789:

    "And they are in fact entirely pointless."

    Gee, I wonder why people keep installing them then ?

    Could it be that there is a compelling business-case, relative to the alternative agriculture ?

    Solar works, it produces enough power 8 months a year to be more profitable than nuclear ever were.

    I really do not understand that "If it isn't perfect, we shouldn't use it" attitude.

    And btw: My 3kW roof-mounted solar panels produce 1291W right now, that's 484W more than my house uses.

    790:

    gasdive PLEASE stop it ... WHERE do we get our baseload power from, without ensuring that there are no crops, because it's all covered in "solar panels"????????? Sydney is NOT the planet

    I have no idea how to say it more clearly, and I'm left with saying it again.

    If solar doesn't work, there's no answer to the question, "WHERE...?"

    NO WHERE

    Let me say that again.

    NO... WHERE...

    Did you get that?

    NO WHERE

    You can't have baseload power.

    Nuclear won't do it unless you have a spare couple of quadrillion pounds stashed away somewhere. Which you don't.

    And, even if you did.

    There's not enough uranium even with breeder reactors. There's not enough thorium either. There's not enough time to build the reactors, there's not enough trained people to staff them, there's not enough people with the skills to train the people that would train the people who train the staff, there's no where to put them, there's no design for the reactors, there's no factories to make them, there's no design for the factories, hell, there's no design for the factories that will build the machines that go in the factories that make the reactors.

    If you depend on nuclear to come and save the day, you're out of luck. It's not coming. It's impossible.

    If you try to brazen it out and keep burning you'll crash the civilisation that you depend on and then you'll have to pack your bags and leave just when everyone else is doing the same. Which means you'll die.

    Without solar there's no way to stay in the UK in large numbers and long term.

    With solar, probably in several different countries connected by UHVDC cable, there's a chance. Maybe a 50/50 chance, if everyone else does the right thing. Which isn't likely.

    791:

    Actually, you have it arse backwards.

    What you said, while perfectly true, in no way contradicts what I said about its strategic use. You were looking at it from the point of view of the physics community, I was looking at it from the military planner's perspective.

    The parable of the blind men and the elephant springs to mind.

    792:

    "And there is no TECHNICAL difficulty in building a high-speed rail link from Helsinki to Berlin"

    A major part of the trouble is Denmark.

    We have no domestic supplies of iron, so railroads have always been the red-headed step-child, because all the rails had to be imported, and our rail network is too tiny to support competent maintenance organizations.

    If the rest of the Nordics want better connectivity to Germany, they should do is create a consortia owned by SJ & DB to buy out and upgrade the danish rail network.

    793:

    "There's not enough uranium even with breeder reactors. There's not enough thorium either."

    If you have the money, there is all the uranium and thorium you could ever want.

    794:

    the population above 45 degrees is very roughly 10% of the world population and uses roughly half the energy in the world. If it continues as it does now, staying warm by burning things, its current energy consumption of roughly 12.5 TW will double over the next 30 years

    That's a very odd assumption.

    Firstly, TFR in the nations above 45 degrees is generally below replacement -- populations are falling. Secondly, energy consumption per capita isn't rising: if anything it's falling due to efficiency improvements and better insulation. (EU energy consumption almost flatlined after the 1974 oil shock, despite population increase and economic growth.) Thirdly, climate change means that by-and-by there'll be less energy demand for heating because winters will be less chilly.

    Upshot: rather than energy consumption doubling over the next 30 years, I think it's likely to remain stable or fall.

    The world consumption of uranium is 62,496 tonnes, to make 2553 TWh. Using that ratio, 100,000 one GW reactors would need 21 million tonnes of uranium per year. That's roughly 3 times the current world reserves at 260 USD/kg.

    Firstly, your energy demand is at least twice as high as it needs to be. Secondly, you're assuming 210 tonnes of uranium per 1Gw reactor. That's a ridiculous excess: a full reactor fuel load is on the order of 50 tons of LEU, which seems to be what you're postulating, but you're not accounting for running a mixed-oxide fuel cycle and reprocessing the "spent" fuel. In which case you end up mostly running on plutonium and your uranium input goes about 25-50x further than your baseline assumption.

    (NB: fast breeders were cutting-edge and difficult ... in the 1960s. We've built them, screwed up, and know the obvious failure modes now. (I notice India is currently commissioning a Gen 3 commercial fast breeder: why not copy that?)

    Finally: you're assuming world production of uranium is static. But it's not: it's set at that level because there's no demand for additional material at present so it's not commercially viable to open new mines or seawater extraction plants.

    795:

    If you have the money, there is all the uranium and thorium you could ever want.

    Yes and no. It's not super accurate, but in round figures the resource doubles when you increase the price by a factor of ten. You can apply that sort of reasoning to say diamonds but it falls down when you're extracting energy.

    To a certain extent cost is a measure of the energy needed to do the extraction. If you're looking at an annual bill of 6 million dollars a year per person for electricity, then that implies a lot more energy expended to extract that uranium than you're going to get out of it.

    796:

    If you have the money,

    I think this is actually a case where money stops being a useful way to understand the world.

    Money is a surrogate, a metaphor, an accounting fiction. Normally it lets us act as though everything is fungible and available instantly in infinite amounts.

    But at extreme scales money breaks down. It doesn't matter how much money you offer, I'm not willing to be killed. At the other extreme, it doesn't matter how much money you have available you can't buy a replacement planet Earth.

    I get the feeling that "run humanity off nuclear fission" is another example of the latter case. Money doesn't matter when you want 1M trained nuclear power plant operators by the end of next week.

    Just as you can't pay 9 women to make a baby in one month, you can't pay anybody to train thousands of millions of people in a new university-level skill more quickly. We have seen that with medical people during the pandemic.

    But more generally, scale brings its own problems. Especially in cases like this, going from "we struggle to build one new nuclear power plant" to "we guarantee to build thousands of nuclear power plants"... seems unlikely.

    797:

    Solar works above 50 degrees, but it's crap.

    Firstly, where I am the sun never gets above 11 degrees in midwinter, so you get a fraction of peak energy out of any PV panels.

    Secondly, most of us live in apartment buildings with tiny or no gardens, and shared rooftops. A single household-sized PV panel doesn't go very far when it's split among 6-12 households. (Our cities are very dense. Even our suburbs are what Americans or Australians would call "urban" areas.)

    Thirdly, in the equatorial regions, peak demand for domestic electricity is in daytime hours, typically noon to evening, for running aircon. It may also peak in summer and decline in winter. It's the exact opposite here, where demand peaks at night (we need heating), when there's no sunlight on this side of the planet, and in winter (at midwinter the sun is above the horizon for about six hours in any 24 in my city -- even less if you go much north of here).

    If there was a way to extract energy from darkness we'd be laughing!

    798:

    Er, why should a rail line from Helsinki go via Denmark? Yes, that applies to Norway and Sweden, but it's not a sane route from Helsinki.

    799:

    Where you are, 1 m^2 of level panel gives approximately 33 W-hr (sic) per diem. Several times more if angled, of course, but that then shades a huge area.

    One reason that reserves of uranium ore are so low is that TPTB can't even be bothered to register sources that are known, and of slightly lesser quality. And thorium could be used, too, as is being planned in India.

    800:

    "Upshot: rather than energy consumption doubling over the next 30 years, I think it's likely to remain stable or fall."

    There are even signs that the seasonal variability is aligning better with solar+wind production, with solar being a near-perfect fit for the increasing use of air-con.

    I'm less convinced about the "smart grid" where consumption is modulated to production, rather than the other way around. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in the 1…120 minute window (freezers, heaters, heat-pumps, battery-charging), but it drops of rapidly after that.

    Also the necessary communication infrastructure (unless we use grid frequency as a single "balance" signal) will make us vulnerable to both attacks and mistakes.

    The main problem is the absolutist opinions.

    First, there are the people who cannot imagine a mix of supplies, it has to be all nukes, all wind, all solar or whatever. That's not going to happen and it would be economical folly to attempt it.

    Second, there are the people who think we have to stop all CO2 emissions. That is not necessary either, it will be perfectly OK to keep gas-fired reserve generators around and use them only 1% of the time.

    Who pays for the idle gas-gensets ? The people who want a stable grid, ie: all of us. Just like we have traditionally paid for coal-fired or nuclear produces to be on standby for each other.

    But most importantly: The revolution is already over. USA is expected to close 12.6GW of Coal, 1.2GW Gas and 0.8GW nuclear in 2022:

    https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50838

    Wind and solar are now cheaper than any other source of electricity, and no matter how corrupt, no politician can change that fact.

    801:

    If Denmark's like the UK, solar panels are installed to farm the subsidies. In terms of delivering useful power, they are dubiously useful, at best.

    802:

    I think, from my perspective living in Brisbane, the irony is that Sydney, being above 30º, is in Greg's half of the planet.

    803:

    If nuclear really was the only alternative for above 45 degrees (it isn't) then above 45 must be abandoned. There will be climate refugees one way or the other.

    Yes, and now I invite you to re-read this think-piece of mine, from almost exactly five years ago: Some notes on the worst case scenario. And, from May 2018, happy 21st century! -- the fiddly implementation details.

    If we don't figure out a way to survive in place we will be murdered.

    804:

    Without solar there's no way to stay in the UK in large numbers and long term.

    What's wrong with wind and tidal power?

    Renewables produced the equivalent of 97.4% of Scotland's electricity consumption in 2020, mostly from the country's wind power.

    (Tidal is harder, for reasons Nojay is happy to rant about -- it means dropping large amounts of concrete in a particularly harsh environment and keeping it maintained. But we've still got about 20% of Europe's tidal power capacity off our shores here.)

    To answer my up-front question: wind isn't reliable. Sometimes it blows so hard you have to feather the turbines or they'll come apart, sometimes it stops for a few days. But this isn't an absolute show-stopper: the real problem is, as it is with almost every other form of power except nuclear, a lack of storage capacity.

    805:

    All of which makes Greg Egan's recent novel Perihelion Summer really quite instructive.

    806:

    And there is no TECHNICAL difficulty in building a high-speed rail link from Helsinki to Berlin - expensive, and the politics beggar description, but feasible.

    Well, yeah, the politics. If you want to go the Eastern route, it's basically going via St. Petersburg, and the trip there with current rail is about 500 kilometres. Then you start getting into politics of high-speed rail.

    I think a better solution would be to have HSR from Tallinn to Berlin, but even going that route there are multiple polities in the way and it'd be somewhat difficult to build a single line going that route.

    The other way would be to go North around the Gulf of Bothnia to Stockholm and continue from there, but that's a somewhat longer trip (on the order of almost 2000 km) so it would need quite a fast train to be usable...

    807:

    the real problem is, as it is with almost every other form of power except nuclear, a lack of storage capacity

    I think this is half true, albeit a bit tangled and to the point where some of it is not quite real. It's not really true to say storage isn't an issue for nuclear, because over the lifetime of a nuclear plant you lose more value against investment (and to be clear this includes everything from social capital to waste disposal) through underconsumption than through any other factor. The MW we don't use can't be counted as part of the value proposition (and remember the whole concept of "base load" is a version of trying to make use of the otherwise unused value from coal plants).

    Storage is the sort of problem we'll never "solve" as such, but will be partially addressed in so many different ways that it no longer presents as an issue.

    808:

    So yes, in theory adding/removing parts of trains mid-route is a great idea in the real world it is problematic and thus they really try to avoid it.

    breaking trains up is quite common on the line I use. You are told to use the front or back of the train if you want to go to particular destinations. I assume they assemble them without passengers

    809:

    You could have high speed rail from Helsinki to Malmö, and from Copenhagen to Berlin. Then to transit over both routes you'd need to walk across the Øresund Bridge wearing a trench coat, tapping a cane and holding a lit cigarette (no need to inhale, at least that part would be optional).

    810:

    "If Denmark's like the UK, solar panels are installed to farm the subsidies."

    In Denmark solar is competitive without subsidies now, and that is before any meaningful CO2-tax has been applied to Coal.

    811:

    "Well, yeah, the politics. If you want to go the Eastern route, it's basically going via St. Petersburg,"

    No.

    There is a very live project for a Helsinki-Tallin tunnel, and a railroad from Helsinki that way to Berlin is high on many EU wish-lists.

    812:

    "breaking trains up is quite common on the line I use"

    In Denmark both breaking and joining trains is part of the regular schedule, being able to do so was a major driver for the design of the IC3 "tube-train".

    They have even shown both operations done at speed, but decided against doing that, because the new/future ERTMS radio-based signalling system protocols do not support it.

    813:

    Helsinki to Malmö by train? Now that's an option that wasn't there at any speed due to the Baltic Sea.

    (Did you confuse Helsinki with Stockholm?)

    For the Helsinki Worldcon, my wife and I used trains as much as possible. We did home to London King's Cross. From there we walked across the road to St Pancras, and got the Eurostar to Paris GdN. We then took the Metro across Paris, and then boarded a TGV down to Zurich.

    Where we boarded a sleeper to Prague, Czechia.

    From where we board a sleeper to Warsaw, Polandd the following evening.

    From where we boarded a train to Bialystock in eastern Poland.

    From where we boarded a train up to Kaunas in Lithuania.

    That's two and a half days to get that far, but we did get to tour Prague. The rest of the trip required a couple of coaches, and a ferry, with us having stayed two nights in Kaunas and one in Riga, since there was no rail link for that bit excepting going off to St Petersburg and back.

    There is a project under construction to build a decent speed link from Warsaw up to Tallinn: the Baltica railway project. If you look at that page you'll see a current wide variation in speed, and yeah, some of that route was 50km/h or worse, but other bits were shiny new with multiple tracks.

    814:

    "Storage is the sort of problem we'll never "solve" as such, but will be partially addressed in so many different ways that it no longer presents as an issue. "

    "Storage" as opposed to "Reserves" is a carefully planted FUD point from the fossilist.

    Storage implies a two-way process, electricity-to-X-to-electricity, and that obviously makes everything harder and less efficient, which is precisely why they launched that talking point.

    What we need are "reserves", something which can produce "electricity of last resort".

    The primary candidate is bio- or natural-gas driven gensets. For the small amount of time they will be running, their greenhouse-gas pollution is not relevant.

    Other candidates are (pumped) hydro or even, at least in the short term, coal. In the long run even "bio-diesel" gensets may be in the picture.

    As to the presently much hyped "PtX" technologies: Yeah, maybe in 25 years time.

    Will those reserves increase the cost of electricity ? Yes, but again, as I said above: They always did.

    815:

    You can hide subsidies in pricing structures, and that is what is done in the UK. In particular, a pricing structure that pays company A and B the same for GW-Hr is an indirect subsidy for company A.

    Company A supplies power unpredictably and erratically, with most at the times of least need, and is not penalised for failure.

    Company B provides the rest and, in particular, needs capacity for the peak load and a RAS margin.

    816:

    After seeing the Hinkley Point C deal, I cannot imagine anybody still thinking that the UK electicity market is anything but insane.

    The "Viking Link" Cable Denmarks grid operator wants to install between Denmark and England is pretty much premised in electricity prices in UK going bezerk after Brexit...

    817:

    I've written a long post where I answer each point, but now you've given me more homework. It's past midnight here and I'm dizzy with exhaustion. Answer tomorrow.

    818:

    Of course it's insane. It's another of these idiotic Tory privatisation jobs that takes an integrated national organisation that all worked together, and splits it up into a whole slew of different bits for every narrowly-defined sub-function all working against each other. Instead of one thing with the purpose of supplying electricity we now have loads of things with the purpose of making as much money for their own bit as they can and bugger all the rest. There is of course the usual ill-conceived regulatory structure apparently supposed to keep the inherent counterproductiveness under control, which equally of course immediately gets hacked by those it's supposed to control and repurposed to transform every normal operating glitch into a tangle of legal reasons to grab money off one of the other bits, and to enable behaviour which in some way directly or indirectly evades any responsibility for actually doing any work and landing one of the other bits with it.

    We have something over a couple of hundred entities which call themselves "suppliers" but do not supply anything, or indeed even do anything at all except collect the payments of people's bills and keep some of the money themselves before handing the rest over to the entities which are actually supposed to be being paid. It is officially considered by the Tories to be a good thing if people change to passing their payments through a different parasite every few months; they call this "engaging with the market". We are supposed to believe that this idiotic bollocks makes everything cheaper than a system which does not explicitly support such a flock of parasites - we'll be having government-supplied tapeworm eggs to put in our food at this rate.

    Australia seems to be even more fucking mental, although from what I can make out it seems to be basically the same sort of system, just operating in a context that further exaggerates the lunacies. A while back one of our antipodean contingent posted a tale of an incident of a city or area that was supplied from sources A, B, C and D. Some combination of circumstances managed to result in sources A, B and C all being fucked up at the same time, leaving D as the only one still functioning. This allowed source D to hold the city to ransom by jacking up the price to $50/kWh (or some such outrageous figure) until the other sources came back on line. The city had no choice but to pay it, which they did out of some special fund set up with the specific purpose of taking the hit from random massive rip-offs by legalised extortionists. How anyone can think a system where things like that are not only allowed to happen, but expected to happen so you have to keep a special pile of money sitting around to cope with them, is anything other than a piece of total and utter dog shite, is beyond me.

    819:

    806 - for "a few days" read "as much as a month". OK, this has only happened once that I know of, but when it did it covered most of the UK.

    808 - Although you would then logically route South from Stockholm to Gothenberg (and/or Malmo), Stockholm, Copenhagen and Hamburg to get to Berlin.

    810 - We have apparently at least indicated by personal account that (de)coupling rakes of couches in service, if not using slip coaches, is a matter of scheduling, not feasibility.

    812 - In Denmark, you have a technology that multiplies insolation!? In the UK we usually can't generate enough watts off a domestic photovoltaic array to run a household.

    816 - For the small amount of time they will be running, their greenhouse-gas pollution is not relevant.
    For values of "small" approximately equal to 75% of a day in December.

    820:

    I really do not understand that "If it isn't perfect, we shouldn't use it" attitude.

    Propaganda.

    821:

    I should got a step further than this after reading a few more comments. It seems like most of us (probably myself included) are getting some of our ideas about what can and can't produce sufficient electricity from someone's propaganda. Before posting a "rational objection" to, for example,* solar north of 45 degrees, make sure you numbers come from a place that's not propagandistic bullshit!

    .

    • Yes, I said, "for example." Please don't everreact as if I've slapped you in the face. The "over 45 degrees" thing might or might not be accurate - it's an example.
    822:

    Like the official insolation statistics, official energy usage figures, and simple arithmetic? Been there, done that. It has no effect on the solar-struck fanatics.

    It's not a hard latitude figure, anyway, and depends at least as much on other factors. The UK is unusually handicapped, because of its latitude (and cloud cover) and extremely high land use in the south (where the winter sun, such as it is, is found). If you analyse the UK's requirements and constraints, it is clear that local solar power can be no more than a piffling part of any solution, often does as much harm as good, and thus deserves no more than a very small part of our attention.

    Wind, tide and (some) hydroelectric power are all VASTLY more relevant. Importing solar power from north Africa (but not South America, let alone Australia!) via cable is also very plausible.

    823:

    Pigeon @ 820: Instead of one thing with the purpose of supplying electricity we now have loads of things with the purpose of making as much money for their own bit as they can and bugger all the rest.

    Because that "one thing" worked so efficiently and reliably in the past, everyone in it worked harmoniously to ensure that, and people certainly weren't out for whatever they could get.

    "Does the current system have inefficiencies?" is the wrong question, because the answer is always "yes". The right question is "which system has the lowest level of inefficiencies?".

    So what were the inefficiencies in the CEGB? We probably don't know, because it was, as you say, a giant monolith. Everyone in it had a vested interest in making it look smooth and efficient, regardless of what was going on underneath, and anything less than positive could be hidden under the Official Secrets Act (which exists to protect officials, not secrets).

    We do know a few bits; there was a hidden subsidy of the coal industry by the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) for political reasons. The top management of the CEGB was a political appointment, so doubtless there was a lot of similar stuff going on. The most economic location for a new power plant was doubtless to be found in a marginal constituency. And of course we all know about this, nothing like which will be built again.

    I used to work in a privatised industry. The culture shock between the old civil service and the new was quite something. Basic questions like "How much do we spend each year on X" for some important bits of X were literally unanswerable. The entire organisation was built around little fiefdoms, each desperately trying to argue its corner, but without any actual numbers on which a rational decision could be made. Yes there were budgets, but they included so many hidden overheads, cross-subsidies and deeply intertwingled systems (people plus technology + processes) as to be worthless. A major strategic goal of management for the first 10 years was too get all this stuff straightened out so that they could actually manage instead of just signing off on a budget of "last year + 5%" for everything.

    Part of the problem was that everything had become so deeply intertwingled that nobody actually understood how it all worked. Everybody understood their bit, and could tell you (in massive and tedious detail) about what they did and why their bit was important, but nobody could make any decisions about improving it for fear of breaking something.

    or indeed even do anything at all except collect the payments of people's bills and keep some of the money themselves before handing the rest over to the entities which are actually supposed to be being paid

    And hedging the likely costs on the futures market to avoid going bust when the market changes. Some do that better than others. The investors in the latter are certainly not celebrating right now. And don't forget all the people who sold those future contracts; they are also looking at big losses this year. (No, I'm not crying for them; its the game they chose to play.)

    We are supposed to believe that this idiotic bollocks makes everything cheaper than a system which does not explicitly support such a flock of parasites

    Would you prefer a system which keeps the parasites hidden? This is the problem with a system that makes the inefficiencies visible: everyone can see them and everyone complains about them. Before it was just a big black box labelled "CEGB" which sent the bill to the taxpayer every year (without actually revealing the size of that bill). If anyone suggested that it might be done better, they were just told they didn't know what they were talking about.

    (And if you say "I just want a system without any parasites" I'll send you a cookie).

    Another story from my days in a privatised industry. The CEO was at an international conference, and his French counterpart commiserated "It must be so difficult, having to go to the financial markets every time you want to do anything, being at their beck and call. How can you plan anything?" The next year they met again. "Its terrible", the Frenchman complained. "My budget was cut 30% this year by the Ministry. I've had to cancel all my investment projects and pay the penalty fees!".

    Perhaps you are right; perhaps the privatised electricity industry is less efficient than what went before. Or maybe the government is right and this way is better. Neither side can prove it either way. But at least now we can see the inefficiencies to argue about them. We know how much subsidy is being paid by whom to which bit. That alone is a significant improvement, because now we can actually make intelligent decisions instead of guessing.

    824:

    "But it's not a few seconds, particularly for a train that already has passengers on it."

    Yes, it is, with modern automatic couplers.

    Front half of Oxford-Paddington service (return working of unit that has just done Paddington-Oxford) is waiting in platform at Oxford. Rear half of service (unit working Hereford-Paddington) arrives at Oxford (with me on it). Pulls into same platform, stops a metre or so short of the other unit, creeps up that last little bit, clunk. And that's it.

    With the previous generation of units, clunk would have been just the start of the operation. Then someone gets down on the track, swings the coupler of one unit onto the hook of another (which requires a dynamic technique because it's heavy enough that a lot of someones can't just straight lift the thing), winds the screw round and round and round to tighten it, and then spends not much less time on each pair of stiff, heavy and awkward hose and jumper connectors that needs to be wrestled into engagement.

    The Hereford-Paddington service was allowed 5 or 10 minutes dwell time at Oxford to make this connection. We spent nearly all of it just sat there doing nothing. Previously we would have spent a significant part of it with someone wrestling with couplings, and all the margins for error would have been correspondingly reduced.

    A brake test is required after such an operation, but the same is true when a new driver takes over a service from a previous one, which is a thing that often happens at Oxford. The procedure for such a brake test has changed. It used to be a static test to verify that pressure changes in the pipe made it through from one end to the other. Now it is a running test carried out after departure: the driver builds up a moderate speed, then puts the brakes on and verifies that the train slows down as it should. This checks not only that the signal to operate is being sent to the brakes, but also that the brakes are responding to it. It also reduces time spent messing around in the station, while slightly increasing the time taken to drive the train to the next one.

    "Now most stations platform space/time is in high demand, so deliberately increasing dwell time to do this eats up capacity."

    Current practice, as encouraged by the daft privatised structure, is to try and fudge things using the time domain, which boots the responsibility for deficiencies in the train service off onto the infrastructure department, allowing the train operators to claim that none of it's their fault and killing any expectation of improvement since anything infrastructure takes years and years and costs at least ten times more than is remotely sensible.

    The inherent root-and-tendril nature of a railway network (thinking of the more interesting plants which aren't just simple pure branching structures) and the size of the set of possible journeys passengers wish to undertake mean that you inevitably have wiggly end bits that don't need much capacity provided and major bits that need lots. It is currently popular to deal with this by running a bunch of separate services, each comparatively infrequent, from the wiggly end bits in one set to the wiggly end bits in another set over the same major bits in the middle, so over the major bits the various services all add up to a large capacity.

    But keeping all the services separate means that they all need their own allocation of time and space at stations, and they all need their own separate paths over the network. And shortage of paths is what the network is currently choking on anywhere you care to look. The more services you can combine into single trains where they're following the same route, the more paths you free up.

    825:

    At Cambridge, the doors are usually locked for a minute or two, and the actual coupling is a small part of that. The fact that both trains have to stop first is irrelevant, because passengers need to get on and off, anyway. It's a bit of a scheduling nuisance, obviously, but nothing to get excited about. Also, at major junctions (Cambridge is a minor one), longer dwell time is useful for passengers making connections.

    826:

    Here's what I would do if I was in charge and I had multiple quadrillions burning a hole in my back pocket...

    I've no intention of dunking on anyone, but don't think too small.

    Let's look at the amount. The gross world product right now is a bit below US$90 trillion. So we're talking about 10-100 times the amount of money in the world. Basically, you own the place.

    Now, this can be a huge problem, or a huge opportunity. The problem is that if you spend that money, global hyperinflation becomes the norm. There's enough money for everyone to be a millionaire, but nothing additional to buy with it. So prices become ludicrous, and those who can't get in on the inflation basically die for the lack of a $20,000 liter of tap water.

    A better way to think of this amount is not as cash, but as power. Someone just gave you ultimate power over the global financial sector. What do you do with it?

    I'd suggest four things: --Dismantle the wealth management industry and put its clients out of business by alienating them from their resources and systems. This is code for doing away with all the billionaires and kleptocrats. --Implement a global debt jubilee. This does away with many of the burdens that are keeping people poor. Probably this involves radically restructuring the military and other industrial complexes in some interesting ways. --Implement solutions to climate change and other problems. The solutions are out there. The problem is, the only ones thought to be viable have to be a) sufficiently profitable to the wealthy and powerful, and b) politically palatable to the wealthy and powerful. Use the quadrillions to eliminate these two barriers. --Once these tasks have been accomplished, make the quadrillions, and probably quite a few trillions, disappear. In other words, buy the world, then gift it back to the biosphere, including humans, and make all those databases with financial numbers in them vanish so that the power they create vanishes too. Properly done, this massive deflation will make it much harder for billionaires to retake power.

    There's probably a host of fiddly details in there too, involving things like munitions buybacks and the like.

    That's just me going off the cuff. Someone who thought about it could do even better. Trouble is, quadrillions is like The One Ring. At best it can be used and destroyed. Keeping it around beyond that one use just speeds up civilization's collapse.

    827:

    "In Denmark, you have a technology that multiplies insolation!?"

    No, we have sensibly constructed and insulated new buildings.

    For instance most countries and people seem to totally overlook the fact that in sunshine a roof can easily reach 60-70°C, so in hot climates insulating your roof safes air-con costs.

    Well, we also have technology to optimize PV efficiency, both trackers and reflectors are being worked on, but they are of no significance yet.

    828:

    "Because that "one thing" worked so efficiently and reliably in the past, everyone in it worked harmoniously to ensure that, and people certainly weren't out for whatever they could get." [context: sarcasm]

    Any organisation has such problems because they naturally arise through human failings. To claim to solve the problem by reorganising things around principles that explicitly regard those failings as virtues and are set up to encourage them is a meaning of the word "solve" of which I was not previously aware.

    "Would you prefer a system which keeps the parasites hidden? ...(And if you say "I just want a system without any parasites" I'll send you a cookie)."

    I want a system which is not deliberately set up to promote their existence.

    "And hedging the likely costs on the futures market to avoid going bust when the market changes."

    I don't understand why you feel the need to say this. The context suggests that you are trying to counterbalance what I wrote by stating something which you expect me to view as commendable, but your actual statement is something that doesn't provide the slightest reason to so view it. The meaning I take from your paragraph as a whole is that they're not satisfied with a mere licence to print a certain amount of money, so they attempt to take more than they might turn out to have been allowed to, engage in a hybrid of ordinary gambling and a more complex and less conspicuous form of parasitism as a defence against being thus caught out, and don't always get away with it. Unless you're engaging in a more subtle form of sarcasm and not actually trying to defend the current system at all, I don't see what you're trying to convey.

    829:

    "They have even shown both operations done at speed, but decided against doing that, because the new/future ERTMS radio-based signalling system protocols do not support it."

    Slip coaches, or entire slip portions, are of course old news - the GWR was particularly fond of them. (They did violate signalling protocols - breaking the principle of having only one train in a section at a time - and they did also have the occasional incident of the slip coach going up the arse of the train it had just slipped from, but they still did it.)

    Pils coaches/portions, though, I thought was just me having nutty ideas that would never merit serious consideration. I am impressed that a proper full-size railway operator has actually done it with real trains.

    (I don't suppose they did it with a lasso and a flywheel though...)

    830:

    Last time I looked the best I could find about how much tidal capacity Britain has came out somewhere around 10GW, which is nice to have but a long way short of filling in for when the sun and wind aren't working. (It's also a fairly continuous supply given the way the times of the tides vary as you go around the island.)

    Of course the trouble with figures like this is that you can't tell whether they're actually realistic, or whether they've passed all the possible sites to the fairies and then not bothered to mention all the ones the fairies said will cost too much. I do think it sounds a bit low.

    I wonder how much power you could generate off the difference in sea level across Panama before you were dumping enough cold water into the Caribbean to really fuck up the Atlantic circulation...

    831:

    Dwell time is also handy for the "Oh crap, I should have been in the front four carriages" situations where you got to Kings Cross just in time to catch the fast train but forgot you needed to get to the far end of the platform for Cambridge North and points beyond. In the before times there were always a few people shuffling up the platform.

    832:

    The Sunrise Izumo/Seto Japanese trainset I have travelled on more than a few times splits into two sections at Okayama station (and joins up on the reverse direction travelling towards Tokyo). The process is well-practiced by the staff carrying it out and only takes a few minutes. You can find video of it on Youtube, of course:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyKWBAPs65c

    833:

    Any organisation has such problems because they naturally arise through human failings. To claim to solve the problem by reorganising things around principles that explicitly regard those failings as virtues and are set up to encourage them is a meaning of the word "solve" of which I was not previously aware.

    Try thinking of it this way. This is what you wrote, with changes in italics:

    Any organisation has such problems because they naturally arise through human failings. To claim to manage the problem by reorganising things around principles that explicitly recognise those failings instead of ignoring them and are set up to track and limit them is a meaning of the word "solve" of which I was not previously aware.

    BTW, the "engage with the market by switching suppliers* that you dismissed earlier is a key part of the limitation mechanism. Why do you want a government bureaucrat to do something you can do yourself?

    [On hedging risks] [...] engage in a hybrid of ordinary gambling and a more complex and less conspicuous form of parasitism [...]. Unless you're engaging in a more subtle form of sarcasm and not actually trying to defend the current system at all, I don't see what you're trying to convey.

    No its not gambling, its insurance. Futures markets, options, and all the rest, are mechanisms for trading risks. If you are in the electricity business then you have the risk that the price you pay will rise while the price you can charge does not. That is a fundamental risk of being in the energy market, but its one you don't want. By buying futures on the energy market you can pay someone to take this risk off you and on to themselves.

    This is just like what you or I do when we pass the financial cost of a burglary on to an insurance company. Looked at from one point of view, house insurance is a bet that you are going to be burgled, so its a kind of gamble where you win the jackpot by having someone burgle your house. Except, of course, that isn't the point of buying insurance.

    The real irresponsible gamblers were the companies who didn't hedge in this way; not hedging was a gamble that energy prices would stay stable or fall. Of course the companies who made that decision have now gone bust, and anyone who invested in them has made a 100% loss. Thems the breaks.

    As for the people who were paid to take on that risk, they will have been looking for risks that go in the opposite direction. If energy prices go up, what else goes up or down? Then they can make bets in the opposite direction on those things. Get that right, you make a steady profit. Get it wrong, and you lose your shirt, but like I say...

    The energy companies don't want to pay more than they have to for insurance, so they shop around. Market forces again.

    The trick for Government is to come up with an architecture for all this that minimises the inefficiencies. So by all means point out those inefficiencies and suggest ways that they can be reduced. But please don't pretend that sweeping it all into one box labelled "CEGB" will be any better unless you have evidence to support that assertion. If you do then I'm all ears. Until then you are just blowing smoke.

    834:

    This is already answered, but just to add my little bit, The coupling and de coupling of occupied passenger trains is a routine event in my part of south east England. My local service to/from London has carriages added/removed at Haywards Heath. Likewise the London to Southampton/Bognor Regis via the Arun Valley service divides or couples at Horsham and London to Weymouth at Bournemouth. The whole event only takes a couple of minutes, whichever way around it is happening.

    835:

    Moving water through the Panama Canal for electricity generation won't happen. It's not a cold water problem, because the canal runs NW-SE from the Caribbean to the Pacific, and they're probably the same temperature that close together. The problem is that Lake Gatun in the middle is 26 meters above the sea level on either end (I'm fudging, there's about a 2ft difference in sea level IIRC). So seawater would have to be pumped uphill to get from ocean to ocean, and there's no utility in generating electricity off the difference. Lake Gatun in the middle is freshwater, made by damming the Chagres River. The biggest island on the lake is Barro Colorado, which you might have heard about at some point.

    836:

    "No its not gambling, its insurance. Futures markets, options, and all the rest, are mechanisms for trading risks."

    That was the original intent (and current claimed intent), and how it started, but is NOT how it operates today. In particular, the millisecond trading is of no practical use in managing risks, and it's not a critical (perhaps the MOST critical) part of the mechanism. It's high-stakes gambling, often with other people's money.

    837:

    "I think this is actually a case where money stops being a useful way to understand the world."

    I don't think it ever was.

    It's OK for the small-scale, grounded, everyday purpose of tokens for playing swapsies to avoid getting stuck due to not having anything the other person wants to swap. But the moment you start considering there's anything "real" about it beyond the actual pile of tokens you have in your hand, you get sucked into an alternate universe of complete and utter batshit insanity where reality is nothing more than a function of made-up numbers pulled out of the arses of the privileged few who have the golden rectum, and trying to construct any meaningful mapping between such a complex tangle of fictional madness and any kind of reality you can stub your toe on (or cook with CO2) is the kind of pointless endeavour whose only possible output is the kind of useless garbage that leads you to be unable to avoid stubbing your toe all the bloody time.

    Moreover, the use of money as a sole meaningful motivator for any kind of project or purpose is like doing smack. The motivator becomes the purpose, and anything that may happen to be achieved on any aspect of what the purpose is supposed to be is purely a lucky by-product of that aspect's chance alignment with some aspect of doing more smack.

    There seem to be two broad classes of measures for dealing with climate change: those that follow the notion that a solution must of necessity emerge as a side-effect of some apparatus cobbled together out of household items to shoot up on insane golden arse numbers with (just as the problem itself emerged as a side-effect of such things), and those that do not. I incline to consider the latter approach as the less irrational of the two.

    838:

    EC: In particular, the millisecond trading is of no practical use in managing risks

    Who said anything about millisecond trading? Certainly not me.

    I was talking about hedging liabilities over months, not milliseconds. I'm aware of high speed trading: like you I think its something we could do without, and its something that regulators could tackle without much difficulty. Putting in an enforced 1 minute latency on trading data should do nicely. Maybe add a random jitter of a second or two for each recipient so that you don't get an advantage by having your data arrive 1 minute + 1ms when the other guy only gets it 1 minute + 2ms.

    Unfortunately the banks would scream and they have the money to be heard. But that's democracy :-/

    If the left took a more judicious and targeted approach to this kind of thing it might be more effective.

    839:

    Of course the trouble with figures like this is that you can't tell whether they're actually realistic

    A huge problem is that the convenient sites for tidal power are environmentally sensitive, and vice versa. The Severn estuary, for example, was going to provide 5GW of base load ... back in the late 1970s before it was realized that this use was incompatible with a site of special scientific interest that was home to several endangered species.

    That leaves offshore stuff which is theoretically viable but involves the same calm and forgiving environment as North Sea Oil, only with extra turbulent flow (because you get the most power out where the water's running fast).

    840:

    Coupled and decoupled regularly?

    How about the decades that the (self-proclaimed) Standard Railroad of the World, the Pennsy, switched from electric to steam, then to diesel, at Harrisburg, for every east-west passenger train, all with passengers on the train?

    sigh Would love to see a film of trading a GG-1 and a K-4....

    841:

    No, not via the canal, I meant digging a bloody massive tunnel and putting turbines in it...

    The Pacific is on average a little higher than the Atlantic, so there is some head to generate flow; and it can get up to a few metres higher because the tides are bigger on the Pacific side (and of course also lower, but I suspect without working it out you'd be better off not allowing bidirectional flow). So you can generate power, but you need a very large flow to do it. Still, you've got a whole ocean's worth available...

    The Pacific has a lower salinity and you've got the Humboldt current going all the way up that coast bringing up cold water; the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are the heater that powers the Gulf Stream, so it seems logical that there is at least the possibility of buggering things up in a very major way if you change the conditions there too much.

    Basically it's just an evil idea for a bad pseudo-sustainable generation project that you could make a schlock eco-thriller about or something :)

    842:

    Planting my tongue Very firmly in my cheek, let me make a modest suggestion or two:

    How about, to power the world, we build an undersea tunnel between Tierra Del Fuego and the Antarctic Peninsula. Periodically, the project creates subsea tidal barrages as stations along the tunnel, and these connect up to the extremely well developed power grid in southern Chile and from there to the rest of the world. This will also help with the obligatory migration of climate refugees to the rapidly melting Antarctic Peninsula, there to settle new land.

    If this project works out, we can set up similar projects linking mainland Canada to Dorset Island, Dorset Island to Greenland, Greenland to Iceland, and Iceland to Norway. We get tidal power and non-polluting train corridors. And, for the Iceland stretch, we also get a wee bit of geothermal power too.

    What could possibly go wrong?

    *Yes, this one-ups Harry Harrison. Thanks for noticing.

    843:

    You are clearly half a century out of date. The futures market is essentially ALL about millisecond trading, nowadays - we were consulted on that matter, back when I managed a supercomputer. The markets have added some jitter to reduce the advantages of the companies that run in the same machine room, but I have not kept track of the details. Pigeon is right.

    844:

    There were mutterings about non-barrage generators in places with a high natural flow, which have fewer ecological problems, but it's still tricky.

    845:

    You are clearly half a century out of date. The futures market is essentially ALL about millisecond trading, nowadays

    Yes, so are all financial markets. This is a problem, but its orthogonal to the one I originally raised, which is the need to hedge real-world liabilities over real-world time frames. Chewbacca was a wookie. So what?

    846:

    [Money is] OK for the small-scale, grounded, everyday purpose of tokens for playing swapsies to avoid getting stuck due to not having anything the other person wants to swap. But the moment you start considering there's anything "real" about it beyond the actual pile of tokens you have in your hand, you get sucked into an alternate universe of complete and utter batshit insanity

    OK, so what do you want to replace it with?

    You and EC keep saying "Capitalism bad", and I keep asking this same question, and I keep on not getting a coherent answer.

    847:

    Because it's a straw man of your own invention.

    Yes, it is extremely harmful when out of control (as it is at present), and is being abused to harm many countries and the people within them. One of the the primary purposes of a government is to protect a country from enemies, domestic and foreign, and that is NOT what is being done. We need proper regulation, and enforcement of that regulation.

    Any other resource management system will have similar problems, because it is in the very nature of complex systems.

    848:

    I've seen press reports of assorted non-barrage tidal flow generators being built and deployed in the past. They're usually one-off prototypes, generating a couple of MW at peak tidal flow periods or continuously in high current-flow regions such as off the coast of Cape Wrath. The press reports then go quiet with no news from the project, a bit like the Biggest Battery Breakthrough Since Breakfast articles. A year or two later, another tidal power generator concept makes its appearance before the world's press, and so on. What I've not seen (yet) are plans to deploy dozens or hundreds of these generators in select locations to produce significant amounts of power. This leads me to believe that these prototypes didn't work out economically, broke hard in use or cost too much to keep in operation in an actual marine environment, faced with corrosion and marine life encrustation. See also the "Salter Duck" of old.

    849:

    You and EC keep saying "Capitalism bad", and I keep asking this same question, and I keep on not getting a coherent answer.

    Go read 828 again.

    Here's the simple problem with capitalism: it's based on alienation. A tree in a forest has no value until it is cut down. The forest has no value until it is owned, but wildlands only have value based on the "improvements" made to them. So a land with a clearcut forest atop it is more valuable in capitalism than an uncut forest.

    This has been a critical problem for decades in environmental economics. What is the value of nature. It's either zero or infinite. The reason is that nature contains capitalism, so what's the value within capitalism of the system that contains capitalism? It's a divide by zero problem, and the values assigned by environmental economics are for things extracted from nature into capitalism. And they're still substantially larger than the entire gross world product. They have to be.

    So the obvious and very unsarcastic answer to what to replace capitalism with is to reverse it: instead of land and resources belonging to you, you belong to land and resources. This means that you take care of the systems that own you, and in return, you are allowed to take the surplus generated to live on, either directly or through trade. If we called those resources "totems" or "dreaming," you'd recognize that this is a very, very old and well-established idea with thousands of years of success behind it, while capitalism's been around for far less and is failing. For modern times, I'd suggest expanding the Dreaming to include the atmosphere, space, the electromagnetic spectrum, and other infrastructure necessary to keeping human life going. If you're a civil engineer, you may belong to the roads, and your job is to take care of them, for example.

    One twist on this is the idea that one doesn't eat one's totem. So, for example, you may be responsible to care for a bit of the internet. You cannot personally use that bit of internet, but you can use the systems that others care for. This creates a really interesting and tricky set of codependencies that might actually make for a more stable system.

    Anyway, the short answer is that capitalism is ass-backwards, so one obvious solution is to reverse how ownership and valuation works and see if that works better.

    850:

    I heard that it was corrosion, but that's the same for barrage generators, and they CLAIM to know how to solve that. Maybe. At least tidal energy makes physical sense for the UK, even if the engineering is damn hard.

    851:

    829 - In the UK, most buildings are not new builds. The most recent buildings I've ever worked or lived in date from the 1970s. The oldest I can reliably date would be the Gilbert Scott Building at the University of Glasgow, from 1870. This message is being typed in one built in 1910.

    837 - Sounds about right to me.

    842 - I think we're all agreeing with you, even ignorant of the individual case.

    852:

    No, not via the canal, I meant digging a bloody massive tunnel and putting turbines in it... The Pacific is on average a little higher than the Atlantic, so there is some head to generate flow; and it can get up to a few metres higher because the tides are bigger on the Pacific side (and of course also lower, but I suspect without working it out you'd be better off not allowing bidirectional flow). So you can generate power, but you need a very large flow to do it. Still, you've got a whole ocean's worth available... The Pacific has a lower salinity and you've got the Humboldt current going all the way up that coast bringing up cold water; the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are the heater that powers the Gulf Stream, so it seems logical that there is at least the possibility of buggering things up in a very major way if you change the conditions there too much.Basically it's just an evil idea for a bad pseudo-sustainable generation project that you could make a schlock eco-thriller about or something :)

    It's more evil than that, because there are three fairly serious problems with what you laid out.

    One is the notion that the seas are at different mean levels. They aren't. The Pacific and Caribbean tides are quite different (ca. 18 feet versus ca. 18 inches) but that's only good for generating intermittent energy.

    The second is that the Panamanian Isthmus is north of the equator, while the Humboldt current is south of the equator. See this diagram, for example. Normally currents do not cross the equator, due in part to the coriolis effect. The currents are hairy around the isthmus (one area is called "Punta Mala" for a reason), but they're getting Pacific equatorial water, not antarctic water. There's not enough of a temperature difference between the two oceans (see this website) to be much use.

    The third problem is that the Panama tectonic microplate is a little chunk of volcanic goodness that's caught between several other plates. Panama is earthquake country and contains two active volcanoes. So it's not the most peaceable bit of real estate to bore a tunnel through. To be fair, the Canal zone appears to be the least geologically active part of the country. But that's relatively calm in a highly active region, not boringly safe.

    853:

    I've been in a train from Cambridge to London where Part A utterly rejected Part B.

    Part A starts from Cambridge and forms the front of the train and is usually sitting at the platform. Part B starts at Kings Lynn and forms the back of the train. Part A was sitting there, people were getting on. Part B arrived, and normally it's trivial to couple up; except it didn't work. After several goes, instructions were issued to de-train. So we did, and they had several higher intensity tries to try and get the coupling mechanism to work...

    It failed, and the upshot was that the 12 carriage train was crammed into 4 carriages, and forget trying to board at any intervening station when we were already packed in like sardines.

    854:

    Theoretically, you could build a tunnel under the Åland Sea (shorter than the Chunnel!) and bridges across the Archipelago Sea....

    855:

    Barrage generation almost always causes radical ecological change to quite large areas of wetlands and existing waterways on the inland side of the barrage structure. However there is a simple solution to that.

    Nukes. Find an area of coastline with little ecological footprint, the western coast of Alaska or maybe Greenland and use nuclear explosive devices to blow a large gaping hole adjacent to the shoreline. Build a barrage with turbines AFTER you do this, not before. The explosion creates a large sterile pond that fills and empties as the tide turns twice a day and if you're lucky you may even get new wetland habitats developing on the inland shores of the pond. Win win.

    (Somebody get Heteromeles a bucket-sized bottle of tranquilisers, stat).

    856:

    Sorry about the length of this post

    TL;dr I think solar is the only option for a bunch of reasons, and I think it can work. The usual alterative is nuclear, which works great at a small scale, but if you try to scale it up misery ensues.

    That's a very odd assumption.

    I'm certainly willing to agree it's unusual. However if you phrase it as "if this thing that everyone agrees won't work here doesn't work then we're completely screwed" then maybe it sounds better?

    Firstly, TFR in the nations above 45 degrees is generally below replacement -- populations are falling. Secondly, energy consumption per capita isn't rising: if anything it's falling due to efficiency improvements and better insulation. (EU energy consumption almost flatlined after the 1974 oil shock, despite population increase and economic growth.) Thirdly, climate change means that by-and-by there'll be less energy demand for heating because winters will be less chilly.

    Ok assume population falls by 50%. Assume energy consumption falls by 50% per capita. Assume heating is 100% of the energy demand and no one installs an airconditioner, so 50% fall in demand due to warming. (note, this is double dipping the energy savings. 50% fall for... Reasons, plus another 50% fall for warming)

    Upshot: rather than energy consumption doubling over the next 30 years, I think it's likely to remain stable or fall.

    No, let's assume it falls by 87.5% to just 12.5% of its current level rather than increases by 100%

    I said: The world consumption of uranium is 62,496 tonnes, to make 2553 TWh. Using that ratio, 100,000 one GW reactors would need 21 million tonnes of uranium per year. That's roughly 3 times the current world reserves at 260 USD/kg.

    Firstly, your energy demand is at least twice as high as it needs to be.

    We delt with that above, don't double dip.

    Secondly, you're assuming 210 tonnes of uranium per 1Gw reactor. That's a ridiculous excess:

    Numbers from the world nuclear association.

    http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figures/world-nuclear-power-reactors-and-uranium-requireme.aspx

    a full reactor fuel load is on the order of 50 tons of LEU, which seems to be what you're postulating,

    The world nuclear organisation gives the numbers for U before enrichment. The cost per kg they give is before enrichment. If you count the cost of U before enrichment and the amount needed after, you're fooling yourself. The numbers for before are readily available. Makes sense to use them in both cases.

    but you're not accounting for running a mixed-oxide fuel cycle and reprocessing the "spent" fuel. In which case you end up mostly running on plutonium and your uranium input goes about 25-50x further than your baseline assumption.

    I said "But of course, we can build fast breeder reactors that use 1/100th of the uranium". So I'm twice as optimistic as your most optimistic numbers for breeders.

    (NB: fast breeders were cutting-edge and difficult ... in the 1960s. We've built them, screwed up, and know the obvious failure modes now. (I notice India is currently commissioning a Gen 3 commercial fast breeder: why not copy that?)

    It's not designed, "optimised", to roll off a production line every 90 minutes. If we were talking about building 5, or even 50 bespoke units over a 40 year period, then yeah, probably a great design. Copy away. That's not what we're discussing.

    Finally: you're assuming world production of uranium is static.

    I assume an over 400 fold increase in uranium production from the current 47,731 tonnes/yr to 21,000,000 tonnes/yr and improvements in extraction increasing reserves from 6,147,800 tonnes (as per the world nuclear organisation figures) to 196,729,600, a 32 fold increase.

    But it's not: it's set at that level because there's no demand for additional material at present so it's not commercially viable to open new mines or seawater extraction plants.

    Yeah, that's why I included a 32 fold increase in reserves. Was that not optimistic enough?

    So assuming the energy consumption drops to 12.5%... Instead of 21 million tonnes you need 2.6 million tonnes. Assume a 50 fold increase in energy per kg (your most optimistic number). It's now 52,000 tonnes. 52 million kg.

    Now if you cut consumption that much, you don't need to simulate production as much. (thanks for making me redo the numbers, I missed that first time around) So not 26 million per kg. Say 26 thousand per kg. Only a 4 fold increase in reserves. That means a fuel bill of 1.3 trillion dollars a year. About 3300 USD per person. (because we've cut population by 50% in 30 years). Plenty of fuel for decades (assuming the global North hogs all the resources, again) However, that might not be realistic. That's a big population fall (50%) and a big cut in consumption, (75%).

    If we assume energy consumption remains static as you propose, and we include your most optimistic projection for the efficency of a breeder, we need 8 times more energy than the above. So that's 8 times the cost, but spread over more people, so 4 times the cost per person. 13,000 USD per person. Using your least optimistic number of 20 times increase from breeders, it's 32,000 USD per person. So that sounds like a reasonable range 13,000-32,000 per person, but that's just for fuel. So that's about 33-75% of the UK GDP spent on fuel alone. How long will the economy stand that? Plus the fuel runs out before 2100 (or costs 10 times as much, whichever)

    Having said that, I didn't quite just pull that figure of doubling demand from the air. Maybe a bit, but this is the reasoning. Currently, much of the heating demand is met by fossil fuels. We can see from monthly figures that it's much higher in the winter, but the finest granularity we have is monthly. Electricity doesn't work like that. You need to be able to cover the 5 minute peak load. So the "winter peak" means a very different thing electrically. January might have 4 times the consumption, but with fossil fuels that's all you know. The 13th of January at 3:35 pm might be 8 times the consumption, while the rest of January averages 4 times. The second thing is that AGW doesn't just dial up every reading by 2 degrees. It makes the temperature more variable, both hotter and colder (at least until we lose the ice caps and the whole world settles down to being 12 degrees warmer, but that's not on the 30 year horizon). So, when you're figuring out how much generation capacity you need, it's going to be much higher than the average and the weather may be just as bad or worse than it is now, at least some of the time. You need to plan for that or deal with people freezing on their homes. That might mean air raid shelter like refuges or letting people die. If that's the case, and consumption does double, that's 66-150% of GDP.

    But fuel isn't the only cost. Piper Alpha had a 1.7 billon pound payout when it was a total loss in 1988. I don't think I'm over estimating to say a nuke on a platform would be worth the same today. That's vastly cheaper than Hinkley Point C. 1.7 pounds per Watt, vs Hinkley at 7 pounds. We need 50,000 of them (at the consumption numbers you gave). At 1.7 billion pounds each, that's 85 trillion pounds. 115 trillion USD. 145,000 dollars per person. At 1% interest that's about 3500 dollars a year per person over 50 years, at which point everything needs to be replaced, but fuel costs 10 times more. The wages for 10 million workers (not all directly running the reactors) runs about another trillion annual or 1250 per person. It might be cheaper on land, but that's a lot of land, that someone already owns. That someone will be quite cross when a bunch of untrained teenagers blow up the reactor which will happen all the time.

    I really don't think the North can sustain that expenditure and literally put food on the table (given that most food is imported). Those numbers (apart from the last one) look optimistic to me, and they're getting close to the entire UK GDP. What they'd do to balance of trade...

    It's hard to walk around Edinburgh Old Town, look at the tourists, the shops, the thousand year old castle and think "I'm not sure this will be able to continue". But if you (the global North) collectively refuse to run some cables from sunny places, it can't. It really can't.

    ^^^^^^^^

    Then homework arrived.

    OK, it's the next day here and I've done my homework.

    If we don't figure out a way to survive in place we will be murdered.

    I think you're quite right. Which is why I said almost that exact thing. Particularly if it all happens rather suddenly during a global collapse of civilisation. A managed retreat might be possible. It's just a tiny bit galling that the global North, so happy to suggest distant brown people should depend on the kindness of strangers when the river delta they've farmed for 10,000 years is flooded due to minibreaks in Ibeza, now are not at all pleased by the idea that it might be them living in a place that's not going to be habitable, and quite soon.

    What's wrong with wind and tidal power?

    Tidal isn't within 2 orders of magnitude of sufficient. Wind, as Greg and others like to point out, is prone to stopping for weeks at a time when it's needed most. For wind to come close to working for 800 million people you'd need season to season energy storage. You'd probably also need a lot more wind if you want to power 800 million northerners rather than 5 million Scots. If you have that much storage then solar works because you can charge up during the long summer days. This is an excercise looking at what things look like if solar doesn't work and the fake greenies would just get out of the bloody way and let us build the nuclear we need. I think solar does work, and it's the only thing that can work long term and these posts have been describing how I got to that conclusion.

    Damien points out that nuclear becomes much more attractive if you add seasonal storage. But of course, if you have enough storage to make nuclear not utterly ridiculous, then you could have had solar for 1/10th the cost, installed in 1/10th the time.

    Poul-Henning Kamp says: The primary candidate is bio- or natural-gas driven gensets. For the small amount of time they will be running, their greenhouse-gas pollution is not relevant.

    That's fine for you to say small amounts of emissions are not relevant. In 30-40 years when countries are being torn apart by climate change, having 25 TW of diesel gensets might be viewed the same way we view nuclear missile factories. That is, a clear and present weapon of mass destruction, and if you don't let international inspectors in to make sure you are only fueling them from carbon neutral sources, you might find smart bombs coming in through the windows to make sure.

    857:

    gasdive
    You can't have baseload power.
    LIAR or STUPID or Brainwashed or some combination.
    We HAVE TO HAVE baseload power
    Yes, I know about personal abuse, on this blog, but seriously, please stop it ...
    SEE ALSO - - Charlie @ 799 & 805 ??

    Let's get this straight.
    I want as much energy as possible from renewables ... but that is never, ever, going to be enough, especially in our winters, with cold, dull, still spells, so we need nuclear AS WELL AS all the renewables.
    OK??????

    858:

    Still waiting for the bit where you produce a seasonal storage at all, never mind one that somehow works with photovoltaic generation but not with nuclear, wind or hydro, or a combination of the three. Without a seasonal storage that can store photovoltaic energy but nothing else, the rest of your post makes no sense.

    859:

    Paul @ 680: On the Motorail idea, I think the fundamental problem is the Business Case.

    f you want to set up such a service, you are competing against a number of alternatives:

         Drive there yourself.

         Take the train, then hire a car.

         Take a plane, then hire a car.

    To win, you need a better trade-off on time/money/hassle for some significant part of the population.

    I'm not proposing to set up such a service. I just want the service so I can use it.

    It's the "then hire a car" at the destination that makes the whole damn thing cost prohibitive. I'm not looking at needing it for a couple of days, I'm looking at needing it for weeks or months.

    Another factor is how much baggage can you carry on the train or plane. What's the appropriate compromise between having enough clean underwear & my medications and having the gear I'm going to need to do the photography that's the whole purpose of making the trip. If I can't have both; if I have to choose between one or the other, there's no purpose in making the trip in the first place.

    So, that leaves "drive there yourself" ... 1,750 miles (26 hours) to get to my starting point - three days on the road just to get going. I have done it in one single push stopping at rest areas along the Interstate to nap for an hour here and there. IT WAS NOT FUN and by the time I reached my destination I was too exhausted to do anything but fall into bed & sleep 48 hours straight to recover 1.

    But, "drive there myself" is what it's gonna be. I'll just have to accept that I'm going to lose a week of my time in getting there and back.

    Given the price of rail tickets, it is generally cheaper to drive somewhere than to take even two people by rail. The only reason to take a train is if a car would be a positive hindrance at the far end, which basically means "if you are going to visit London". For a family of four the train is much more expensive than a car (assuming you have a car, but that's 90+% of the population).

    I don't know what Motorail would charge for taking the car, but I doubt it was much cheaper than a day or two of hiring a car. So it won't work for day trips or overnight. But if you are going somewhere for a week or more, the tiredness overhead of driving there starts to look like less of an issue anyway, and the fuel costs will still be less than any conceivable Motorail solution.

    How does it compare to the cost of hiring a car for a week; two weeks ... a month ... or longer?

    There is no way that a train be faster an aircraft for a journey that takes more than 4 hours by surface (that is the lower limit that FlyBe use for their routes). So anyone who cares about time will simply take a plane and hire a car at the far end.

    Getting there fast means nothing if you're stuck at the other end because you can't afford to hire a car. Might as well stay home.

    Then you have overheads and limits on vehicle size. Trailers and caravans? Difficult to impossible. So many holidaymakers can't use the service anyway.

    How to get to France on the Eurotunnel with a Motorhome and dogs

    [ ... ]

    The only solutions to this are to heavily subsidise the rail operation or tax petrol at insane rates. Personally I'd favour the latter, as it would get people moving to electric cars faster.

    Here in the U.S. I'd be reasonably satisfied with both. Subsidize rail AND subsidize Electric Vehicles. But you're still going to need more charging stations along the way.

    1 Albuquerque, NM to Raleigh, NC.

    860:

    David L @ 703:

    IIRC the wood pellets come from the US southern states where there's a lot more sunshine per annum than the Frozen North. They're processed and shipped via diesel-burning train to, I think New Orleans where they get trans-shipped onto bunker-fuel burning ships and thence to the UK where they get loaded onto more trains, also diesel-burning before arriving at Drax where they suddenly become Green as fuck.

    A large amount of wood pellets are made from hardwoods in the eastern end of North Carolina. Between I95 and the coast. And is pelleted then shipped from Wilmington or maybe Elizabeth City to Europe and other places. It was big in the news a while back when Germany was all about wood pellets for home heating as a green way to shut down nuclear. Per the EU regs on such things biomass (wood pellets) are better than coal. Except it is not.

    Oh well.

    https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/07/us/american-south-biomass-energy-invs/

    Much of it is a by-product of the timber industry in eastern NC. Wood scrap not suitable for use in construction or furniture making can still be used for wood pellets (or for making paper products).

    Elizabeth City is not a port. The other port in NC, which has a bulk wood pellet facility, is Morehead City.

    861:

    Without a seasonal storage that can store photovoltaic energy but nothing else, the rest of your post makes no sense.

    I try to read people';s posts somewhat generously. Gasdive seems to be talking about a context in which political difficulties make a global electricity grid infeasible (kind of like our current situation). So multiple TW of wind power distributed over Eurasian linked by a big grid isn't really an option, but without that you have lulls in the wind for days-to-weeks over much to Europe. So while wind can contribute, it's probably not going to be a majority of the supply.

    For similar reasons water power isn't really feasible. Plus it has the additional disadvantage of destroying the ecology of whatever water body it uses, whether it be tidal, hydro or one of the imaginary ones.

    Biofuels that don't use food are still in the experimental basket. Some of them can work on a lab scale, but they make PV look resource efficient by comparison so until someone actually scales one up they're a bit theoretical. We definitely know that we can launder fossil fuels via food crops to produce fossil-replacement fuels.

    It does kind of leave PV and CSP as the main options for bulk energy production. Although honestly for a lot of cases local solar thermal has big advantages, but for the most part that';s still more expensive than having better buildings in the first place (yes, knocking them down and building properly insulated ones is cheaper than paying the energy bills even without the price shocks the UK have currently decided to impose on themselves).

    As for seasonal storage, the one we know works is pumped hydro. Aotearoa has a proposal for that, as part of the five year scale storage system to tide them over dry years (country is ~75% hydro). Doing that at an EU scale would be very difficult, but right now no-one seems to be looking for alternatives with any urgency. Apparently people really would rather freeze, or burn their grandchildren for heat.

    862:

    We HAVE TO HAVE baseload power

    Can you link to an explanation of this that doesn't come from the coal board? I understand why people like having very cheap electricity overnight, but I don't understand why it's essential.

    I can imagine that maybe it's because without cheap night heating poor people will die, but you're already doing that and few people seem to be treating it as a crisis, let alone an emergency (except perhaps in the Chicken Little sense - much screaming, no move towards solving the problem). Is that what you mean?

    "baseload" in the sense of not having to manage grid demand is technically impossible, the grid exists specifically to do that thing. It's orders of magnitude more efficient to do that than have every electricity user run their own fast-response local source on site (see the forest of petrol and diesel generators stinking up places that don't have proper grids).

    The suggestion from many of us is that to solve larger scale intermittency problems one solution is to expand the grid. Or interlink the grids, if you prefer.

    The other approach is to have more peaking plants that burn natural gas (or some other fossil fuel, or possibly wood). Those are expensive compared to pumped hydro, less efficient (not so much round trip efficiency since they're single pass, but thermodynamic efficiency) and obviously have non-zero emissions (making them capture and store their emissions would be insanely inefficient, since by design they only run 1% of the time)

    863:

    "To be fair, the Canal zone appears to be the least geologically active part of the country. But that's relatively calm in a highly active region, not boringly safe."

    Relatively indeed.

    https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70036541

    Neotectonics and paleoseismology of the Limón and Pedro Miguel faults in Panamá: earthquake hazard to the Panamá canal

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro\_Miguel\_Fault

    Both faults are active, cause earthquakes every 600 to 900 years, and could cause ground slippage of up to 9.8 feet (3.0 m). An earthquake in 1882 caused a regional tsunami. A team of seismologists... found evidence suggesting both faults slipped simultaneously around 700 CE.

    Potential consequences of an earthquake

    The Pedro Miguel and the Limón Fault system are a concern for geologists, as a strong earthquake centered on either could damage the canal, drain the lake that supplies water for the operation of its locks, Lago Gatun, and cause severe damage in the capital.

    [[ markup fix - mod ]]

    864:

    How about a accounting system that works with the values you've suggested: The value of any resource is either infinite or zero. All resources start by being valued as infinite because a properly cared-for forest, for example, will sustain you and all your descendants for eternity. If you remove a tree from the forest its value is now infinity - 1 tree. So to preserve the value of the forest, you must replace the tree: Cut down an oak, plant an acorn.

    Human-built items don't count backwards from infinity. They count upwards from zero. If you own a computer, you own zero + one computer.

    If you're stupid/desperate/evil enough to cut down a whole forest, or damage it such that it won't give the next generation enough trees and the value becomes zero; everyone who's remotely numerate will know what you've done...

    865:

    LIAR or STUPID or Brainwashed or some combination. We HAVE TO HAVE baseload power

    Or what?

    You've ruled out solar and wind over and over. Tidal is about 100th of the required power. Coal will collapse the civilisation that you depend on. Nuclear is ridiculous and you don't have the money or the fuel or a hundred other things to make it work.

    What are you left with as alternatives? Yelling at me? The numbers are pretty clear. I can't be lying, I gave the world nuclear association's numbers and a link you can check.

    "HAVE TO HAVE" doesn't make something possible. Not unless you're three and you think yelling that you HAVE TO HAVE an ice-cream will get you an ice-cream. Even then, if you're on a plane, and you're yelling at your parents that you HAVE TO HAVE an icecream right now! If there's no ice cream on the plane, you're shit out of luck. Calling your parents stupid and liars when they tell you there's no ice cream won't create an icecream.

    I've been going on about this here for years, and I thought everyone understood the subtext. The alternative for failing to decarbonise is that you leave and probably die, or you hang on and certainly die. Apparently not.

    866:

    I realise that to people who like nuclear power as a solution all this seems very silly, it's just tiptoeing around the obvious solution.

    So ignoring the technical problems, can I instead look at what's actually being done. In terms of generation capacity being added every decade (scale chosen so that nuclear appears on it), we have many, many GW of PV and wind being added every decade. We have a few GW of minor things like CSP, solar thermal, fossil gas and so on, plus a fuckton of coal. We have a very small number of GW of nuclear being added.

    So in raw pragmatic view, nuclear is obviously not a practical solution. It's just not happening.

    Sure, given some major technical improvements, plus significant changes in politics, nuclear might become a solution in the future. It's not a bad thing to put some research effe=ort into, as part of the "research all the things with great haste" approach to avoiding the worst of the climate catastrophe. But it is definitely not a "bet everything on this working" solution.

    IMO it's very much an "if we die without this, we're almost certainly going to die" solution. Kind of like a self-sustaining Mars colony, and probably about as expensive.

    867:

    How about the shorter a time you hold a stocck/future, the higher the tax? And anything under, say, a week, unless you can prove personal disaster (your car died, etc), the tax bracket's up over 70%.

    868:

    Heteromeles @ 729: That's fair, and I'm not questioning your previous experience in North Carolina. I do question depending on a dam, especially given the mess in Oroville where a single tree nearly caused the spillway to fail. The critical questions for that plant are:
    a) what is it's working lifespan?
    b) what's the climate forecast for that lifespan?
    c) what kind of maintenance and rebuilding does the dam need to deal with that climate forecast?
    d) Is it getting the maintenance and rebuilding it needs for c)?
    [reformatted slightly to make it easier to read]

    a) I don't know for sure ... a hundred years? It's been 40 years since I helped build the dam ... and a couple years before that when I was working on the nuclear plant itself.
    b)Same as it is now only more of it.
    c)I don't think it needs any special attention due to predicted climate change
    d)It gets regular inspections. AFAIK, to date no repairs have been needed. It was solidly built & has stood up well so far.

    Shearon-Harris Dam is a rubble faced, rock filled, embankment dam anchored in bedrock. The spillway does not go through the dam, it's a separate structure blasted through the rock of an adjacent hill; reinforced concrete anchored in bedrock.

    The top of the dam is approximately 50 feet above the maximum possible impoundment (controlled by two steel gates that can be raised and lowered in the spillway). Maximum depth of the lake is only about 20 feet. They built the dam across the valley of Buckhorn Creek while blasting the spillway through the ridge on the west side of the valley. Any flood large enough to wash away that dam would be large enough to wash away the whole of central North Carolina.

    Spillway structure seen from the lake side

    Spillway structure seen from the outlet - showing where it was blasted through the bedrock.

    Hopefully you can answer yes to d) and not fuss about it.

    Hopefully you can drop the holier than thou, know-it-all attitude ... but I ain't holding my breath.

    As for building new nuclear power plants, where would you build them in your area without putting them under serious flood risk?

    The Shearon-Harris site was designed to have four reactor units. It isn't even at minor risk from flooding (a factor considered as part of the original site selection process). So, if they were going to build another unit, that's probably the best place to put it.

    869:

    IMO it's very much an "if we die without this, we're almost certainly going to die" solution. Kind of like a self-sustaining Mars colony, and probably about as expensive.

    Why didn't I write that instead of 8 pages...? Perfect.

    870:

    Wikipedia entry for Harris Lake at Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant.

    Markdown or whatever it is is fucked up like a soup sandwich.

    871:

    Pack two pairs, then you can always be wearing your cleanest underwear. (Also works for voting in two-party political systems.)

    (Shamelessly stolen from one of Piet Hein's grooks.)

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

    One of my favourites, although I can't get it formatted to look correct:

    It may be observed, in a general way,

       that life would be better, distinctly

    If more of the people with nothing to say

       were able to say it succinctly.

    872:

    mdlve @ 743:

    I last took VIA in the 80s, from Edmonton to Winnipeg (and back). It was enough to put me off for life — horribly slow trip, because freight has (or at least had) priority over passenger trains. As well, the dining car served meat that was charred on one edge, still frozen (with white frost) on the other and refused to do anything about it.

    I haven't used VIA, but a lot has changed since then - though sadly not the freight having priority problem.

    I'm not going to get into this except for one thing ... In this day & age of computer controls, there's no excuse for not being able to coordinate schedules better so that neither passenger trains nor freight trains have to wait on the other.

    And that's not a criticism of Canada, that's just as true here in the States and it's true anywhere there are railroads. IF for no other reason than it saves fuel and reduces carbon emissions.

    873:

    Gasdive seems to be talking about a context in which political difficulties make a global electricity grid infeasible

    At least one person gets what I'm saying.

    I'm a huge fan of interconnected grids. As a search on my name and UHVDC will show.

    In fact I'll quote myself from about 6 months ago, when I was replying to another bad faith argument from Paws.

    paws said:"Go on then; what's your solution to the problem of photovoltaic solar panels not generating any electricity when it's dark?"

    To which I replied

    You want me to repeat myself for the what, 10th time, so you can poo poo it again?

    Sure, why not.

    You have powerlines that run from the sunny side of the planet to the not sunny side. UHVDC powerlines already exist, they run fine over land and under water and the loss to get from one side of the planet to the other is about 50%. We currently lay data lines all over the world. We could do the same with power. Cost is very roughly a million USD per km of 12 GW powerline. You'd probably need something in the order of 1000 times around the world worth of line. (that would carry 24 TW from one side to the other, which is comfortably more than the world energy consumption).

    I try not to reply to paws. He always argues in bad faith. For example his latest where he converted my statement where I specifically say storage for nuclear works as storage for PV:

    Damien points out that nuclear becomes much more attractive if you add seasonal storage. But of course, if you have enough storage to make nuclear not utterly ridiculous, then you could have had solar for 1/10th the cost, installed in 1/10th the time.

    Into this reply where he claims that I claimed the exact opposite.

    Still waiting for the bit where you produce a seasonal storage at all, never mind one that somehow works with photovoltaic generation but not with nuclear, wind or hydro, or a combination of the three. Without a seasonal storage that can store photovoltaic energy but nothing else, the rest of your post makes no sense.

    BTW, the post referred to that makes no sense without seasonal storage was about how much nuclear you need without seasonal storage. Not about any PV alternative, as I was explicitly discussing alternatives without PV.

    Also slightly annoying is the "still waiting". To quote myself again, this time replying to EC saying that the UK uses 10^18 joules per year. It's from 6 years ago (I really have been banging on about this for years)

    A cubic km of molten salt stores almost exactly 10^18 joules. 10 sq km, 100 m deep is a cubic km. Round trip efficiency is similar to long distance interconnectors but waste heat can provide area heating, which boosts the effective efficiency to near on 100%.

    http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/10/facts-of-life-and-death.html#comment-2011121

    874:

    The French and Swedish nuclear builds are the fastest grid transitions on record. It is entirely correct that we are not currently building reactors at a pace that matters at all. If the politics change, that changes too.

    That is one part of the point of advocacy.

    The second part is that I would very much like people to stop literally blowing up gigawatt sized chunks of low carbon electricity infrastructure. Everyone talks about the high costs of new build, but it is obvious this is not the actual objection of the anti-nuclear movement, because every time it gets any actual political power, it commits vandalism on a gargantuan scale against already built infrastructure.

    Fake Greenies is entirely accurate as a description, even if it is probably unhelpful in discussions because antagonistic. Greenpeace and fellow travelers are, effectively, captain planet villains. This does my head in with how very Orwellian it is, but it is the world we live in.

    The third thing is that I would very much like people who advocate renewables to at least consider their local weather patterns before doing copy-paste on Californian talking points and policies. Building solar cells here is just stupid, but it still happens. It happens in Canada. Please pay some attention to physical reality?

    875:

    PS: Interestingly one of the commentariat has funded the molten salt storage approach, combining it with steel boxes of salt for containment as per this post

    http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/08/blocked-on-blogging.html#comment-2033268

    Details here under their link "Storage is the key"

    http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/01/obligatory-hugo-eligibility-po.html#comment-2135896

    876:

    Re: 'If there was a way to extract energy from darkness we'd be laughing!'

    Maybe you'd like to read this - could be worth a small chuckle.

    'Generating Light From Darkness'

    https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30412-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS254243511930412X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

    Here's the non-techie version:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/science/solar-energy-power-electricity.html

    877:

    Hopefully you can answer yes to d) and not fuss about it. Hopefully you can drop the holier than thou, know-it-all attitude ... but I ain't holding my breath.

    That was a miscommunication, I think. From my end, trying to get details like that isn't just a fuss, it's a fucking nuisance. I was hoping (correctly, it turned out) that you could answer all four questions without much trouble. You're lucky to have a stable nuke, apparently. We're not so lucky out here, so making general assumptions about the reliability of nuclear power based on our respective local plants is awkward.

    For example, here's the local nuclear power plant San Onofre. It very carefully doesn't get into all the political games that went on. Nor about how the spent fuel's being stored on the beach rather than trucked across the freeway to high ground.

    In California, we're utterly dependent on dams in our big cities, so it's good news when the local dam finally gets raised to hold more water, when they realize they don't have enough for a drought. Because of ubiquitous droughts, depending on a reservoir for plant cooling seems like a rather bad idea. And our dams can be lovely things like the Hoover Dam, where they're fiddling with releases downstream (e.g. my major drinking water source, the Colorado River) to avoid "dead pool" where water can't flow out of the dam (https://www.thespectrum.com/story/news/2022/01/07/drought-causes-feds-reduce-releases-through-glen-canyon-dam-which-may-fit-more-natural-colorado-rive/9132210002/). Dead pool isn't just an anti-hero, it's a situation where Las Vegas runs out of water. They're still trying to tunnel a new intake into the very bottom of the reservoir (Lake Mead) so they can suck it dry and prolong the suspense until they decide to evacuate Vegas. Fortunately, Lake Mead is only a hydropower facility and reservoir, not a power plant cooling pond.

    So anyway, that's why I ask impertinent questions about dams. Sorry about the fuss.

    878:

    paws4thot @ 786: 741 - (Funny to think that once upon a time you could take your own vehicle on the train and they did allow you to use it to ride in, and it was considered the highest quality option...)
    True, as far as it goes. OTOH this literally meant mounting your carriage on a freight flatbed, so you'd get the benefits of 2, maybe 3, suspension systems, and if you were "lucky" the train would move at 50mph flat chat (BTW Stevenson's Rocket was capable of around 30mph).

    OTOH, the trains "keep a'rollin all night long" because they have crew changes & don't have to pull over so the driver can sleep so he doesn't run off the road & into a bridge abutment if it was more than a day's drive.

    Driving to Albuquerque takes 3 days ... where the train could cover the distance in a day & a half or less. But it would be best if that train had accommodations so you could get out of the car & use a rest room without having to risk falling off the a flat-car ... enclosed cars like the Channel Tunnel would be better.

    879:

    prolong the suspense until they decide to evacuate Vegas

    How do people react to the idea that they might have to leave? Do you get called a liar, stupid, brainwashed. Do they start drawing up plans? Or do they just ignore it and hope the problem goes away?

    880:

    I'm not going to get into this except for one thing ... In this day & age of computer controls, there's no excuse for not being able to coordinate schedules better so that neither passenger trains nor freight trains have to wait on the other.

    The key point is that the freight trains don't wait for the passenger trains - they have absolute priority in North America (he who owns the infrastructure makes the decisions).

    Freight trains are long, passenger trains are short - thus passenger trains fit in the passing sidings. So passenger trains wait.

    As for using a computer to timetable - the problem is that the most freight trains don't follow a timetable.

    881:

    You've ruled out solar and wind over and over. Tidal is about 100th of the required power. Coal will collapse the civilisation that you depend on. Nuclear is ridiculous and you don't have the money or the fuel or a hundred other things to make it work.

    I think the problem is that you are working under an assumption that the world is taking climate change seriously and thus is intent on ending the burning of fossil fuels.

    If so, that assumption is false.

    The US is currently building less than 1/2 the amount needed on a yearly basis in solar/wind to replace fossil fuels by 2050.

    The US in 2020 got a pitiful 3% of its electricity from solar, and the US government predicts that only growing to 20% in the next 30 years. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50357

    In the meantime, the US has 32 GW of gas-fired power plants in the pipeline https://www.powermag.com/more-than-32-gw-of-new-gas-fired-power-plants-in-u-s-pipeline/

    And coal burning is up in the US in 2021 as it returned to being competitive with the crazy increase in natural gas prices (up by 22%) https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49996

    So, not to say Greg's nuclear dreams are realistic - but we live in a world that has chosen that not freezing(or choose your appropriate excuse) to death today is worth something far worse in the future and thus we as a species are currently planning on continuing to burn fossil fuels in large quantities to provide electricity for the foreseeable future.

    (yes, solar has gotten cheap - but until we actually solve the energy storage issue in a cost effective manner we aren't going to shift to solar as fast and as much as you like).

    882:

    Yet again - 50N here. Solar panels are quite popular and decently effective. We live off renewable non-carbon energy. That not just me, but a few million people in a number of cities ranging up to about 2.5m

    Maybe a few people should stop assuming everything is as bad as it is in UK.

    883:

    How about the decades that the (self-proclaimed) Standard Railroad of the World, the Pennsy, switched from electric to steam, then to diesel, at Harrisburg, for every east-west passenger train, all with passengers on the train?

    And the successor, Amtrak, now takes 30 minutes to change an engine at Washington...

    884:

    I dunno, here in sunny hot australia sometimes it seems I don't even have to put solar panels outside to get electricity out of them. I'm ramping down from a high of about 8kWh/kW/day with the not optimally oriented set on the roof of my house. We're about 30 degrees south so "things are different here".

    One of the problems I have is that my ability to build nuclear plants is quite limited. Even if I had the money and skills, getting a permit here is just about impossible.

    But with solar on the other hand I can whip out my awesome online shopping skills and just buy the bits I think I want, put them in the sun and run stuff off the resulting electricity. It's like magic, I just make the incantations and money turns into energy.

    I kid you not. There's ~3kW of grid tie on the roof of the house, 750W of off grid AC in the sleepout, 100W of off grid 12V DC in the workshop/garage, and a few random scavenged 5W and 10W panels powering odd stuff like the vent fans in the toilets. Where I live solar just works{tm}.

    885:

    https://crookedtimber.org/2022/01/12/why-energy-storage-is-a-solvable-problem/

    John Quiggin (Australian economist) has a conveniently timed piece on energy storage. He's optimistic.

    886:

    when they tell you there's no ice cream won't create an icecream

    Not 100% related, but your comment reminded me of this comic.

    887:

    Yes, and no.

    I have zero hope that civilisation isn't going to collapse in the next few decades.

    With it will go luxuries like people living on islands that don't produce enough food to support them, and those people will take the traditional option of packing up and leaving, and then being killed, exploited or starved.

    We've seen it over and over for thousands of years, but everyone thinks it can't happen to their civilisation.

    So yes, I assume people get it when I talk, but no I don't think they do.

    Robert Miles captured it nicely just a day ago. "There's no rule that says we make it"

    https://youtu.be/JD_iA7imAPs

    888:

    Different Robert Miles to the one I expected. But this one does make a good point.

    889:

    I am pretty sure that whoever came up with this fully understood exactly what "code brown" means in the vernacular. As someone on Reddit said " it's being used as an emergency code as the health system is currently shitting itself."

    https://www.sbs.com.au/news/victoria-declares-code-brown-emergency-as-covid-19-wave-takes-its-toll/c7007ee7-4855-40d5-a7ea-5b6b1529aa9e

    890:

    “One of the problems I have is that my ability to build nuclear plants is quite limited. Even if I had the money and skills, getting a permit here is just about impossible.” You need to move some place a tad more remote, then nobody would interfere with your freedumb to build dangerous stuff unsupervised. No worries, mate! You could soon pick up the required skills, after all nobody wants actual experts anymore do they. On the other hand I suspect you’re smart enough to keep enjoying converting the raw photonic flux raining down on you in abundance for a lot less trouble.

    891:

    Dammit, I keep forgetting an actual on-topic comment that I’ve been meaning to post for days.

    My old friend Alan Kay is somewhat famous for pointing out that “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. Actually, he’s rightly famous for a lot of other things but they’re not relevant here. He also points out that people tend to heavily over estimate what they can do in 5 years and under estimate what can get done in 10. It’s not unrelated to the very non-intuitive nature of exponential growth.

    892:

    Las Vegas

    How do people react to the idea that they might have to leave? Do you get called a liar, stupid, brainwashed. Do they start drawing up plans? Or do they just ignore it and hope the problem goes away?

    LV is a very strange place. 90% of the states income is from gambling and trade shows. Give or take. A large chunk comes from Nellis AFB which is basically a very large collection of shipping container sort of things where AF pilots fly most of the drones that operate around the world. And toss in a non trivial $$$$ total for black ops out in the desert. (Seriously)

    So when you're there you read things about the state legislature debating teaching in pre-teens in schools about how gambling is good for society.

    And while the entire state has a population of 3.1 million, Las Vegas metro area has 2.3 mil, Reno metro has 0.4 mil, so the rest of the vast state has 400K people spread out very thinly. If you think London dominates the politics of England and the UK you've seen nothing like Nevada.

    A great way to get a feel for how weird Nevada is is to drive from the California side of Lake Tahoe into the Nevada side. Instant change from nice, sleepy tourist town to HEY WE GOT ENTERTAINMENT AND GAMBLING.

    As to the water issues, well, I get the vib that they feel it is something to deal with but hey, they'll fix it one way or the other. Las Vegas can't just stop.

    Pre-pandemic, the top 3 metro areas visited by people from out of the country are New York City, Orlando (the mouse), and Las Vegas.

    Las Vegas has no income tax. Only a sales tax. As that lets them siphon money off the visitors which is an easier thing to impose than an income tax. I'm betting both places have carve outs for groceries and such to help the locals.

    So that's a thought. Kill off leisure air travel and you'll shut down Las Vegas. Or much of it. And maybe mouse world with it.

    893:

    Vegas is going to make some really weird ruins someday.

    To expand on this, it's sucked its water dry already (those were the wet meadows and springs, aka "Las Vegas" that made it a critical oasis on the trip across that part of the desert. It was Ice Age water and it's long gone. I think there's a park there now?). So it's on life support piped in from the Colorado (via Lake Mead) and other parts of Nevada (who ain't happy about it).

    So anyway, one day the water will fail and the people will go away.

    On the pleasant thought that there are future archeologists, what are they going to make of the place? Enough concrete sublevels for a decent dungeon, all sorts of structural steel slowly rusting away in a litter of glass shards, no water save for the occasional flash flood. If the stories don't remain, what will they think Vegas was about? Why house three million people in the middle of nowhere?

    That's actually a general problem for much of the US: frame and drywall leaves diddly for ruins, as does online data leaves no records either. Our most durable remains are likely to be some forms of plastic trash, copper alloys, and, most of all, all the stuff we've bulldozed into shapes. Kind of pathetic compared with piles of Roman marble and brick, or even baked Babylonian clay, but there you have it. Our contribution to the planet.

    894:

    "The French and Swedish nuclear builds are the fastest grid transitions on record."

    ...and both were driven by heavy-duty political power from clandestine nuclear weapons ambitions.

    So yes, that is proof that if you really want to, and are willing to spend the money, you can build nuclear power fast.

    But cheap it aint.

    895:

    "We HAVE TO HAVE baseload power"

    It's a bypass! You've got to build bypasses!

    :-)

    896:

    Moz
    We DO NOT HAVE a "Coal Board" - in fact the number of actual coal mines in the UK is down to single figures, & dropping. So - you are talking out of your arse, oh dear, never mind.
    And peaking plants that use natural gas - are what we are trying to avoid, aren't they? Burning more Carbon?

    gasdive
    No I have NOT "ruled out solar and wind over and over" - they are necessary & very useful.
    BUT
    They are not enough, on their own, not here, when we get cold, dull, still days in January for a week at a time or longer.
    We have to have baseload power - or, in the future - not available yet (?) huge back-up of electrical storage in the region of 10's -> 100's of Megawatts.

    Energy Storage ...
    I assume that this could probably be scaled-up? How big a battery-bank do you need? How physically large is it? How long can you run it for, until it's out of juice?
    Even so ....

    897:

    until we actually solve the energy storage issue in a cost effective manner we aren't going to shift to solar as fast and as much as you like

    One of the fun things in Australia is that home solar penetration keeps going up, and the duck curve is starting to look a bit alarming. AFAIK we already have a fair percentage of systems idling during peak sun periods because the grid overvolts and the inverters cut out. I'm guessing that happened less during covid when people were home using electricity during the summer.

    So it's not just a matter of preventing people building new solar and wind farms, to stop solar you actually have to stop individual homeowners putting PV on the roof. A bigger question is what proportion of homes will even stay on the grid once batteries etc drop in price and the grid rises to parity.

    I think we're going to get fees for home users feeding the grid as a widespread phenomenon before long.

    898:

    peaking plants that use natural gas - are what we are trying to avoid, aren't they

    The difference in emissions between a 50% thermally efficient gas plant that runs 1% of the time, and a 30% efficient coal plant that runs 90% of the time is huge. Admittedly coal plants in places like Australia and the UK often struggle to hit that 90% number because most of them are old and past their design life so they need more maintenance than the owners like to talk about. Sadly the chances of them being compensated for retiring their stranded assets are following BoJo's popularity trajectory.

    It's perfectly fine if you don't know why we need baseload power, but it would be nice if you could say so rather than imitating the seagull.

    899:

    Me @ 848: You [Pigeon] and EC keep saying "Capitalism bad"

    EC @ 849: Because it's a straw man of your own invention. [...] We need proper regulation, and enforcement of that regulation.

    EC: I owe you an apology. I lumped your views in with those of Pigeon based on vague memories of our previous discussions. I should not have done that without at least checking.

    As it happens, I broadly agree with what you wrote above. I complained that I never get a proper answer to "What is supposed to replace capitalism?". The two answers I do get I call "Rainbows and Unicorns" and "Capitalism Lite", or if I'm trying to avoid sarcasm the latter is "The Nordic Model" (though that's a bit of an approximation). I want to see a system that replaces capitalism, but I'm going to need a lot of convincing that any candidate is really going to be better; history is already littered with tragic faiures. In the absence of something like that, Capitalism Lite looks like the best option.

    How we get there I don't know, other than trying to educate people. This is hard, and not just because of the relentless drum-beat of propaganda from the wealthy assuring us poor plebs that giving them all the money really is good for us. Financial plumbing is a bit like real plumbing: you really need it, its a skilled job, errors are very expensive, and its fundamentally boring.

    Handing the financial plumbing off to specialists and telling them to get on with it doesn't work because somehow all the money winds up being piped to the plumbers instead of the people who need it. But you can't have everyone in a democracy supervise the plumbers by vote either, because they can't take the necessary time to learn about plumbing, even if they wanted to. If you set up a regulatory agency, the only people with the expertise to staff it are ... other plumbers.

    And that's before we get to the people at all the Plumbing Research Institutes coming up with whizzy new hydraulic control mechanisms.

    900:

    Did you confuse Helsinki with Stockholm?

    Well no. Context is everything, and the context was about how feasible it is to build a high-speed rail line from Helsinki to Berlin (around the other way, through the Balitc states). I'm aware there isn't an existing high-speed rail link from Helsinki to Malmö and I'm genuinely not all that interested in whether there is an existing rail link of any kind, but there is clearly an existing road link (per google maps) so it's surely possible (although perhaps uneconomical) to build one, which was part of the premise of the joke, or at least the image in the middle :)

    901:

    Poul-Henning Kamp: It's a bypass! You've got to build bypasses!

    Its funny you should mention this, because it turns out Mr Prosser was right. You do have to build bypasses. Bypasses prevent the emergence of "stroads".

    A stroad is a bad combination of two types of vehicular pathways: it is part street — which he describes as a "complex environment where life in the city happens", with pedestrians, cars, buildings close to the sidewalk for easy accessibility, with many entrances and exits to and from the street, and with spaces for temporary parking and delivery vehicles—and part road, which he describes as a "high-speed connection between two places" with wide lanes, limited entrances and exits, and which are generally straight or have gentle curves.

    American towns in the 70s didn't build bypasses, so now every town in America has a town centre with lots of traffic that is just trying to get through as fast as possible while being frustrated by the number of red lights. This makes it an unfriendly space for people on foot, so people avoid shopping there, and all the business migrates to out-of-town big-box stores and malls. Business tax income for the city goes down, they have to compensate by cutting services and hiking residential property taxes, so people move out of the town, and the whole thing falls apart.

    Here in the UK we avoided this by building bypasses and then pedestrianising the town centres. The bypasses are the roads that get the through traffic past the town efficiently, and the town centre streets are a nice safe place to be because they have little or no traffic, and what they do have is driving slowly to or from a parking place. Town centre property values and taxes are high thanks to the high footfall, and this pays for the maintenance of everything else in the town.

    That model is now starting to fall apart under pressure from Amazon, but its certainly stood up better than the US version till now.

    Take a look at a UK town (any town) on Google Maps. You will see typically two sets of roads: an outer bypass (often called "Thistown Bypass") around the outside, and then an inner distribution road around the town centre. The town center itself will be a bunch of pedestrian streets, often with a mall (we call it a "shopping centre") attached. Take a look at the lines of those streets; very often you can see the old through-road (often called "High Street"). You can see the bypass take a fork around the town, and then further on the through-road is intercepted by the inner distribution road, beyond which it becomes a pedestrian area. If it hadn't been for these two roads the High Street would have become a stroad instead of a nice place to go shopping.

    1970s town planners get a lot of stick for high rise slums and similar mistakes, but the basic layout of the British town was something they got fundamentally right, and they deserve credit for it.

    Take a look at this analysis from a small US town near Chicago for the end game when you don't build bypasses.

    902:

    I'm aware there isn't an existing high-speed rail link from Helsinki to Malmö and I'm genuinely not all that interested in whether there is an existing rail link of any kind, but there is clearly an existing road link (per google maps) so it's surely possible (although perhaps uneconomical) to build one, which was part of the premise of the joke, or at least the image in the middle :)

    Well, yeah, you can drive that route, but it's about 2400 km, and I don't think that's very feasible for even a fast train connection. Even the fastest Shinkansen train (320 km/h) would be 7.5 hours if it drove the full speed all the time. It could be a nice night train trip, though.

    There is a train connection from Helsinki to Tornio (in Finland) and from Haparanda (in Sweden next to Tornio) to Malmö, but currently there is no passenger traffic there between Tornio and Haparanda. The gauges are different, so I think a HST there would need new tracks and it would take years to agree on the gauge to be used, so it's not really a good solution.

    One of the jokes here is of course that Finland and Sweden are pretty sparsely populated "up North" - I think Sweden is even more concentrated on about Stockholm's level and South of that. Of course all of Finland is North of Stockholm, but aside from the few cities most of Finland is pretty sparse.

    (2400 km circle from Helsinki covers much of the Central Europe, and going via the Baltics driving that distance is almost to Paris...)

    903:

    there's no excuse for not being able to coordinate schedules better so that neither passenger trains nor freight trains have to wait on the other.

    It's (mostly) a single track railway. If you've got trains going in both directions, one at least is going to have to pull over into a passing loop to let the other one past. The best that scheduling can do for that is to make sure the about-to-be-stationary train has just finished getting into the passing loop when the non-stop train arrives from the other direction.

    904:

    The difference in emissions between a 50% thermally efficient gas plant that runs 1% of the time, and a 30% efficient coal plant that runs 90% of the time is huge.

    Here in the UK we've got about 35GW capacity of CCGT plants, that is if required they can deliver that capacity on demand unlike renewables. During winter we generate on average 20GW-plus of our electricity from these plants during the daytime, peaking to 25GW when the wind doesn't blow (right now as I type this it's 23GW). That 1% operating time figure for CCGT you quoted really needs to be 50% or more. Saying that, modern CCGT generating systems can get 60% thermal efficiency out of their fuel and, looking forward, they can burn lots of different types of fossil carbon fuels if oil prices fall due to reduced consumption.

    We just lost 800MW of non-carbon nuclear generation in the UK a few days ago as the two AGRs at Hunterston were shut down in preparation for decommissioning. The other AGRs will follow over the next decade for similar reasons, ageing of the plant plus a problem with cracking in the moderator blocks. That means we need another 15GW-plus of 30%-uptime wind turbines to replace that 6GW of 90%-uptime nuclear capacity or we can cheapskate it by building 6GW more of CCGT. My bets are on the CCGT plants.

    The 18th century was powered by wood, the 19th century was powered by coal, the 20th century was powered by oil and because everyone decided nuclear was Scary! the 21st century will be powered by gas with a figleaf of solar and wind. The 22nd century will probably be powered by wood again, with a leavening of camel dung and whale oil.

    905:

    Moz: Sadly the chances of them being compensated for retiring their stranded assets are following BoJo's popularity trajectory.

    You are dead wrong.

    In 2020, coal plants provided a whopping 1.6% of the UK's power, and the UK went for 5202 hours without any coal power production -- or 59% of the time. The last plant is due to be shut down for good in September 2024.

    (It's a long-term plan pre-dating Boris.)

    906:

    I dont know why you still talk about this from a point of view as if the UK energy policies were any more rational than say, UK's EU policy or Covid19 policy ?

    Yes UK's energy system is f**ked in so many ways it's not even funny.

    Should we start all the way back when the AGR's were built because one particular company thought they could make gas turbines so that steam would not be necessary, and then continued to be built, even after the crucial selling point of the design had evaporated ?

    One of the wisest investment you can do in UK right now, is roof-mounted solar with as much battery as makes sense, to take the edge of the ridiculous electricity prices in the future.

    Ohh, but that's also not possible, because the real-estate market in UK is feudalized, and the owners have no incentives to build energy-efficient buildings or to allow renters to install solar panels etc.

    Do you know that in most analysis of energy systems, energy sources etc, UK is treated as an "assumed outlier" until data from UK is proven to be useful ?

    Dont belive me ? Look at any prognosis about the future of nuclear, and try to the Hinkeley Point C contract's impact in their models...

    Now, please stop carping about how 'useless' solar and wind are, when the fundamental problem is the deeply corrupt and incompetent UK political class.

    907:

    Heteromeles @ 828 (which I read again):

    • Dismantle the wealth management industry and put its clients out of business by alienating them from their resources and systems. This is code for doing away with all the billionaires and kleptocrats.

    Fully agree. Have you read "Moneyland"? Its all about this stuff.

    Trouble is, absent your Magic World Dictator, its a difficult problem to solve. Moneyland is like the Internet: it treats finance laws as damage and routes around them. The problem used to be Switzerland. Then it became offshore jurisdictions like The Bahamas. These days its mid-western American states. As soon as you close one down, another one pops up.

    What we need (but won't get) is some kind of World Tax Organisation to run alongside the World Trade Organisation; something that says "if you want to play with us, you have to follow our rules", and can send non-compliant states to Coventry. Unfortunately right now that includes the whole of the US (because you can't exclude just South Dakota), so the idea is a non-starter.

    • Implement a global debt jubilee. This does away with many of the burdens that are keeping people poor.

    Thats not as easy now as it was in the Bronze Age. There are too many different kinds of debts, all shading in to one another. Does Donald Trump benefit from this? Also, a lot of money these days is actually debt (fractional reserve banking and all that), so if you cancel all debts you make a big chunk of the money supply vanish.

    OK, so only some kinds of debt; the bad ones. Some kinds are easy; student loans aren't really loans, they work more like a highly regressive graduate (or failed graduate) tax. But then it starts getting messy, and having bureaucrats invent categories and rules for assigning people into them sounds like a really bad idea. Which mortgages get cancelled? What about car loans? And once you have closed down all those loan industries (because that is what you just did), how do people who need a car to get a job buy a car? Credit isn't an unalloyed bad anymore than its an unalloyed good.

    Also, we do have a kind of debt jubilee in most countries, its just that we do it case by case instead of wholesale, and call it "bankruptcy". Not a fun process, but its better than having your children sold into slavery like the Bronze Age used to do.

    International debts between countries are simpler; a debtor can simply declare that its not going to pay. As long as you haven't mortgaged your main port to China nobody can do anything. The only thing stopping countries doing this is their credit rating; they might not be able to borrow again without paying a much higher rate. Telling those countries that they don't have to repay their debts isn't going to change anything because everyone already knows that.

    908:

    You're over-complicating it, but that is the sort of regulation that would stop some of the abuses. It's a complex problem, and would need careful analysis by an expert to decide on suitable regulations - and subsequent tweaking. But over-complication is always counter-productive.

    909:

    We have to have baseload power

    Okay, so 19th century advances in worker's rights mean nothing and all that time and money spent breaking unions so that mill owners could get some use out of that overnight power for continuous production means we have to have continuous production or else. In other words: you're a slaver, an unreconstructed one at that.

    Just for starters, maybe have a think about what the 8 hour day is and what it's for?

    But hey, sure you can save a shitload of money versus tripling your investment in plant by making your labour force work around the clock. We need baseload power! Good for you calling a spade and spade and all that!

    910:

    "Moneyland is like the Internet: it treats finance laws as damage and routes around them."

    But that is also therefore their greatest weakness: Increase the cost of routing, and you'll get to their ill-gotten riches.

    Tax financial transactions on a nonlinear scale: The larger the amount, the higher the tax, the shorter an asset is owned, the higher the tax on both the purchase and the sale price.

    Now that it has gotten UK out of its system, EU may be able to do that.

    911:

    Pretty obviously, we need one of three things: baseload power, massive storage capacity, or a near-global grid. Solar and are all intermittent, and only a few countries have enough hydro and tidal. In terms of current technical ability, the three options increase in order of difficulty. Greg has a point, but overstates it.

    912:

    A lot of the British housing stock is multi-occupancy such as multi-storey flats like the ones Charlie and I live in here in Edinburgh. "Roof-mounted solar" on the available forty square metres or above our heads has to provide electricity and heating for as many as four residences, fifteen people and (usually) a commercial shop on the ground floor.

    It also presumes a middle-class living that can purchase a house with a roof, that's three hundred thousand quid to start with. There's a lot of "I've Got Mine, Fuck You" in the "solar will save us" crowd, I have noticed.

    913:

    Heteromeles @ 851 [in reply to my question about "what replaces capitalism?"]

    So the obvious and very unsarcastic answer to what to replace capitalism with is to reverse it: instead of land and resources belonging to you, you belong to land and resources. This means that you take care of the systems that own you, and in return, you are allowed to take the surplus generated to live on, either directly or through trade. If we called those resources "totems" or "dreaming," you'd recognize that this is a very, very old and well-established idea with thousands of years of success behind it, while capitalism's been around for far less and is failing. For modern times, I'd suggest expanding the Dreaming to include the atmosphere, space, the electromagnetic spectrum, and other infrastructure necessary to keeping human life going. If you're a civil engineer, you may belong to the roads, and your job is to take care of them, for example.

    I'm not sure how literally to take "you belong to the land". The last time we had people tied to the land it was feudalism; essentially a form of slavery. Presumably you don't mean that.

    I do indeed recognise this idea; the close spiritual link to the land is a feature of a lot of pre-literate societies. I'm just having difficulty seeing how it can be translated to modern society. A close spiritual link to a forest sounds like a nice idea (not sure about the reality; forestry is only fun on nice sunny days). A close spiritual link to a car factory less so.

    Also, we can't just all go back to live on the land. The productivity would drop like a stone without modern technology, and most of us would starve. That was the Khmer Rouge's big idea; see how well it worked there. So lets assume we're going to carry on with a modern industrial / post-industrial lifestyle. That brings an irreducible level of complexity with it that pre-industrial civilisations didn't have, so you need to handle that.

    One of the hard questions for any society is how to allocate resources at the strategic level. Moving components from Factory A to Factory B along well established supply chains is a soluble problem. Deciding where to build a new factory is less so. Who gets owned by that job? How are they picked?

    More generally, how do you stop the resource allocators from allocating all the resources to themselves? Or do you propose to get rid of the job of resource allocator altogether? If so, how will these decisions be made?

    One twist on this is the idea that one doesn't eat one's totem. So, for example, you may be responsible to care for a bit of the internet. You cannot personally use that bit of internet, but you can use the systems that others care for. This creates a really interesting and tricky set of codependencies that might actually make for a more stable system.

    Does that mean OGH wouldn't be allowed to read or post here? But in return for making his old PC available for a bulletin board he'd be allowed to use others? What about the routers and cables between them? If I'm maintaining some bit of Internet infrastructure, how does it exclude me from using it, given the way the Internet works? Similar issues with roads; do I always have to drive or walk around the bit I'm helping maintain? What happens if I don't show up? How do we exploit economies of scale in such a system? (Like, I'm not going to buy a JCB and road roller just to maintain a short stretch of road, but without machinery its a very inefficient form of manual labour).

    Have you ever read "Distraction" by Bruce Sterling? Its a fun read, and worryingly prophetic. Meet Donald Trump in its pages, amongst others. Anyway, part of the background are large gangs/civilisations of people who have opted out of the conventional economy and taken up a nomadic existence mediated by digital reputation systems. Its not a million miles from what you describe, if you added ubiquitous computation to it. I was inspired by that to spend a lot of time thinking about how such a system could work in practice. However I couldn't get it to work. Sybil attacks and sock puppets make it hard on one side, and laziness and impulsive decision making by ordinary people makes it hard on the other. The algorithms also had a nasty tendency to be quadratic or worse.

    914:

    The "near-global grid" idea presumes that other places have massive surpluses of generating capacity online when demand exceeds supply elsewhere.

    Thought experiment -- postulate there are, say, ten power regions on the planet, each interconnected by very high-capacity grids (hundreds of gigawatts, in a mesh topology, maybe thirty or forty big links running thousands of kilometres). If region A drops to half its supply capacity over demand for some reason then other regions nearby have to make up that missing half of capacity but they also have to meet their own demand so those regions need to have the capacity to generate 150% of their own power requirements. If the Black Swans arrive in flocks with three of those regions losing a couple of interconnectors and the wind stops blowing over half a continent on a cold night, the other regions have to provide twice their own normal needs to keep the other three regions from a mass extinction event.

    The result is that to be somewhat safe from killer blackouts with this setup each region really needs twice as much generating capacity as its own peak demand, if not more to keep everyone else supplied with renewable energy 99% of the time. The other alternative is to build 120% of dispatchable energy such as nuclear locally and have many fewer big expensive world-spanning interconnectors to balance the load.

    915:

    863 - I just made the bombastic statement that gasdive's bombastic statement needs to work. My own view is that a low to zero carbon base load needs a mixed low carbon strategy to supply base load. That means a mixture of hydro, nuclear, solar photovoltaic and wind power, but it's not realistic to rely on any one of them 24/365.24. Because it's provable that none of them are that reliable.
    Unless we're prepared to start building more hydro plant about the size of the Tummel valley schemes, Scotland has kind of run out of places to put much more hydro. (Environ mentalists will say "what about the plants?")

    875 - gasdive, being unconvinced by arguments about systems that do not exist as either physical or political realities is not bad faith. Disprove this. Acceptable proofs will include pointing to an existing international scale electricity interconnector, or even an international treats where Country A agrees to let Countries B and C build an interconnector through Country A.

    880 - UK Motorail used special "car transporter wagons" for cars, and a mix of sleeper, seater and dining coaches. The posts you reference covered the early days of rail, up to maybe 1850.

    883 - Have you actually seen gasdive propose a storage solution that isn't obviously vapourware or long time from now ware?

    885 - Not familiar with the station at Washington (any Washington). The pleaces where I've seen an engine change on a rake done much faster than that alo involved a reversal of travel so the new and old engines were (de)coupling from opposite ends of the train.

    894 - OTOH there are rail tracks down through Florida to Miami.

    People, base load is what happens when there is a demand to heat houses and run industrial process plant 24/365.24. Claiming it is an invention of one fossil fuel lobby or another just makes you look stupid.

    916:

    Heteromeles: One twist on this is the idea that one doesn't eat one's totem.

    Sorry, forgot to mention: a lot of the societies you refer to did exactly that. We can admire how many pre-industrial societies managed their farms, but don't get suckered in by the myth of the ecologically noble savage.

    917:

    each region really needs twice as much generating capacity as its own peak demand, if not more to keep everyone else supplied with renewable energy 99% of the time

    Sure. Depending on how you draw up the regions, that sounds a lot more like an opportunity than a threat. It's what any system with storage to do time-offsets on peak demand needs anyway... so for your scenario you even need to double that again (because you need to account not just for what you put in storage, but now also other regions and their consumption, even allowing that you get some energy back from those other regions at different times, because you use storage to balance your grid either way), and it still isn't a problem really. It's necessary to make oversupply a feature, not a bug.

    918:

    Moz
    30% efficient coal plant that runs 90% of the time *
    *
    Which do not exist**
    See Charlie @ 907, as well. I REPEAT - yes I/we want as much solar / wind / tidal as we can get, but it is not going to be enough.
    How many times do I have to say this, before it penetrates?

    Damian
    What about enough power, on a cols, still, winter's night so that people can have nont-freezing homes???

    919:

    What about enough power, on a cols, still, winter's night so that people can have nont-freezing homes???

    That isn't what "baseload" means. If that's your requirement, then the overnight capacity requirement is orders of magnitude less than that demanded by the "baseload" concept, which is entirely about continuous industrial production. There is a chicken-and-egg argument around this, because it's inconvenient to reduce output in coal-fired plants when demand drops, so continuous industrial production has been promoted through our ideological propaganda system relentlessly for a century or two. Are generators or industrialists more responsible for it? The answer is "yes".

    In general in our modern way of living most people don't require as much heating while asleep under many layers as they do while still active in the evening. Whereas the "baseload" concept is a 24/7 thing. In earlier times I understand the concept of biphasic sleeping was better recognised, people who went to bed at sundown got up for an hour or a few around midnight, did stuff for a while, went back to sleep for the coldest hours. I'm not clear how much this depended on well stoked fires, but happy to talk about it. I agree it's not a trivial amount of energy, but I really need to see the industrial angle accounted for properly here, knowing full well that you'll probably still be talking about "baseload" in a month's time anyway.

    920:

    30% efficient coal plant that runs 90% of the time * * Which do not exist**

    Super-critical and ultra-super-critical coal-fired power stations can get up to 47% efficiency by operating at very much higher temperatures than traditional so-called subcritical coal stations. Whether they run 90% of the time or not is another matter but coal is cheap so they're a good source of cheap electricity as the Green Germans will tell you.

    921:

    It also (currently) needs massive amounts of copper, and is very inefficient. That latter is a big problem, because (despite claims) solar power does contribute to global warming, and (say) doubling (a) its contribution and (b) the contribution of the power itself is not good. As I said, the UK could practicably take power from Morocco, but not South America let alone Australia.

    Damian (#911) needs to do his homework. The days when industry used most of the power are long gone, and northern Europe does not have even 8-hour days in midwinter. Most of the power requirement is during the night.

    922:

    Sigh, or quel dommage!

    I also heard that the Nuer believe in the exact same concept of the Holy Trinity as an obscure Midlands Methodist congregation, proving that Christianity is universal and stuff.

    923:

    Actually, the thing that killed the high streets was (subsidised) out of town supermarkets and shopping malls; that is also a major factor in increasing car dependency and usage. The few, feeble attempts to rein them in have all been reversed under political pressure. Yes, Amazon etc. need stamping on, HARD, but so do those.

    924:

    It's necessary to make oversupply a feature, not a bug.

    The necessary oversupply of renewable generation to meet intermittency and long-distance transmission issues isn't mentioned when the costs of building them are compared to supposedly-expensive nuclear power. Building half the amount of nuclear power stations to meet demand and getting five-nines reliability works out a lot cheaper than lots of renewables plus mass storage plus long-distance interconnectors to achieve two-nines reliability, and nuclear power lasts longer too once it's built (The two reactors at Hinkley Point C could well operate safely for a century or more with some refurbishment every few decades).

    925:

    that mill owners could get some use out of that overnight power for continuous production means we have to have continuous production or else.

  • Some industrial processes cannot be shut down -- if they don't have reliable power 24x7, huge amounts of output get lost. For example, TSMC lost power to one of its fab lines in April lat year. The outage lasted fractional seconds: the diesel UPS kicked in immediately. But there was a brief voltage drop which trashed the entire in-production run, and cost them another week recalibrating the line before production could re-start. It's a 40nm node line used mostly for in-car electronics ... so a fluctuation lasting a few milliseconds cost a visible percentage of global car electronics production.
  • Other processes are even worse. If an aluminium smelter or a float glass furnace cools down, you basically have to demolish it and build a new one. Luckily those processes have considerable thermal inertia so it takes a big outage to hammer them ... but overnight blackout might well be sufficient.

    And this is before we get into the chemical industry where most reactions of interest are highly temperature sensitive and continuous processes require thermal cycling of feedstock on the way through.

  • Here in the cold places, if we lose power overnight a certain proportion of the population may well die.
  • It's not just about "mill owners", it's about a bunch of non-substitutable processes that can't be shut down and are essential to keeping civilization going.

    926:

    As I said, the UK could practicably take power from Morocco, but not South America let alone Australia.

    I agree with this bit! The real question is where does the sun go when it quits Europe, and line losses are a thing even with extreme capacity, so the only candidate for British evening solar is North America, with limits to practicality we can all appreciate. But it's not like there are not already crazy amounts of copper crossing the Atlantic and connecting grids is useful no matter which way things go.

    In terms of demand: sure, industry isn't what it used to be but that's irrelevant to the "baseload" concept, which is about 24/7 continuous production (definitively and ideologically). Over here the argument often involves aluminium smelters (although most are remote enough they build their one coal plants anyway). The industrial-organisation aspect is a real thing that's important enough for unions across the EU to have strong positions on it. And sure, there are unions who work around the idea of continuous production. It's just not a thing to ignore.

    927:

    The fact that the UK's governance is fucked-up beyond belief is irrelevant to the geography, physics and engineering. As I said in #824, providing hard facts has no effect on you solar-struck fanatics. I have posted the actual figures before, and you ignored them then.

    Yes, installing roof-top solar is still cost-effective, but that is because it is still (indirectly) subsidised (as described in #817). It has essentially no effect on resolving our supply problems. Wind IS plausible, and is being used.

    I could trivially provide enough power on most days (c. 5 hours, in midwinter, c. 14 in midsummer) to run this house, with enough battery to boil kettles - but that's excluding heating, hot water and cooking, which are our overwhelming energy usages, and are required at night, anyway. Yeah, right. Big deal.

    928:

    Should we start all the way back when the AGR's were built because one particular company thought they could make gas turbines so that steam would not be necessary, and then continued to be built, even after the crucial selling point of the design had evaporated ?

    Er, what?

    AGRs use steam as a working fluid, same as everyone else. The selling point was that they heated the steam to a higher temperature for better thermal efficiency.

    They failed for two reasons, one fundamental and the other entirely avoidable.

    Firstly, the increase in temperature and modest efficiency gain was outwighed by the extra difficulty. No getting around that.

    Secondly, their was very little commonality between designs. Every plant* was a prototype, and lessons learned could not be applied to future builds.

    To have any chance of success you need to stamp the things out with a common design, or have incremental improvements. The French got it.

    *Usually pair of plants.

    929:

    has to provide electricity and heating for as many as four residences, fifteen people and (usually) a commercial shop on the ground floor.

    In my case, that would be for six residencies and four commercial properties on the ground floor and basement levels.

    The last flat I lived in had no ground floor businesses ... but 12 apartments under the one rooftop.

    930:

    You are right that I have said in the past that we need to abandon capitalism, but that was in the context of a complete social revolution, and where we ideally would be. I also said that I have no idea of how to get there from here.

    The currently feasible approaches all involve socialism / capitalism hybrids - and, yes, I agree with Pigeon and others that some aspects of current capitalism need to be shut down completely.

    931:

    It also (currently) needs massive amounts of copper, and is very inefficient.

    All long-distance electricity distribution is done with aluminium cabling these days, not copper. It's lighter and easier to suspend in catenary using steel supporting cables and it's not that much more resistive than the alternatives.

    932:

    Leaving aside the people freezing part for a moment, this is all an argument around where certain industries need to be sited in a post-carbon world. I'm not making any serious guesses around the likelihood of movement actually occurring, to me it's just one of the millions of required changes we are simply not going to make, and which will doom our civilisation. Because there are many far more intractable problems than relocating energy-hungry industries.

    As for people not freezing: well I'm actually not that averse to this suggestion that the only solution is to dump infinite energy capacity on it, it's always been the only workable one in the past. But it also means we're doomed, so long as we can't take incremental steps to reduce demand through structural and infrastructure improvements over time. The time scale required really means we needed to start about 100 years ago, but it's not a binary thing, the better we do the least worse the outcome is.

    933:

    They failed for two reasons, one fundamental and the other entirely avoidable.

    Nope. The fundamental reason was neutron-induced microfractures propagating in the moderator blocks, which were not intended to be replaced during the reactor lifetime: the amount of spalling was much higher than expected and resulted in debris accumulating in control rod channels, which is obviously a big no-no.

    (Also, the primary coolant loop is CO2, which is then send through a heat exchanger to produce supercritical steam for the turbogenerator. Running a direct-cycle gas turbine was never envisaged for the AGR -- CO2 is the wrong coolant for that anyway -- but was proposed using He for PBRs, of which the UK has built precisely zero.)

    The AGRs weren't really prototypes, either. They were an "advanced" derivative of the original UK Magnox design from the 1950s, and they built 14 of them around the UK to a much more consistent design than their predecessors. But plans to export them were spiked by (a) Three Mile Island, (b) strong competition from the USA with Westinghouse's PWR design, (c) Thatcherite policy of privatization and disinvestment in state-owned industries without providing any kind of support for big capital projects that couldn't be carried by the UK's relatively small private sector.

    If not for Thatcher and North Sea oil, the UK would probably have ended up punching out AGRs the way the French reactor fleet got built. We peaked at about 25% nuclear generation; it could easily have gotten to 75% by the 1990s if the government hadn't noped out for ideological reasons.

    934:

    I'm familiar with those - a close relative of mine was working on the graphite core project for a while when they were trying to decide what to do about them.

    It's worth mentioning that they were originally detected when the reactors were at the end of their design life, and we are well into life extension at this point. They really should have been shut down and replaced some time ago.

    935:

    Wrong. They were all completely different internally.

    The way it went down was that a bunch of companies had different AGR designs and different designs were selected for different sites. Presumably to keep them in business. Each tranche of reactors had a different design.

    This is why Heysham I and Hartlepool look completely different to Heysham II and Torness for example.

    Trivia: It's Heysham I and II, not A and B because the license was for a single 4 reactor site.

    936:

    Thermal annealing in carbon-moderated reactors repairs the neutron-induced fractures in the carbon blocks and it worked fine in smaller reactors like the Magnox designs. Once the designs scaled up though there was more neutron flux than the graphite matrix could cope with, basically a cube-square problem. The Soviet RMBK-4 reactors which were very much larger than the AGRs suffered from the same problem for the same reasons but due to their construction with steam tubes the control rod channels could be recut in-situ to fix them up. This couldn't be done safely with the AGR reactors though and fixing them would require dismantling them and fitting freshly-engineered moderator blocks which wasn't going to happen. The AGRs were built with an expected 25-year lifespan but they'll all run for at least 45 years in the end.

    The Chinese have commercial helium-cooled pebble-bed reactors built and operating, the paired-up HTR-PMs. They're sort-of Small Modular Reactors but they took over eight years to build and get working compared to regular PWRs like the Hualong 1 each of which produces five times as much electricity as the paired HTR-PMs (2 x 105GWe) and only take six years to build.

    937:

    Helium cooled pebble beds are very retro futuristic. IIRC Germany had a good go at making them work in the 80s.

    Over the years I have come to the conclusion that lower efficiency is a reasonable price to pay for more tractable engineering.

    938:

    Both of the notable German pebble-bed reactors broke badly and released significant amounts of radioactivity into the outside world. In one case with the THTR-300 this happened a few days after Chernobyl-4 burned to atmosphere and the operators tried to hide the leak in the "cloud" but some isotopic detective work by independent monitors revealed the truth. They're still trying to figure out how to safely dismantle both reactors forty years later.

    939:

    In at least Norway and the UK (Scotland), aluminium smelters were located where there was a convenient source of hydroelectric power.

    940:

    That's why I said they had a go. I knew they had a problem with the pebbles breaking, and that it was bad enough that they gave up on them but didn't follow the fine details.

    I find it hard not to think of molten salt in the same way - nice on paper, probably very hard in practice.

    941:

    Building solar cells here is just stupid, but it still happens. It happens in Canada. Please pay some attention to physical reality?

    I'll note that in Ontario (Canada) where we have at least one solar farm* we also use a huge amount of power for air conditioning, which happens to be most needed on days that are ideal for solar.

    *Passed it on the 401 somewhere east of Toronto. A quick google search shows there are several more.

    942:

    Our most durable remains are likely to be some forms of plastic trash, copper alloys, and, most of all, all the stuff we've bulldozed into shapes.

    Porcelain toilet bowls. I read a story once written as a future archaeologist interpreting the huge numbers of toilet bowls (which in time-honoured fashion were being classed as 'having ritual or religious significance').

    943:

    Even decades ago, before climate change hit the popular consciousness, solar panels were an obvious match for air conditioning.

    944:

    Porcelain toilet bowls. I read a story once written as a future archaeologist interpreting the huge numbers of toilet bowls (which in time-honoured fashion were being classed as 'having ritual or religious significance').

    The future archaeologist draped the toilet seat around his neck like a toque and declared "They used them for ritual purposes!"

    I saw another story where the future folk used matter disintegrators to dispose of unwanted, ahem, waste[1]. The deep strata of toilet bowls from ancient civilisations were though to be some form of crude rocket motor.

    [1] The lack of toilets on board Federation starships in Star Trek has been explained by the pinpoint use of transporter technology.

    945:

    "paired HTR-PMs (2 x 105GWe)"

    s/G/M/ , no?

    946:

    EC @ 923
    Power continuation - Yes. That.
    Currently, we have a v slow-moving cold air patch over most of the UK - virtually no wind, a bit of low-angle sunshine during the day & fuck all for the approx 15.75 hours ( In London ) when there is no sunlight - never mind the 16.25 hours of "dark" where Charlie is...
    OK - we need "baseload power" for those intervals, for a week or a fortnight ( At least ) every winter - & more than once, too.
    - @ 929
    YES

    Damian
    but that's irrelevant to the "baseload" concept, which is about 24/7 continuous production (definitively and ideologically). NO
    It's about people not freezing in their houses overnight - almost anywhere in the UK during a cold, snap, with no wind - like right now!

    947:

    The Anglesey Aluminium smelter was built specifically to use electricity from the Wyfa nuclear power station. A lot of the base load from this station went to the smelter which was the UK’s biggest single consumer of electricity. It was part of the Wilson governments industrial strategy - which also included building the Drax power station next to the UK’s newest large coal mine for transport efficiency.

    948:

    Yup, can confirm. Toronto in summer hits 35 celsius during the daytime, which is definitely "turn on the a/c" weather. And PV cells can deliver while the sun is shining. (They're not so much use during the winter nights.)

    I'd like to note that Toronto is at 43.6 degrees north, while London is at 51.5 (and Edinburgh at 55.9 degrees). People tend to forget just how far north the UK is -- Edinburgh's north of Moscow, Russia, and London is north of every significant city in Canada.

    949:

    Correct -- the HTR-PM reactors each produce about 250MW of heat, the heat is combined raise steam to feed a single 210MWe turbine. Exactly why this is done I'm not sure, it may be that 200MW is the smallest turbine-generator set in the catalogue. There's some discussion about connecting 6 HTR-PMs to feed a single 700MWe turbine-generator set for cost and efficiency purposes but I don't know if anything will actually happen along those lines.

    The HTR-PM design can also produce process heat as well as direct thermal desalination since the working fluid (helium) exits the reactor at 700 deg C, way hotter than water-moderated reactors or even the AGRs. I don't know if this is being done yet, the HTR-PMs only achieved criticality about six months ago and were grid-connected around Xmas 2021 as I recall. The Chinese may be wanting to run a few power operating cycles with the system before messing with the pipes.

    950:

    People tend to forget just how far north the UK is -- Edinburgh's north of Moscow, Russia, and London is north of every significant city in Canada.

    *laughs in 60 degrees north, in the southern portion of the country*

    951:

    The main requirements also include transport. It is infeasible to charge every vehicle (road, rail and air) during the few hours of daylight in midwinter, even ignoring the fact that a heavily overcast day has a fraction of the insolation of a bright one. I haven't been able to find hard figures, but my estimate is that it could well be 5 times less.

    952:

    A good working definition of "baseload" is the minimum load over a period of time representing the base generating capacity that must be there or poor people without solar panels on their roofs will have to do without energy. Top-op and quick-start stations like CCGT and storage like Dinorwig and Cruachan can cope with the peaks but something, somewhere has to be turning and burning to meet that "baseload" demand. Time was it was coal-fired stations, now it's gas.

    Actual baseload varies with the seasons, in the UK electrical baseload is about 30GW in winter (a little less at the weekends) and maybe 25GW in the summer. We have, after a decade of promotion, subsidies and preferential treatment in the energy markets about 25GW dataplate of installed grid-connected wind turbines. They can and have produced as little as 500MW for a day or more in the recent past and right now as I type this they're producing only 7GW of the current 42GW demand, not even close to the daily winter baseload of 30GW. Most of what we need (22.5GW) is coming from gas and contributing to global warming.

    953:

    Sssh, I'm arguing with Aussies, who just don't get latitude!

    954:

    I believe the Aussies do get latitude. To me the issue appears to be more that the UK residents resist the conclusion "in the long run, you have to abandon the UK".

    955:

    Americans won't abandon the US Mid-West aka Tornado Alley so why would British people abandon Britain?

    Eventually, after trying everything else up to and including fracking we'll build enough nuclear power to have a decent standard of living for everyone. We could skip the resulting 200 ppm-plus increase in atmospheric CO2 levels and build that nuclear capacity now but that's not how it's going to work out.

    In other energy news, apparently Russia is looking at shutting down the Yamal gas pipeline to Europe next month (a branch line of the Yamal originating in Belarus provides Ukraine with a lot of its gas. The West paid Ukraine to shut down their RMBK-4 reactors over two decades ago so they're hurting for energy).

    956:

    Re: People freezing in the cold

    In my neck of the woods, the largest (and often most wasteful) users of electric energy are businesses - and they all get massive 'volume' discounts while consumers are berated for 'wasting' energy. And considering that quite a few of these same businesses are not paying the same rate of taxes as the plain working folks, it's a double whammy.

    More weird energy-saving ideas -- and some have even been shown to work on small scales:

    Earth battery - bonus for Greg* is that it works best south-to-north!

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

    Street pavements - energy makers and reservoirs - currently [ahem] in field testing somewhere in London. Was also used/tested in the Paris Marathon. Eco-bonus is that it uses recycled rubber tires/tyres. Hmmm - wonder if it could be used indoors, i.e. staircases and oft-traveled corridors.

    (Greg - maybe you can check out the London install and report back to us?)

    https://inhabitat.com/energy-generating-pavement/#:~:text=do%20just%20that.-,With%20a%20minuscule%20flex%20of%205mm%2C%20the%20energy%20generating%20pavement,watts%20of%20electricity%20per%20hour.

    Plant microbial fuel cell - I really like this one! (Hey Greg, you could field test this in/on your own veg patch!)

    'Plant microbial fuel cell

    The plant microbial fuel cell , developed by Bert Hamelers of the Sub-department of Environmental Technology at Wageningen University, was first described in 2008. The cell is based on the following principle: With the aid of sunlight, plants convert CO2 into organic compounds (photosynthesis). The plant uses some of the compounds which arise in this way for its own growth, while the remainder is eliminated through the roots. Micro-organisms which are naturally found in the ground around the roots of plants break down these organic compounds. This process causes electrons to be released. It is possible to gather these electrons with an electrode and use them to generate electricity. This system is capable of supplying green energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The direct current which is produced in this manner has a low voltage (1V) and as such is not dangerous for animals or plants.'

    https://www.wur.nl/en/show/Plants-create-energy.htm

    My impression from reading the comments on this blog about energy is that a lot of folks seem to believe that a big problem needs a big (single) solution - no exceptions! I don't buy this at all. I think instead that incrementalism (i.e., the slow, steady accumulation of energy-sucking products and services) is how we got here and how we'll get out.

    Next-gen energy --

    I first read about this kid when she won the Google Science Fair (followed by the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair) and I sporadically check to see whether any of her ideas have made it to market/for sale. Nope. Ditto for a couple of other GSF winners I looked at. Seriously - I think we need a 'Steve Jobs' clone for making multiple alternate energy sources and reduced energy usage chic/sexy.

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

    *Greg - I'm not mocking you or trivializing your situation, your location, hobbies, etc. just happen to line up with the examples above. And, seeing is believing.

    957:

    The lack of toilets on board Federation starships in Star Trek has been explained by the pinpoint use of transporter technology.

    I heard you went in the corner and used your phaser to disintegrate the results…

    958:

    London is north of every significant city in Canada.

    Edmonton is 53.5°N, so 2° north of London. It's a significant city.

    When I worked there, if I didn't make a point of going for a walk at lunchtime I didn't see the sun in the winter — at work before sunrise, left after sunset (with no overtime, just regular hours).

    Last year sunrise was 8:48, sunset 4:15 on the solstice.

    959:

    Our most durable remains are likely to be some forms of plastic trash, copper alloys, and, most of all, all the stuff we've bulldozed into shapes. Porcelain toilet bowls. I read a story once written as a future archaeologist interpreting the huge numbers of toilet bowls (which in time-honoured fashion were being classed as 'having ritual or religious significance').

    Heh heh. I disagree with that. There's this thing out in the survivalist community called "Johnstone." It's basically using toilets as the raw material for flint knapping, especially arrowheads (e.g. https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/paleoplanet69529/johnstone-slab-knapping-tutorial-t3864.html). Apparently it's not the easiest thing to work with, nor does it produce the best results. However, there's a lot of it available, and unlike high grade obsidian, flint, or other materials, it's basically free or really cheap.

    So if we get knocked back to the stone age, I don't expect the toilets to last. Nor do I expect copper wire or other useful salvage to stay in place.

    Granite countertops, on the other hand...

    960:

    Nah. If you want a hammer, you do NOT want a brittle mineral, and granite (of the sort in worktops) is one of the better materials. It is also useful for grinding purposes (though you would need to roughen the polished surface), as in millstones, pestles and mortars.

    961:

    "Because it's provable that none of them are that reliable. "

    Better yet, it's somewhat demonstrable. The database at https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/download.php contains years of data on the UK grid taken at a 5-minute cadence and includes demand as well as a variety of sources. The files are in .csv format and are well worth importing into your favorite spreadsheet and graphing things like demand, wind and solar.

    Here's a sample of the header and first data line from one of the files. It suffers from line wrap here, but may give an idea of what's available. Regrettably, non-electrical use of gas and coal are not included, but it's something.

    id timestamp demand frequency coal nuclear ccgt wind pumped hydro biomass oil solar ocgt frenchict dutchict irishict ewict nemo other northsouth scotlandengland ifa2 nsl 1100609 2021-11-20 00:00:38 25599 50.096001 726 5612 6847 6804 0 649 2217 0 0.507 0 -502 1047 150 0 711 143 3589 4602 -332 693

    962:

    Nah. If you want a hammer, you do NOT want a brittle mineral, and granite (of the sort in worktops) is one of the better materials. It is also useful for grinding purposes (though you would need to roughen the polished surface), as in millstones, pestles and mortars.

    Oh I quite agree. Thing is, the stone slabs on countertops I have (previous owner installed) are a coarse-grained stone that, from my very minimal geological knowledge, aren't something I'd take for granite (sorry). It's very decorative, but I'm not sure its material properties are consistent enough across a piece of any size to make it useful for much of anything other than expensive countertops.

    Obviously, countertops vary, and I quite agree that some of the material would be really useful in other applications. My sneaking suspicion is that much of that material has been diverted to such applications, and the stuff in "granite countertops" is what is pretty and pretty useless elsewhere.

    963:

    In general in our modern way of living most people don't require as much heating while asleep under many layers as they do while still active in the evening. Whereas the "baseload" concept is a 24/7 thing.

    I don't think a small change in temperature makes that much of a difference in many places as the drop in outside temperature overnight often is more than the amount people drop the thermostat. So the differential between inside/outside temperatures either remains the same or gets worse.

    964:

    Plant microbial fuel cell - I really like this one! (Hey Greg, you could field test this in/on your own veg patch!) 'Plant microbial fuel cell The plant microbial fuel cell , developed by Bert Hamelers of the Sub-department of Environmental Technology at Wageningen University, was first described in 2008. The cell is based on the following principle: With the aid of sunlight, plants convert CO2 into organic compounds (photosynthesis). The plant uses some of the compounds which arise in this way for its own growth, while the remainder is eliminated through the roots. Micro-organisms which are naturally found in the ground around the roots of plants break down these organic compounds. This process causes electrons to be released. It is possible to gather these electrons with an electrode and use them to generate electricity. This system is capable of supplying green energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The direct current which is produced in this manner has a low voltage (1V) and as such is not dangerous for animals or plants.'

    The easy version for a human is called a "fermentation tank."

    The problem here isn't generating electricity, because potato clocks and similar have been around forever. The problem is building a life around such small amounts of electricity. This, too, is doable, but (almost) everyone reading this blog would regard it as the epitome of Third World poverty. Worse, I suspect that many would choose to die rather than lower themselves to that level.

    Probably we're in a century where the people at the fin de siecle would regard our current preferences as lethally quixotic, because they chose to adapt and go on. But such is life.

    965:

    Sssh, I'm arguing with Aussies, who just don't get latitude!

    Ummm...They'd say the same about you not getting deserts or tropics.

    I had the same problem living in Wisconsin. To me, four seasons and snowy winters were exotic. To them, Santa Anas, earthquakes, wildfires, and tall mountains were bizarre. Such is life.

    966:

    It’s the same latitude as Manchester. A long way south of Edinburgh.

    967:

    gasdive (he, him, ia) @ 881:

    prolong the suspense until they decide to evacuate Vegas

    How do people react to the idea that they might have to leave? Do you get called a liar, stupid, brainwashed. Do they start drawing up plans? Or do they just ignore it and hope the problem goes away?

    The answer to that is, unfortunately, "Yes".

    968:

    It’s the same latitude as Manchester. A long way south of Edinburgh.

    Yes, but a couple of hundred km north of London, which he specifically mentioned.

    969:

    It has to be said: as long as it's not a hyperspatial bypass....

    970:

    Much of it is reconstituted granite (*), true, but I would be surprised if it were not useful for those purposes. However, I would also expect some to be reconstituted 'marble' and similar, which would be a lot less useful.

    (*) As in the cheapest forms of supermarket meat, described so enticingly by OGH.

    971:

    That's because your definition of "something other than capitalism" is based on 1) non-capitalism failed there; 2) your exclusion of what I gather are called "externalities", and 3) can't be done (now) (because politics and money spent by big money to prevent it).

    How's this: I've just invented a phrase as I'm typing this - "small market capitalism". Once a business goes over a certain size, or becomes more then x percent of the local economy/product (the definition of "local" depends on the economy/product), it becomes governmentalized (I'd say nationalized, but there are cases where a US state or county or city should take it over, like local power/water/sewer).

    This would tend to make business (as opposed to Ponzi-scheme market money-making) pointless.

    972:

    Not entirely true.

    The US did start building bypasses/aka ring roads, by the late eighties. However, they were only partly for getting around heavy-traffic cities; the other part was that developers wanted them, madly, because suburban sprawl. 360, an outer loop around Austin, TX, we called "developers' loop by '88.

    In the US, of course, we have developers building malls, driving small businesses out of business, and rebuilding/"urban renewal", which took away lower-cost store fronts. One ultimate example of that is downtown Austin, TX, which other than Sixth St, the club scene has nothing except historical buildings open on evenings or weekends. Many bus lines - at least in the mid-nineties - stopped going downtown, because there was no reason to on weekends.

    973:

    Yeah. In the fifties, the US railroads at least started transitioning to CTC (centralized traffic control), and let lie or pulled up all but one track, with passing sidings.

    In some cases, they're started relaying track, now that it's growing... but that's all freight.

    974:

    Interestingly, a world-wide tax was discussed recently at one summit last year.

    975:

    Folks, it appears to me that there are at least two definitions of "baseload" being used, and everyone seems to not realize that.

    Def 1: enough energy for people to have heating/cooling/transportation/etc Def 2: all of the above, plus industrial and corporate use (do the servers the traders use need less power than crypto miners? I don't think so.)

    976:

    If you want to limit mercantile activity, here are some suggestions, plus a warning:

    Perhaps limit size, duration, or both.
    --A thing can be large, but if so, it cannot last more than a year before unwinding. Basically, something like a festival or an emergency is fine. --A thing (like a corporation) can last for a long time, but if so, if it has more than 150 people, it has to split into two corporations.

    The problem with this setup is that this is precisely what wealth managers do to hide the wealth of billionaires, so I'm not convinced that it will make any big difference. Any superficial change like this is easily hackable, especially these days, when there's a whole wealth management industry designed to hack rules to advantage their clients.

    I'd suggest, instead, that you look at it as a power game, where wealth, politics, coercive violence, knowledge, organization, misinformation, and life support (farming, medicine, etc.) are all pillars of power that people put together into coalitions to empower themselves. If capitalist wealth (money, politics, and violence) is the problem, then your job is to get everyone not swept up in the mess organized to oppose it.

    977:

    Y'know, another answer would be solar power satellites, beaming down power when the sun don't shine, and the wind don't blow. You don't need the cables, etc, losses are low, zero emissions....

    978:

    Yep. I remember when I was in my teens, and my mother being bemused to realize that Philly was around the same parallel as Cadiz, in Spain, and near Tel Aviv....

    979:

    For a somewhat dubious meaning of 'answer'. There are some rather tricky technical problems, and it would add to the earth's total insolation. It's been considered, but the former is the killer.

    980:

    I was explicitly talking about size. For example, if one company is, say, 10% or 20% of all the paychecks in a city or county, going over that means it should be taken over for the public good. If the company's kept it just below, but done it to a bunch of cities, then we're starting to look at nationalization.

    BoeLockMart, for example, should be nationalized.

    On a more local scale, no metro area's water, sewer, or electricity should be private. Hmmm, how's this: no life support issues, like these, should be private?

    981:

    The big error that the USA and UK made in the past 3/4 century was to allow commercial organisations, consortia, cabals, cartels and complexes to get big enough to be a danger to the body politic. Eisenhower warned about that, was disregarded, and much of the USA's foreign policy is made by the military-industrial complex. Those pompous prats in congress are mostly puppets or useful idiots.

    In the UK (regarded as being irredemiably socialist by the USA up until the 1970s), we sort of kept this under control, until Thatcher. Most of our national policies are now controlled by mostly foreign (often USA-based) multinationals, or cartels. The civil service (which used to be a brake on such things, when I worked for it) has almost entirely sold out at the top levels.

    982:

    On the other hand, consider: no need for the intercontinental hard-wired grid, no need for cooling water (that would be for fuel-burning or nuclear), very long-term viability, no need for mining/processing/disposing of radioactives.

    Seriously - let's consider everything, not turning "cooling water" or wastes or concrete supplies or anything else as "externalities".

    984:

    Yes, but will the military have the wherewithal to have it completely automated, producing Euromeat for British shops at the end?

    (Up to chapter 5 in Quantum of Nightmares. Jeez, it's depressing.)

    985:

    "25599..."

    Oops, I should have said that most of the units are megawatts. I.e, at the time the UK grid was drawing 25,599 MW or 25.599 GW.

    986:

    Charlie @ 955
    Exactly - you, I & EC seem to have this problem with 23.5°

    Nojay @ 954 Correct, but - really- we don't want to use gas, either, if we can avoid it, do we? ... @ 957 ...
    And a couple of Exemplary Sentences on stupid fake greenies, trying to kill us of cold by "anti-nuclear" fuckwittery, too!

    SFR
    Noted. But, as you can see I want as many different energy sources as possible - it's "just" that we are going to really need nuclear - AS WELL - as all the others.

    Rbt Prior
    Still S of both Edinburgh & Glasgow - as Mike Collins also notes.

    mdive
    Even with our currently-warm winter & inside the London heat island, the outside temps at night have been -2° - and you really do not want the inside of your house as cold as even +5° - because you will want to warm it up, when you are in it.
    Cheaper & more efficient to have good insulation & maintain a minimum of, say 10-12°
    Even here, the day/night effects can be striking - I have a greenhouse that faces SSW ( The Sun's rays are parallel to the main front & back at 10.30 GMT ) - last night the automatic tiny fan heater came on, as the temp had gone below 4° - at lunchtime, with full low-angle sun-shine it had risen to 17°

    EC @ 985
    Already predicted to make things worse - so, of course, Bo Jon-Sun will do it, if he's still there.

    Actually ... I think Starmer should propose a "Vote of No Confidence RIGHT NOW!
    Why?
    Because then the tories are hoist on their own ...
    1: They vote FOR the motion & it passes - GENERAL ELECTION & they are thrown out.
    2:The motion does not pass - NOW they cannot ditch Bo Jon-Sun, because they voted to keep him in ... it gets so bad that the whole thing implodes & we get a ... GENERAL ELECTION.
    3: The one thing we don't want ... Bo Jon-Sun is removed by his own party, they put a semi-acceptable fascist drone in place & they scrape a majority in 2024, shudder.

    987:

    To me this is an example of why having different tax rates for different "kinds" of income doesn't so much reward people into making decisions about their income so much as giving the rich an huge incentive to re-classify their income into the cheaper rates.

    In the US this is always the result when capital gains are taxed less than "ordinary" income. Legions of tax lawyers come out of the woodwork creating all kinds of ways to change ordinary income into capital gains.

    988:

    Actually, the thing that killed the high streets was (subsidised) out of town supermarkets and shopping malls; that is also a major factor in increasing car dependency and usage. The few, feeble attempts to rein them in have all been reversed under political pressure. Yes, Amazon etc. need stamping on, HARD, but so do those.

    I don't know where you grew up but in the years of my life the general population has liked the move from "downtown" or high street to the burbs / malls. And now Amazon. They complain about not having a nice street of downtown shops to visit but don't remember (in the US at least) the stores that were only open 9-5 MTTF 9-1W and 9-1Sat so they didn't have to deal wit shifts or overtime. And you had to have a spouse at home not working to visit these shops and the "MAN" was at work. In the US Sears was somewhat the start of store open past 5 weekdays and all day Saturday so MEN could also do shopping. Then things moved to malls and now to Amazon.

    The markets are giving people what they want. Convince them it is a bad thing and maybe you'll get Amazon to shrink. But until then, well, nope.

    989:

    It's not just about "mill owners", it's about a bunch of non-substitutable processes that can't be shut down and are essential to keeping civilization going.

    Yep.

    990:

    In my case, that would be for six residencies and four commercial properties on the ground floor and basement levels.

    And what about places like Chicago, NYC, London, Tokyo, etc...?

    991:

    I was explicitly talking about size. For example, if one company is, say, 10% or 20% of all the paychecks in a city or county, going over that means it should be taken over for the public good. If the company's kept it just below, but done it to a bunch of cities, then we're starting to look at nationalization.

    Trump? Bojo?

    Making the ownership public doesn't necessarily solve the problem. The US Military is a classic example of a publicly owned thing that is unauditable, perhaps on purpose, and certainly not controllable by the government entity that allegedly bosses it around. Similarly, putting a corporation in the care of a dictator isn't a good thing either.

    Other problems with this idea: term limits. If the people in charge are underpaid, busy with other things, and only get a few years' experience in charge before they have to go onto their next job, they can be manipulated quite easily and thoroughly by their notional underlings.

    A more fundamental way to think about this is that corporations tend to run more like political plutocracies, and they overlap with other political entities. The general description of this situation is "heterarchy," which is, in American, a system of checks and balances which keeps its people alive and protects itself from subversion. I'm not sure whether there are general rules for how to do this* but that's kind of what you're trying to do here.

    *I think Terry Pratchett talked about a witchly gadget called a "Shambles" in his Tiffany Aching books. If memory serves, that's kind of what we're talking about here, on a much bigger scale.

    992:

    941 - sort of true. The Lochaber smelter was built where it is in order to be near a good site for a hydro plant.

    964 - They're probably moulded stone, with a pattern that "looks like" polished granite (at least for certain values of looks like).

    993:

    and London is north of every significant city in Canada.

    You're welcome. (The Gulf current.)

    994:

    Toronto in summer hits 35 celsius during the daytime, which is definitely "turn on the a/c" weather.

    [grin] Some of us think this is a nice summer day. As long as the humidity isn't too high. My wife is NOT one of these people.

    I grew up working / playing outside in such temps and higher in the summer.

    995:

    The days when industry used most of the power are long gone, and northern Europe does not have even 8-hour days in midwinter. Most of the power requirement is during the night.

    On Ontario most power is industrial/commercial, and the biggest demand is during the working day. That's why we have timed power rates, to encourage users to shift consumption to off-peak hours (evening and overnight). Electricity prices at night (7PM-7AM) are about 1/3 those of peak usage.

    Moving heating from gas/oil to electricity will double electricity requirements in the winter (roughly equal to industrial use). It would be less with decent housing construction, but replacing an already inadequate housing stock is currently not in the cards — and unless we see a 70s-style energy price shock I'm not certain energy efficiency will be a big selling point for new construction. (As opposed to spacious vaulted ceilings, granite countertops, etc.)

    996:

    I heard you went in the corner and used your phaser to disintegrate the results…

    An evolution of the Palace at Versailles method?

    997:

    if it has more than 150 people, it has to split into two corporations

    Back in the 80s, when I visited Italy, the tax rules were apparently different for larger corporations, favouring small corporations. So large companies responded by splitting into huge numbers of really tiny companies (the chap I was talking to said 'each lathe is a separate company') for tax purposes.

    Such a thing would be even easier now, with cheaper computers to control stuff. It's kinda like what Uber does with its drivers.

    998:

    “The lack of toilets on board Federation starships in Star Trek” - neatly parodied by Ookla The Mock in ‘Favoured son’ and double-parodied on ‘RoundWorm’ in ‘Comforts of home’. Basically.. airlocks.

    999:

    Some of us think this (35C) is a nice summer day. As long as the humidity isn't too high.

    It is, usually. In Saskatchewan 35C is OK. In Ontario, not so much. Humidity 75-98% for most of the summer.

    1000:

    Re: '... allow commercial organisations, consortia, cabals, cartels and complexes to get big enough to be a danger to the body politic.'

    Plus not pay their fair share of taxes, plus be allowed to contribute (and probably use as a tax write-off) all of their political 'donations' which in turn help their preferred candidates win more easily.

    There's still some serious legal wangling going on about granting corps 'legal person status'. If such happens, then considering the $$$ they control, the next step would be to make corps 'preferred' persons under the law. (And for the SF/F slant: clone these artificial preferreds until you can outvote and then eventually outlaw any biologic who isn't directly part of a 'corp person'.)

    And speaking of slavery in different guises ... According to th eopinion piece below: BigRiver is proposing a huge plant in SAfrica which would be situated on land that already has had its share of colonialism and slavery. And to also really show who's bo$$ to the wimpy local ecologists and historians this plant would be partially sited on land that's currently being evaluated as a UNESCO Heritage Site.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/1/18/why-south-africa-should-cancel-amazons-new-hq

    1001:

    Much of it is reconstituted granite

    Quartz countertops are the current thing in new installs. In the US. https://www.thisoldhouse.com/kitchens/21018440/all-about-quartz-countertops

    Ground up rock glued back together and looks mostly natural. Plus it doesn't absorb liquids the way those made of slabs of real rock do.

    1002:

    Yep. I remember when I was in my teens, and my mother being bemused to realize that Philly was around the same parallel as Cadiz, in Spain, and near Tel Aviv....

    Given the spin direction of the planet, apparently it DOES made a difference to be on the west side of a land mass vs. the east side. [grin]

    1003:

    Humidity 75-98% for most of the summer.

    https://www.google.com/maps/place/Paducah,+KY/@36.928673,-88.6720654,9z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x887a1060d12f85c3:0x1dc24c50850cb925!8m2!3d37.0833893!4d-88.6000478

    I grew up just south of Paducah. Lone Oak if it shows. While not like being next to lake Erie zoom out a bit and notice water on 3 sides. A lot. Those are big rivers. And the land is mostly low and flat. Humidity about the same.

    1004:

    Given the spin direction of the planet, apparently it DOES made a difference to be on the west side of a land mass vs. the east side. [grin]

    Ya think?

    San Diego's more-or-less the same latitude as Charleston South Carolina, The Golan Heights, the Sahara, part of the Himalayas, and Nagasaki Japan.

    1005:

    Moz: Sadly the chances of them being compensated for retiring their stranded assets... You are dead wrong. In 2020, coal plants provided a whopping 1.6% of the UK's power,

    Since I'm wrong, can you say who is going to be paying the compensation for shutting down those plants?

    1006:

    Nojay

    It also presumes a middle-class living that can purchase a house with a roof, that's three hundred thousand quid to start with. There's a lot of "I've Got Mine, Fuck You" in the "solar will save us" crowd, I have noticed.

    Are you sure you've noticed that? I'm yet to meet anyone, even the people selling it, who claim that behind the meter solar will ever do more than protect an individual from the vagaries of the kleptocracy class. (They usually don't phrase it that way, but that's what they mean. They normally say "high prices" or "blackouts" but both of those are symptoms of money going into profits for mates rather than infrastructure.) The "solar will save us" crowd are always banging on about grid scale solar.

    1007:

    Ya think?

    I grew up in the middle of the big mass. I didn't really think about it till in my 20s or there bouts.

    See my other comment about Paducah/Lone Oak.

    1008:

    Re: Baseload

    Moz, EC, Greg, et al

    "baseload" is a technical term with a meaning. However it's abundantly clear than some of you are using the technical meaming, and some of you are using it to mean something completely different, that from context I think means "a large supply of uninterrupted electricity" which is almost but not quite nothing like "baseload". Hence the animosity.

    1009:

    That 1% operating time figure for CCGT you quoted really needs to be 50% or more.

    That's more than slightly concerning. But it does mean the UK can massively build out wind and solar without worrying too much about grid stability. Although if Charlie is not just misreading what I wrote above, the plant owners getting compensated for not running or retiring the fossil plants could get really expensive since you have so many of them.

    But then, this business where you lot lash out at foreigners because you do stupid shit at home gets tedious when I'm on the receiving end of it. Can't you go back to abusing the nefarious French or something? I did not stop you building out nuclear plants in the 1970's when that seemed sensible, and I am not running around now fucking up your bumbling attempt at building one today. I'm pretty sure that Charlie at least is famous enough that if he was even just putting his name behind the "build more nukes now" campaign I would have noticed.

    But then I remember... most of you are passivists.

    1010:

    SCOTUS Defines Personhood by Vonda N. McIntyre

    1011:

    What compensation? Their contracts aren't being terminated early.

    1012:

    Granite gets its grinding power mainly from the quartz in it, so I assume would be the same there. Yes, you would end up eating some of the resin, but I doubt enough to poison you.

    1013:

    You're making assumptions that were not in my spec. I would have it official that on nationalization (or local government-ization) that annual audits will be conducted by a federal agency created for that purpose.

    The agencies, of course, would be run by civil service employees (NOT CONTRACTORS), with appointed heads.

    Oh, and the Pentagon's budget should go down by 5% per every department that fails an audit every other year. And it keeps going down every time it fails.

    1014:

    Let me note that high ceilings are cooler in summer, which was why they used to build them high. And why there were transoms over the doors, and you could lower the top window, to let out the hot air.

    I admit it's harder to get certain politicians out the top window for defenestrations.

    1015:

    There are bathrooms in the multi-person quarters on my starship.

    1016:

    Yeah, hence my request that Greg define what he actually means. I'm happy with the technical term, but it's frustrating to argue with "but WE NEED A WUMPUS".

    My impression is they mean more like "most if not all suppliers of electricity need to be uninterrupted", which is a usage encouraged by fossil generators because it defines things in a way that suits them. As a cyclist I'm familiar with that from the "roads are for cars" brigade and many other "people with power define the terms of the debate" situations.

    1017:

    "New: from the government that brought you the enduring stability of Brexit, the rapid construction of the third runway at Heathrow and the astonishing success of HS2... a plan to construct 50 nuclear power plants across the UK in the next decade!"

    That thought just made me laugh out loud. Go on Britain, you can do it!

    1018:

    875 - gasdive, being unconvinced by arguments about systems that do not exist as either physical or political realities is not bad faith. Disprove this. Acceptable proofs will include pointing to an existing international scale electricity interconnector, or even an international treats where Country A agrees to let Countries B and C build an interconnector through Country A.

    No, arguing in bad faith is when you claim the person you're arguing with has said things they haven't said, or not said things they have said. Beyond that we could add claiming that normal requirements for a stable grid that apply to every grid only apply to grids with renewables, not to grids with nuclear (you've done that today).

    There's a lot of others that mean I try to refrain from engaging with you, but I mustn't go on as it's a complete waste talking to you.

    BTW, "an existing international scale electricity interconnector"

    Norway to Gemany

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

    "international treats where Country A agrees to let Countries B and C build an interconnector through Country A."

    Country A Cyprus

    Country B Israel

    Country C Greece

    (this is actually an "Intercontinental" electricity link, between the continents of Europe and Asia, not just international)

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

    1019:

    You're making assumptions that were not in my spec. I would have it official that on nationalization (or local government-ization) that annual audits will be conducted by a federal agency created for that purpose. The agencies, of course, would be run by civil service employees (NOT CONTRACTORS), with appointed heads.

    The assumptions I'm making are normal practice here in San Diego, as well as apparently in Sacramento and DC. I'm not enjoying being an asshole about this, as there is already a cottage industry making more sophisticated 'holes than I can truly comprehend, naive surrealist that I am. I just get to deal with this kind of mess in real life.

    The part I'm being nasty about is introducing the unpleasant reality into a pleasant fantasy. This isn't to assuage my perverted pleasures, but rather because I think one of the occasional utilities of hanging out with smart SF aficionados is that, very occasionally, something surfaces that's useful in the real world.

    As for audits, let's see. If I was into founding big companies, how would I deal with this? In no particular order: 1. Get into the business of founding and growing big companies, then selling them to be nationalized. If (like most super-rich) I've got an axe to grind, I'd offshore the profits, strip the nationalizing companies of their best employees and mobile assets/intellectual property, and then castigate the government for destroying every company I founded. I'd then demand more oversight of the nationalization process, and/or investigation of what's going wrong, and/or legislation to end it, depending on how I felt that month, or whether there was some strategy I was following.

  • Alternatively, I'd use the companies as a springboard to office, then continue to run them with government subsidies. And hire my acquaintances as either contractors or the bosses of the newly nationalized companies.

  • As for auditors, there wonderful people with in-demand skills. That's why they should be hired by the private sector at wages and benefits the government simply can't afford. Also, auditors with ties to government agencies are especially in demand, so they should know that once they've pulled their 20 years overseeing nationalized companies, there's a really cushy job ready for them, working for private companies and helping both their old friends in government and their new bosses "smooth out any unpleasantness" in the audit process.

  • None of this should sound new, because it's been standard practice in the Congress, Senate, state legislatures, and bureaucracies at all levels for decades now. For me as an activist, these are serious problems that are really difficult to fix. The best luck I get is when a career bureaucrat develops a heart of simmering rage, and takes that rage into politics as soon as they're retired, damn all the cushy jobs to try to force their erstwhile bosses to do their effing jobs for once. I know three such people right now, and bless their deeply scarred psyches.

    If you want to break such cycles of corruption, you've got to start thinking of radically different methods for doing that. Please keep trying!

    Oh, and the Pentagon's budget should go down by 5% per every department that fails an audit every other year. And it keeps going down every time it fails.

    Their budget is so fucked up that it fails every audit that's been tried in the last decade or so, so by your standards, they should be out of business. Any politician who tries to shut them down commits political suicide, of course. This is an even more sucking mess than probably either of us can imagine right now.

    1020:

    Actually ... I think Starmer should propose a "Vote of No Confidence RIGHT NOW!

    Would be interesting, but:

    Why? 2:The motion does not pass - NOW they cannot ditch Bo Jon-Sun, because they voted to keep him in

    They can still ditch him, and it is looking like they will

    3: The one thing we don't want ... Bo Jon-Sun is removed by his own party, they put a semi-acceptable fascist drone in place & they scrape a majority in 2024, shudder.

    I'm getting a feeling that Boris is tired of being PM, and if someone comes up with an exit plan he will take it at this point.

    The only real question is who replaces him.

    1021:

    So you and I come to different conclusions at time but we try and live in the real world with real people who vote their emotions and not facts.

    My daughter has a degree in accounting and at 6 years out of college is on her forth job. Now with a startup working on automating some of the process. She has worked for a big national public accounting firm, for the state government auditing department, and for a company that manages drug trials for companies.

    He biggest grip is how at the end of the day the top of the food chain mostly wants to know if the boxes were all checked. When she knows the boxes being checked don't really means things are all OK.

    Periodically I get a phone call asking if "xyz" makes any sense.

    To wrap it up and agree mostly with you. Audits do what the audit is designed to do. And they are designed by imperfect people with all kinds of biases and prejudices.

    Like the other issues talked about here (taxes, financial nonsense, etc...) there are people who will always be around who want to find the holes in the process so they can skate by. Either for laziness or profit. Or both.

    1022:

    HER BIGGEST GRIPE

    1023:

    I think it read better the first time. I got a mental image of a he-man doll with one really big arm. "HE-MAN GRIP BIG"

    1024:

    To pile on a bit. Some here have been involved in industry standards. EC on the C standard and others I think. I got to be on an industry group trying to standardize transactions between "Property and Casualty Independent Insurance Agency" computer systems and the companies. Agent associations, existing trade groups, insurance companies, and of course software vendors for agency systems were all attending. My company (agency system software) got to drive a lot of the early efforts as we did it first with a few companies.

    It was interesting to young innocent me that each of the major groups had totally different goals. And some within some groups had goals against each other. Some of the insurance companies sent tech folks. Others marketing. At the end of the day everyone was trying to make sure no one else got an advantage over them. It made for some interesting "food fights" at times. Mostly polite. Mostly behind the scenes. But it was also so much fun to deal with people who had no idea what we were talking about but were convinced they did and kept trying to steer discussions to things they did understand.

    1025:

    Moz @ 1019 ...
    Unfortunately, you are probably correct, even though we desperately need those nuke powerplants.

    1026:

    Unfortunately, you are probably correct, even though we desperately need those nuke powerplants.

    Well Bill Gates is trying to help you out, company he started (Terrapower) is working on the issue.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/bill-gates-wyoming-nuclear-power-plant-b1995379.html

    1027:

    OK, lets look at the claims.

    TerraPower says its relatively small, 345-megawatt plant,

    TerraPower plans to make its plant useful for today's energy grid of growing renewable power. A salt heat “battery” will allow the plant to ramp up electricity production on demand,

    At peak capacity, the plant could generate 500 megawatts.

    The project will cost up to $4 billion

    So it's a molten salt storage at grid scale charged up with nuclear. There's no issues with scaling up molten salt thermal storage. Salt costs virtually nothing. Efficiency improves as it gets bigger as the square/cube law works in our favour. Scaling this to seasonal storage size is trivial.

    The output is 345 MW, for 4 billion dollars (the 500 MW is the output with the storage). Total energy produced is 3,022,200 MWh per year with storage handling the peaks.

    Solar is currently under 0.2 dollars per watt retail. Much cheaper for a large order.

    https://www.exeoenergy.co.uk/solar-panels/solar-panel-output/

    In Edinburgh, each watt of solar produces 900Wh power year. To make 3,022,200 MWh per year would need 3,358 MW of solar. Nearly 10 times the nameplate capacity of the nuclear option. However that would cost 0.671 billion dollars (0.671 billion is less than 4 billion) Obviously not all the 4 billon is for the nuclear reactor. There's a cost for the steam turbine and generator that would have to be added to the cost of the solar option for it to be an apple to apples comparison. However aren't there a bunch of old coal plants that have steam turbine generators in them going cheap at present?

    I can't see that Bill is really helping all that much.

    1028:

    Yeah, the Natrium, sodium-cooled nuclear power plant. What could possibly go wrong? Plenty apparently:

    https://politicalcompass.org/counterpoint-20210827-wyoming-atomic-reactor

    "As Admiral Rickover said almost 70 years ago, sodium reactors are 'expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.'”

    But people are always so negative about new technology. Anyway, I'm sure Gates can try a Cowboy Cocktail while he oversees the work.

    1029:

    The advantage of small reactors like that is that you really can build them anywhere and they make the nuke fans happy, so they could pop a couple into London or any other big city to supply local power (made locally with local materials and labour, employing local people to run them!). Bonus, they do not have to worry about losing access to their solar plantations in former colonies.

    I'm quite serious about this. I founded the "Reopen White Bay Power Station" group in Sydney partly to get local electricity made locally, to help people understand the advantages of doing that. For some reason the NIMBYs did not like the idea of a coal fired power station right in the middle of the Sydney basin. They should be grateful my next project never got off the ground - restarting the historical Ultimo Power Station right next to the tourist precinct at Darling Harbour. Sadly they closed the Powerstation Museum and moved most of it out to Paramatta instead.

    1030:

    That's brilliant. I love the reopen white bay. Should be more of it.

    I've spoken to a few, no, more than a few, who are mad as hell that home solar gets to sell electricity to the grid, when it does nothing except put money in the pockets of evil lefties. I like to point out that the rules for embedded micro generation don't say it has to be solar. (maybe they do now, but not when I last looked) They can buy their own coal generator if they think they're so great, just like I bought my own solar generator.

    Not many wanted to.

    https://m.alibaba.com/product/742895812/Coal-Generator-Power-Coal-Electrical-Generator.html?s=p&__detailProductImg=https://s.alicdn.com/@sc04/kf/HTB1a9T8dRUSMeJjy1zkq6yWmpXav.jpg_200x200.jpg

    Now, if you'll excuse me, I might just go sip some latte

    1031:

    two nuclear engineering degrees, a Reactor Operator’s license, a corporate Senior Vice President position for an atomic licensee, a nuclear safety patent, two peer-reviewed papers on radiation

    There's a fake greenie of ever I've seen one. Spoiling our nuclear fun with messy facts.

    1032:

    Further evidence that solar can't possibly work, it's destabilising the market in electricity... also terrible news for capitalists, since without a market there's no reason to produce electricity.

    https://theconversation.com/4-ways-to-stop-australias-surge-in-rooftop-solar-from-destabilising-electricity-prices-173592

    The article describes the problem and suggests: 1. More battery storage

    2. Flexible management of energy exported to the grid

    3. Paying rooftop solar owners dynamic tariffs

    4. We need a two-sided market

    Note that the current answer to point three is to make the payment so small that losing it doesn't matter. But since home PV pays for itself in avoided grid consumption anyway, all that would do is increase the payback period.

    Note that increased work from home increases consumption during peak generation periods because most of Australia is aircon territory most of the year. Well, our houses are designed to require it, anyway.

    1033:

    "I've spoken to a few, no, more than a few, who are mad as hell that home solar gets to sell electricity to the grid, when it does nothing except put money in the pockets of evil lefties"

    Down under it seems that takeup has been higher than expected, and now energy companies are slashing the feed-in tariff they were previously offering right to the bone.

    A while back there was talk about charging for the excess generation over a certain level, but can't remember if that was satire or not.

    Hardly a get rich quick scheme for latte sipping woke lefty scum any more :D

    1034:

    Argh - somehow completely missed Moz's post which covers everything and more that I was alluding to in my brain fogged brain fart.

    1035:

    A while back there was talk about charging for the excess generation over a certain level, but can't remember if that was satire or not.

    It was real, and some politicians still say this. It's to punish early adopters, hopefully drive the ones who can't afford the batteries to switch to off-grid out of the market so they remember solar as a money pit, rather than remember the bandits who did it to them. So mostly a right-wing wank fantasy, one that gets attention because it would obviously yield a windfall for established energy suppliers who will fund attention whenever it's raised. But I suspect backers see a reputation-killer when they see one so there isn't serious money behind it. Fingers crossed, eh?

    For the benefit of the Brits: there is a point to some of us getting a bit bolshy when we see things that closely resemble right-wing politician and fossil fuel industry FUD. There are people who will say that if it can't work in the UK it can't work here (cultural cringe at work there, it's a thing), and they don't care that the situation in the UK is different. It makes at least attempting some more care with terminology surely not too much trouble to ask about. Because otherwise we have a shitload of Uranium reserves, a navy that wants nuclear subs, a section of the defence lobby that wants real grown up nukes, and a lot of form for electing governments that just lie endlessly.

    1036:

    1029 - In Edinburgh, each watt of solar produces 900Wh power year.
    I'm not even clear what the units you're using here are. 900Wh means 900 watts for one hour. So presumably 900Wyear means 900W for one year? But 900Wh power year. This could mean spreading the 900Wh over a year, which I make slighty under 2.5W actual at any time: That's not enough to run 1 700lumen LED bulb, based on the bulbs I'm actually using.
    Oh and, based on actual installations, we get around 11% of baseplate wattage for about 8 hours per day this time of year.

    1031 - Nuclear reactors in London! :-) The closest the politicritters have come to that so far is Dungeness and Hinckley Point.

    1032 - Ahem! Wind power. I know I've said (with reasoning) that it's unreliable, but it exists and you can install a small plant in your own garden.

    1037 - a navy that wants nuclear subs, a section of the defence lobby that wants real grown up nukes, and a lot of form for electing governments that just lie endlessly.
    SNAP!!

    1037:

    Invoking the 300+ question rule.

    Watched "Don't Look Up" last night.

    How would you ensure that enclave(s) of humanity would survive a world devastating asteroid impact and then rebuild the planet?

    Assuming you aren't at ground zero suffering a direct hit, where would you hide to survive the initial blast and heat wave?

    Nuclear subs (crews and their families) hiding at the bottom of the ocean?

    Military bunkers (old ICBM missile silos, old Soviet command centers under the Urals, my personal choice - the NORAD command center at Cheyenne Mountain)?

    Natural caverns and abandoned coal mines in Appalachia or Wales (or those salt mines under Lake Erie, deep diamond mines in South Africa)?

    Would the subway system of a major city be safe (New York subways, Paris Metro, London tubes, Moscow metro)? Mao's regime built a lot of deep underground tunnels to protect the Chinese people from nuclear war, would these work?

    Would a typical underground parking garage, suburban basement or a simple tornado shelter at a farmhouse in Kansas be enough?

    Assuming you have enough stored freeze dried food (30 year stable shelf life) and a source of clean groundwater, how long before the Earth begins to recover?

    Or would the atmosphere be unbreathable and the survivors doomed to suffocate anyways? Then again, the small mammals that survived the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs had to breath, so oxygen levels may still be sufficient until vegetation begins to regrow.

    Assuming you don't want to wait 100,000s of years for evolution to create new animal species and fill up all the available environmental niches, what's the best Noah's Ark for repopulating animals and birds (instead of "two by two", just females with enough frozen species sperm to impregnate them)?

    Would the seed bank at Svalbard island in Norway survive (again assuming no direct hit)?

    Storage of data and knowledge for rebuilding and survival is easy enough via thumb drives. Tool and die machines and basic tools are easy to store. Power supplied by solar cells (or small nuclear reactors at military facilities or submarines) is easy enough. But how do you stay in contact with other survivors around the globe?

    Would Elon Musk save his own skin via deep underground shelter built by his Boring Company, or would he catch an orbital flight on Space X and stay in orbit until it was safe to land? Would anything in orbit survive the ejecta hurled into space by the impact? Would the rich survive in their luxury New Zealand bunkers?

    What else have I forgotten?

    1038:

    [[ almost duplicate post cut - mod ]]

    1039:

    Sorry about the double post.

    Didn't you used to have a button allowing a poster to delete his own post?

    1040:

    I'm thinking that the North Wales slate quarries* may be a better choice than coal mines.

    * The difference between a quarry and a mine is in the material extracted and any post-processing, not whether it is an open cast or tunnelled facility. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloddfa\_Ganol but note that the workers explicitly described the facility as a quarry; see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llechwedd\_Slate\_Caverns

    1041:

    Sodium-cooled reactors are not salt-storage or even molten-fluoride reactors. There have been a bunch of sodium-cooled reactors built and operated, they do not have a glorious history in the main. It's possible the latest generation based on the Soviet BN-series of sodium-pool reactors are better, we'll see.

    1042:

    Suggest looking up the geology of ignimbrite and the conditions in which it forms, as those are the conditions expected to pertain over maybe half the earth. Gigatonnes of incandescent debris raining from orbit. A long winter, maybe a year with no visible sun, followed by a PETM equivalent greenhouse event lasting maybe centuries to millenia.

    1043:

    How would you ensure that enclave(s) of humanity would survive a world devastating asteroid impact and then rebuild the planet?

    stay away from the coast obviously, those megatsunamis were apparently quite something

    the world will be repopulated by clones of peter thiel from his nz bolthole

    it would probably rebuild itself more quickly without human interference but without access to cheap energy supplies we probably couldn't do that much damage anyway

    1044:

    The BN-series design philosophy is kind of hilarious. The pure sodium loops are in fact very well behaved, because sodium plays well with structural steels even at very high temperatures. The issue is the steam generators. Steam generators are supposed to transfer heat, so you cant make them very thick-walled, which is the go-to solution for making the rest of the plumbing indestructible. And water and sodium do not play nice.

    But sodium fires are not very energetic. They happen very easily, but not that hot.

    So the Russians put in a sodium-to-sodium heat exchanger loop to have an outer sodium loop that is not radioactive. Then that loop has the steam generators. In separate fire bunkers. When one of them inevitably catches fire, they cut it out of the sodium and steam loops, shovel sand on it and fix it. They dont even take the reactor off-line to do this. Which is why the plant has a stack of "Minor fire" reports, but also higher reliability than the entire rest of the Russian reactor fleet...

    1045:

    The point of the natrium stunt is that the reactor outputs heat. The heat storage stores heat. No conversion losses, only insulation losses. The thermal output of the reactor is a lot more than 345. More like a thousand.

    If you want to replicate this with solar, you either need to use solar input equivalent to the thermal output of the reactor design, or a gargantuan set of heat pumps to scavenge environmental heat from somewhere.

    1046:

    Since I'm wrong, can you say who is going to be paying the compensation for shutting down those plants?

    What compensation?

    These are old and uneconomic plants, being phased out and replaced by gas peakers and renewables. The UK coal industry barely exists any more -- Thatcher declared war on the NUM back in 1981/82 and 90% of the mines had closed by 1990: the coal the remaining power stations burn is all imported.

    This isn't Australia where you're still running a resource extraction economy on behalf of billionaire oligarchs like Gina Rinehart.

    1047:

    As Admiral Rickover said almost 70 years ago, sodium reactors

    And he should know: he's the bloke who put a liquid sodium cooled reactor in a submarine. (Spoiler: they had a rapid re-think and replaced it with a water-cooled reactor right after the initial sea trials.)

    1048:

    If you want to replicate this with solar,

    The Ivanpah solar thermal power station in Nevada was built with a molten-salt heat store to allow generation of electricity at night. Last I heard it was being shut down as uneconomic although it may have been bought for pennies on the dollar and put back into service by "new" owners after the keelplate builders took the tax-deduction loss on its construction.

    This kind of ownership shuffle happened to the older parabolic-trough solar thermal stations over by Edwards Air Force base in California, the SEGS plants built in the 1980s. The SEGS installations didn't have thermal storage but they got around the "no power generated at night" by burning gas to run the steam turbine-generator sets when the sun was down. From a brief Google and Wikipedia search it looks like all the SEGS thermal plant has been decommissioned and replaced by photovoltaic installations so no more gas-burning at night. Batteries were not mentioned.

    1049:

    Quick answer: the weather wouldn't settle down for a millennium following a bad strike, so there would be hundreds of years when agriculture and even herding were essentially impossible. And the ecology might take a million years to recover enough to reestablish those. By which time, a human enclave would have died out or evolved into some other species ....

    1050:

    I haven't seen the movie.

    If I understand the premise, it's a dino-killer asteroid impact with six months warning.

    A couple of angles you missed:

    There will be no satellites left in low earth orbit -- an impact that big will throw a debris plume almost all the way out to GEO (as happened at the end-Cretaceous impact); indeed, the worst of the fire storm will happen in the opposite hemisphere to the impact (north/south) about 8-12 time zones away, as several million tons of white-hot sand and gravel re-enter from just below orbital velocity and vapourize, dumping almost all their kinetic energy into the upper stratosphere in the form of heat.

    (The continent-sized fires after the Chixculub impactor are believed to have been the result of the entire sky's temperature exceeding 200 celsius, thereby flash-boiling and then setting fire to all the biomass underneath, across an insane area. If you're inder the debris plume, the only escape is to be on board a submerged nuclear submarine -- they can extract oxygen from the seawater and run away very fast, b/c the oxygen levels near the firestorm will drop rapidly.)

    Impacts are most likely in the plane of the ecliptic, so in the tropics. This is Good News for Svalbard; also hopeful for parts of Russia and northern Europe and Alaska and Tierra del Fuego. (For values of "hopeful" which mean "starve to death slowly rather than killed by shockwave or parboiled beneath a red-hot sky".)

    But the survivors will have no comsats and no weather forecasting sats, while global climate change will be off the charts for several years, in the most unpredictable way imaginable. One likely outcome is a 10 degree celsius temperature drop, followed after a few years (when the dust clouds settle) by a rebound driven by the pre-existing anthropogenic warming effect of CO2 release, boosted by the additional CO2 released by charring half the biosphere. One extreme happy fun outcome might be a shutdown of the warm water outflow from the Gulf of Mexico and a huge bloom of sulfur metabolism bacteria in the oceanic depths (a side-effect of all the dead marine biomass raining down) and then a Canfield Ocean forming in the North Atlantic/Arctic. In which case those lucky, lucky Northern European survivors get to asphyxiate on hydrogen sulfide.

    1051:

    PS: in fact, the LEO clear-out will be so abrupt and extreme that it'll exceed the worst Kessler Syndrome scenarios by some orders of magnitude. So the Mars colony is going to have to make do and mend, or die. No help coming for them in the next decade or two even if the launch infrastructure survives!

    1052:

    3e6 MW-Hr (3 PW-Hr) per diem needs 7,000 square kilometers of solar panels in the UK. And you HAVE allowed for storage capacity for 2 PW-Hr for 6-8 months, haven't you?

    1053:

    Popcorn Time! - Tory MP crosses the floor & other fun occasions.

    1054:

    Post in haste - correct at leisure. I mean storage capacity for 3-400 PW-Hr.

    1055:

    Haven't seen the movie either. But a few points.

    One is that all the meteorite strikes tagging Russia point out that an asteroid most likely will not be in the plane of the ecliptic. It will be near the plane of the ecliptic on a solar system level, but even a few arc-seconds of deviation could put the strike just about anywhere on Earth, although there's obviously a 70% chance it will hit ocean.

    The second point is that we've got some really good biological and paleontological evidence that the physical scenario of Chicxulub is incomplete. The global firestorm obviously didn't happen as simplistically modeled because we know where life survived on the surface (cf Tim Low's Where Song Began for where birds survived) and we have a really good idea of how it survived closer to the impact (Anthony Martin's Evolution Underground). The tl;dr is that the southern hemisphere has a bunch of ancient lineages most likely because of Chicxulub, which hit in the northern hemisphere. Therefore, the whole rotation of the Earth and the normal barrier of the equatorial winds limiting the movement of airborne stuff across the equator actually mattered after the impact. That's not in the disaster models, but it demonstrably happened.

    So there will quite certainly be less damage on the opposite side of the Earth, and everything that can survive underground for extended periods (gophers, for example) will survive even closer. Plants will survive better than animals anyway, because half of their biomass is underground (roots) as are a lot of their seeds (seed bank). Ditto fungi.

    Since there's already a low-key and purportedly sleazy industry of underground bunkers for the ultra-rich, I think we can safely call the post-impact future the "Tunnels and Trolls" future of humanity. But don't worry, we'll undoubtedly diversify after the survivors re-emerge and learn how to farm again. And to farm gophers for a living, if they didn't bring any livestock into their bunker with them.

    1056:

    I think we can safely call the post-impact future the "Tunnels and Trolls" future of humanity.

    I'm reasonably optimistic that the human species (and its radiative descendants) will survive unless we get very unlucky. But that's an aggregate: individually I think we'd be looking at a 90-99.9% die-off. Our current global technological civilization won't survive: a very good result might be a late-19th century technological equivalent with some legacy of culture and records, a couple of centuries after the event.

    1057:

    I think we'd be looking at a 90-99.9% die-off.

    In any kind of end-of-technological-civilisation scenario the number of initial survivors is important. If there are a few scattered survivors then things look quite optimistic. If 10% of the population are survivors then its probably pretty bad.

    In The Day of the Triffids the protagonist muses how fortunate it was that the mass blinding was of the "few scattered survivor" type. Otherwise the result would have been starving hordes eating and burning anything they could get their hands on, before dying of cold and starvation when the resources ran out. So now there are a few scattered survivors, but zero resources. All the wood has been burned and all the edible animals killed. No cows for milk, no horses to pull ploughs, no pigs or sheep. They're all dead, Jim. This leaves the final survivors in a much nastier place, and no hope of pulling themselves out of it by breeding livestock.

    1058:

    Let me note that high ceilings are cooler in summer, which was why they used to build them high. And why there were transoms over the doors, and you could lower the top window, to let out the hot air.

    Houses I'm thinking of don't have transoms. New builds, vaulted ceilings with no way to let hot air out and not designed for cross-breezes so not significantly cooler, more expensive to heat… essentially, designed to look good on Instagram and maximize sale price (cathedral ceiling, add $xxx kinda thing).

    I've seen houses designed to maximize passive heating and cooling, built over 100 years ago. Not at all the same style, layout, or functionality.

    1059:

    He biggest grip is how at the end of the day the top of the food chain mostly wants to know if the boxes were all checked.

    One of my nieces got what she thought was her dream job working for a consulting firm. She quickly discovered that their real brief wasn't coming in and solving engineering problems, it was convincing companies to keep hiring them, which meant figuring out what the chap* in charge wanted and recommending that as a solution, because if they recommended another solution (even if it was better and worked) they wouldn't be given another contract.

    Another niece is an accountant. She says external auditors work the same way — look at Aurther Anderson as an example of what that can lead to…

    *Invariably chaps in her experience.

    1060:

    Mao's regime built a lot of deep underground tunnels to protect the Chinese people from nuclear war, would these work?

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/etherflyer/3428137036/

    I find it interesting that the signage to emergency facilities is kept current (or was 15 years ago when I was in Beijing). Also interesting that they put English on the signs.

    1061:

    I think we can safely call the post-impact future the "Tunnels and Trolls" future of humanity. I'm reasonably optimistic that the human species (and its radiative descendants) will survive unless we get very unlucky. But that's an aggregate: individually I think we'd be looking at a 90-99.9% die-off. Our current global technological civilization won't survive: a very good result might be a late-19th century technological equivalent with some legacy of culture and records, a couple of centuries after the event.

    I am too, but why stop there?

    Personally, I like the Ming Dynasty better than the already-fossil-fueled 19th Century. Probably that's because I'm inexplicably amused by mobile forts made of up-armored wheelbarrows and donkey carts used against Mongol cavalry. With firearms.

    We can predict some winners, too: Places like Moscow, Beijing, Montreal, and Las Vegas have significant underground cities well away from a coast and a mile-high tsunami. Were I expecting urban survivors, I'd look there. Well, until Vegas runs out of water.

    Since most people aren't going to survive the impact, period, should governments do anything to prepare them? After all, humane livestock care is that the animals have a really good life up until that really bad last day. If that's our definition of humane treatment, why not be humane to everyone. Keep fighting the pandemic, for instance. Make sure people don't starve before the asteroid hits. That sort of thing. If there's nothing we can do to prevent it and only a few people with particular skills in particular locations will survive...

    Speaking of particular locations, if I had to randomly bet on safe locations, I'd still choose the southern hemisphere, particularly South Africa, Chile, New Zealand, southeastern Australia, and Madagascar. These are places with reasonably high highlands reasonably far enough away from the coast to survive the tsunami, and reasonably likely not to get hit by massive firestorms.

    That said, if South Africa is a redoubt for humanity, a certain billionaire we all dislike know and loathe love would probably end up surviving too. Yes, Elon Musk could conceivably end up as emperor of Earth. And post-impact, it would still be more habitable than Mars.

    The final bit of silliness: would an asteroid strike trigger an ice age? Here's my logic chain. Since this is over my level of climate science, I'm assuming some critical detail is missing that invalidates the scenario. Anyway, a lot of junk gets blasted skyward, insolation falls. That cools the planet. But most of the forests burn and the oceanic phytoplankton take a hit, so CO2 and methane go up, which warms the planet. But human civilization goes bye bye, which radically drops CO2 emissions, which cools a bit. And phytoplankton are nutrient limited, and the asteroid has just stirred up the oceans (if it's an ocean strike) and caused massive amounts of nutrient-rich runoff into the ocean, and added a big mass of mineral-laden dust to the ocean. So there's a plankton bloom. Which sucks down carbon, a year or two after the event. And plants regrow on land in the years/decades following the event, with many fewer herbivores than they had (hordes of grasshoppers, but no massive herds feeding civilization). That drops carbon still further. If atmospheric CO2 gets below ca. 250 ppm, our planet trips over into an ice age. Could the follow-on effects of an asteroid strike actually do this? It just might. I think it depends mostly on the phytoplankton, as we saw in March 2020, getting civilization to shut down does make a noticeable and immediate difference.

    1062:

    I wouldn't fancy being down there in any kind of earthquake. It's all booby-trapped.

    One of the quarry owners somewhere in the middle started going bust, and tried desperately to hang on by playing fast and loose with how much you have to leave behind in order to stop all the rest of it falling on your head. It didn't work, but it did keep them going long enough to damage their working enough to become a danger to the workings above and below it, which then had to modify their own operations to avoid disappearing down a hole or under uncounted tons of rubble. The decline of the quarries as a whole was accelerated by having to cope with the arseache, and it only got worse over time as the dud bits filled up with water and created risks of sudden catastrophic flooding as well as just plain collapse.

    Most of the other noticeable quarrying sites have got a similar kind of story attached to them also, and indeed variants adjusted for the specific geology crop up in all the historical mineral extraction areas. Even without that, mines in general don't fill me with confidence as refuges; few tunnels dug with the actual intention of staying open for long term use are adequately stable without installing some form of roof support structure and keeping up the maintenance, whereas mines tend to do no more than the minimum they can get away with to have it not fall in while they're still interested in it, even if they don't then go on to sabotage themselves by taking the support out anyway.

    Having said all that, I still don't think it's valuable since the original premise is fatally flawed. It's quite plainly the kind of scenario where the closer you are to ground zero and the less shelter you have, the better off you are, and the best you can hope for from going down a hole is to make it take longer and be more unpleasant.

    1063:

    Sodium-cooled reactors are not salt-storage or even molten-fluoride reactors. There have been a bunch of sodium-cooled reactors built and operated, they do not have a glorious history in the main. It's possible the latest generation based on the Soviet BN-series of sodium-pool reactors are better, we'll see.

    I'd note that, if Lord Gates has learned anything about dead-catting in the wake of what might have been a debacle with one Jeffrey Epstein, then it's theoretically possible that the second link I posted (about the Cowyboy Cocktail) is more relevant to an interest in Wyoming than Natrium is. I'm almost certainly wrong in this, but why build an experimental reactor in Wyoming?

    1064:

    Re: 'Tory MP crosses the floor'

    News coverage over here is mostly saying that BoJo will be ceasing all COVID protocols to hang on to his PMship.

    The Mordor rags will probably hype the 'let's all ignore COVID' as good for the economy. And of course when the UK economy doesn't bounce back, they'll blame the EU (probably mostly Macron).

    Anyways - us furriners across the pond will be watching to see how principled, rational and scientifically well-informed the ruling UK party and electorate are now that the feces have hit their wall. (Tory MP: What scandal, where? - I don't smell anything*!)

    *'I tested positive for COVID months ago (at his last party) and still can't smell a damned thing!'

    1065:

    Generally, as I understand it, Bill Gates isn't that interested in odd tax-deferral or tax-avoidance schemes. He's in his late 60s, he's a multibillionaire, he's giving his wealth away almost as fast as he's getting richer because he still owns a lot of Microsoft stock and he doesn't seem that interested in getting even richer in what time he's got left on this planet.

    Wyoming, why not? I have a vague recollection of another PowerPoint SMR project intended for Montana and a number of the "gimme money" SMR schemes show their fantasy power palaces sited in Arcadian woodlands and Sylvan dells. Maybe there's development money rattling around loose in such states but anything nuclear is under the Federal control of the NRA so even if Wyoming says "yeah, go ahead and fission some atoms here" the hoops the project people have to jump through are still determined by a VERY thick rulebook written elsewhere.

    1066:

    Several times in fact. Often in direct response to you. Oh and energy storage for 12 months, not 6, for all UK energy needs not just electricity. Packed into a square area 10km on a side, and done for a few pounds per person.

    But you completely ignore me every time. Can you tell me what the margin is for me to explain again? (this being about the 16th time).

    1067:

    Yes the stunt is with heat.

    As has been pointed out about 300 times, most of the UK load is heating.

    So it's a perfect fit for district heating. That's not possible for the nuclear as the storage has to be co-located with the reactor that no one wants to live next door to. (see the discussion about putting a couple in London.) Plus the electricity generated can run heat pumps, making the system efficency better that 100% for heating. That would be a valid issue if the goal was only electricity, and solar with storage would only be about 1/4 the cost rather than 1/8ish

    1068:

    But don't worry, we'll undoubtedly diversify after the survivors re-emerge and learn how to farm again.

    But will they make their clothes out of curtains?

    (A terrible reference to a now strange to watch US movie from 1939.)

    1069:

    The chicxulub asteroid was about the same size as the don't look up comet. However the chicxulub impactor was thought to be doing about 12 km/s, while the don't look up impactor was modeled on Neowise and was doing about 60 km/s. So it will deliver about 20ish times the energy. That's a tsunami of mantel not water. I doubt that much would survive.

    1070:

    Well, until Vegas runs out of water.

    Well that will get ugly quickly. Once they run out of fresh water including the bottles (two weeks tops) they will have a choice of beer/liquor or the gray water used to drive all the fountains. So get smashed and die or cholera and die.

    1071:

    1064 - The quarries I chose have both been open as tourist experiences, and indeed I've been along (since we went in by adits) both of them.

    1066 - Pretty much, with a side note of DRoss complaining that Wee Nic isn't abandoning Covid protections fast enough, and one of the English Broadcasting Corporation ignoring Wales again.

    1070 - 1965 film you mean.

    1072:

    I gave a general idea, you're demanding detailed specifics.

    Fine. 1. No revolving door. 10-yr non-compete clause for any fed auditor leaving federal employment. Also "may not earn any money from the industry they audited." 2. Take their budgets out of the elective budget, and make it guaranteed (complete with COLA). Oh, and do that for the IRS auditors. 3. About the many companies offshore: there are already anti-dumping laws. Add teeth and bbq sauce.

    1073:

    Quote from him, quoting an old quote: for the love of God, GO!"

    1074:

    He's in his late 60s, he's a multibillionaire, he's giving his wealth away almost as fast as he's getting richer because he still owns a lot of Microsoft stock and he doesn't seem that interested in getting even richer in what time he's got left on this planet.

    He also seems to be afflicted with the same issue as many other successful high IQ folks I've dealt with. He cannot comprehend how to deal with people who don't come to the same conclusions he does. At all.

    Considering they might be wrong, about most anything, does not seem to be allowed due to their brain wiring.

    1075:

    I don't think so. Note that some of my thinking is based on thinking by a lot of people writing and reading in Eric Flint's 1632 universe....

    For one, there will be a gazillion computers and parts available, laying there. They'll use 'em till they die... and I get nervous and rebuild my computer every 6-8 years. How many are in that Microcenter store near me?

    Not just computers - a lot of everything laying around. Plenty of parts to repair others. (When I was in my teens, I saw ads in every sf mag for a pallet with four WWII jeeps, packed in cosmoline (some assembly required). I understand that you'd get one working vehicle out of a pallet. So... how many of any vehicle you want?

    Brick, stone, and concrete buildings will survive the rain of fire. The population, not so much....

    Time for a lot of indoor agriculture.

    1076:

    1965 film you mean.

    Nope. "Gone With the Wind"

    With a side order of a hilarious Carol Burnett skit. But only if you were familiar with the film.

    1077:

    "Would an asteroid strike trigger an ice age?"

    Shall we dig up the five million studies, suggesting a full-scale nuclear war would do that?

    1078:

    Why Wyoming? Let's see, population is smaller than the city of Baltimore, so plenty of space, and few people to complain?

    1079:

    Wyoming, why not? I have a vague recollection of another PowerPoint SMR project intended for Montana

    You can site things there without upsetting very many people. People are thin on the ground in those states. Plus they are tightly wound around coal and fracking. (See Powder River Basin)

    So even though publicly they are all in with coal, gas, etc... behind the bluster are the folks that realize the fossil companies continuously going bankrupt might indicate a growing problem. So they don't mind having a plan "B" in the wings. But let's just not talk about it replacing the existing economy.

    1080:

    That would require a degree of familiarity "Wasn't the ACW Fun?" I hope to never acquire. ;-)

    1081:

    Speaking of trains, here's something that might be of interest to Greg and others: Autonomous battery-powered rail cars could steal shipments from truckers.

    Three points stood out to me -- firstly, the UK and EU are slowly moving to ETCS (European Train Control System), a relative of PTC, and secondly, while 50 car goods trains are short by US standards, they're pretty much normal in the UK. Finally, this would be a cheap way to electrify freight movements to those bits of the UK network that have not yet been electrified -- with a 500km range supported by these BEVs, it might be possible to swap passenger-carrying bodies as well as freight containers for use on those less-used highland and peripheral routes, thereby avoiding leaving entire locos sitting around recharging for hours, or stringing overhead wires.

    1082:

    Not really. When the film was made it was to be serious. Not it comes across as a "those folks were nuts" with a case of insanity tossed in. And the Carol Burnett thing was a parody on top of that.

    At the end of the day, it now makes the entire southern position during the ACW look stupid.

    1083:

    Why Wyoming? Because everyone here is panicking about the end of coal royalties and the near-term shutdowns of most of the state's coal-fired powerplants. Lincoln county, where the planned nuclear powerplant is being built, has a coal-fired powerplant and adjacent coal mine that are set to shut down in 2025. The town of Kemmerer is a one-industry community, with little else to fall back on apart from beautiful fish fossils from the Green River formation. Wyoming has had a great 40-year run of selling low-sulfur coal to electrical utilities throughout the lower 48 states, but it's now coming to an end. A significant proportion of the state budget is covered by mineral royalties and excise taxes. As an example, my county, Sublette, obtains over 90% of its real estate taxes from gas operations and associated infrastructure. There is no state income tax and until recently, amazing public services for Wyoming's 560,000 inhabitants. The problem is that there's no backup once the coal and natural gas industries shrink, and no other source of well-paying jobs to keep people in-state. The legislature has no plan to address these issues, other than through draconian budget cuts and taxing wind energy projects, believing that doing so might slow down the switch from coal to renewables. This despite Wyoming being one of the windiest places you'll ever visit. They'll do anything to keep a project like the sodium reactor going, in the hope that it'll lead to more like it.

    1084:

    anything nuclear is under the Federal control of the NRA

    Ah, not that NRA. I was wondering why our favourite extenders of a second amendment were involved in glow in the dark stuff.

    1085:

    while 50 car goods trains are short by US standards

    US intermodal freight cars can handle shipping containers up to 53 feed long. Are UK cars sized similarly?

    Just curious.

    1086:

    I have never seen you post any realistic figures. And, if you are thinking about molten sodium tanks 10 km on a side (or, indeed, anything else of that size), some consideration of the scaling problems (including safety).

    1087:

    Small, private trains used to exist, but would create havoc with scheduling on today's tracks. Of course, if there were serious investment in new tracks and links (*), things would be different ....

    (*) Such as an E-W link bypassing Ely and Cambridge, to allow freight easy access from Felixstowe to the midlands.

    1088:

    The legislature has no plan to address these issues, other than through draconian budget cuts and taxing wind energy projects, believing that doing so might slow down the switch from coal to renewables. This despite Wyoming being one of the windiest places you'll ever visit.

    I just read a story (linked from here?) about the largest coal power plant in N. Dakota being kept running even though it loses money. Zoning and other things being done to keep wind and solar out. And with regular winds like you describe in Wyoming.

    1089:

    Underground coal gasification is due for a comeback -- basically set fire to underground coal strata, limit the amount of oxygen that gets down there and extract the resulting carbon monoxide gas for use as a combustible fuel aboveground. It's gas so it's like renewables and Green and stuff (and may even be eligible for subsidies), it's a lot easier to pipe the gas to the destination generator plants across the country and all the pollution happens safely underground where it doesn't affect the environment above.

    Yeah right. Before anyone says "Centralia!" well sometimes it doesn't work the way you want it to but it's worth a try, isn't it?

    1090:

    Um, I dunno where the author gets "20 foot", but 40 foot is more like it, and in the US, almost all semi-trailers are 53 foot. They're talking about laying a lot of tracks back down.

    1091:

    Shipping containers are nearly all 20' or 40' long. So there is a huge infrastructure already based on those sizes. So building a transfer yard involves standard cranes and such. 53' is the max (mostly) length of a standard trailer in the US. But that size has issues on many urban streets. And more and more distance freight is handled in container put on a wheeled chassis to then be pulled around via a tractor. Or a train car chassis. Not quite as much volume but in general containers are packed tighter than a general trailer.

    1092:

    Well, I've just solved the problem of why you never read about toilets on spaceships: humans metabolic systems are genetically engineered to be far more efficient, as is their food, and so they only need to use the pissoir.

    1093:

    1083 - Where did he get 20' ISO boxes from!? The photos in his piece show a 40' box, and that's more typical of the ones used around here (other than specialist work like the ones Aggreko convert into mobile generators.

    1087 - No, the maximum length of an ISO box allowed on UK roads is 45'.

    1088 - Watch it EC. Asking gasdive to consider realistic values or structural plausibility is "bad faith debating" by his definition. ;-)

    1093 - Agreed, based on vehicles actually used in the UK.

    1094:

    Note: Had some problems & was semi-offline for a couple of days - could read, but not post. So I'm catching up a bit. I know some of the topics have moved on, but I'm still going to get my 2 cents worth in.

    Paul @ 903: American towns in the 70s didn't build bypasses, so now every town in America has a town centre with lots of traffic that is just trying to get through as fast as possible while being frustrated by the number of red lights. This makes it an unfriendly space for people on foot, so people avoid shopping there, and all the business migrates to out-of-town big-box stores and malls. Business tax income for the city goes down, they have to compensate by cutting services and hiking residential property taxes, so people move out of the town, and the whole thing falls apart.

    whitroth @ 974: Not entirely true.

    The US did start building bypasses/aka ring roads, by the late eighties. However, they were only partly for getting around heavy-traffic cities; the other part was that developers wanted them, madly, because suburban sprawl. 360, an outer loop around Austin, TX, we called "developers' loop by '88.

    In the US, of course, we have developers building malls, driving small businesses out of business, and rebuilding/"urban renewal", which took away lower-cost store fronts. One ultimate example of that is downtown Austin, TX, which other than Sixth St, the club scene has nothing except historical buildings open on evenings or weekends. Many bus lines - at least in the mid-nineties - stopped going downtown, because there was no reason to on weekends.

    I think y'all are also missing the experience small U.S. towns had with bypasses back in the 50s & 60s with the building of the Interstate highways. Particularly look at where I-40 replaced Route 66 and how many of those small towns along the way were hollowed out. Towns & cities that were large enough to have political clout regarding where the roads would be built did everything they could to prevent that happening to them.

    OTOH, Raleigh's "ring road" - the Beltline - began construction in the 1950s and was completed some time in the late 1970s ... by which time it was too little too late and THEY began planning for an outer ring road which began construction in the 1990s 1 (and continues under construction at this time, estimated completion date some time in 2033)

    I still prefer the old designations that had the them marked Inner Inner Loop (clockwise lanes), Outer Inner Loop (anti-clockwise lanes), Inner Outer Loop (clockwise again) and Outer Outer Loop (anti-clockwise again). If you say it real fast people's heads just explode.

    SEE ALSO: Durham, NC Downtown Expressway

    1 The first 3 mile stretch east from I-40 to U.S. 70 opened in January of 1997

    1095:

    Standard container sizes are measured in TEUs -- twenty foot units. Most containers, however, are twice that length.

    1096:

    Charlie @ 1083
    Brilliant idea, nothing to stop it working .. other than the tory party's corrupt politics shitting on the railways at every opportunity.
    See also REDUCING air taxes inside the UK, etc.

    EC @ 1089
    That has quite obviously, been deliberately blocked for (corrupt/tory) road freight interests (again), of course.

    1097:

    Underground coal gasification is due for a comeback -- basically set fire to underground coal strata, limit the amount of oxygen that gets down there and extract the resulting carbon monoxide gas for use as a combustible fuel aboveground. It's gas so it's like renewables and Green and stuff (and may even be eligible for subsidies), it's a lot easier to pipe the gas to the destination generator plants across the country and all the pollution happens safely underground where it doesn't affect the environment above. Yeah right. Before anyone says "Centralia!" well sometimes it doesn't work the way you want it to but it's worth a try, isn't it?

    Sure, let's do it. Probably it beats using coal as the moderator in a nuclear reactor. What could possibly go wrong?

    And here I thought you were going to suggest old coal mines for bunkers against climate change or an asteroid strike. Silly me.

    1098:

    And, if you are thinking about molten sodium tanks 10 km on a side

    You're arguing in bad faith. I never mentioned sodium. As you well know.

    You're worse than the seagull. At least she reads the posts she's replying to, even if the responses are garbled. You either read what you want to see to reinforce how clever you are by picking up glaring errors (that you've made up and aren't really there) or you genuinely have the reading comprehension skills of a 3 year old combined with arrogance that holds near mortals in awe.

    I can't decide which.

    1099:

    "Would an asteroid strike trigger an ice age?" Shall we dig up the five million studies, suggesting a full-scale nuclear war would do that?

    Umm, not quite. A nuclear winter isn't an ice age, nor will it necessarily start an ice age.

    My understanding (which is almost certainly incomplete or just wrong) is that ice ages have three triggers: the conformation of the continents (in our case, Antarctica isolated and cut off by the southern ocean, so that equatorial currents can't divert south and carry heat to it), low atmospheric CO2 levels, and a triggering event, such as a year-without-a-summer volcanic eruption. If [CO2] was low enough, then yes, a nuclear war would trigger the next ice age. Whether that was possible even in the 1960s is one of those fugly questions I can't answer. I'm pretty sure our CO2 levels are high enough now that it's not possible, and it almost certainly won't be possible after 2030 or so.

    Nuclear War, as I understand it, is actually a tiny release of energy compared with an asteroid strike. However, it's a highly targeted release of energy, which is why it's so utterly devastating. It's the difference between getting knocked off the beach by a rogue wave (getting hit by several tons of water moving a few miles per hour, which is a lot of energy) and someone stabbing you with a knife (a tiny amount of energy that might kill you if it cuts an artery or stops your heart). I'm not making light of nuclear winter, but a nuclear war won't cause the massive tsunamis, nor will it loft anything like the debris an asteroid will. Instead, it's designed to destroy cities and infrastructure. That probably matters.

    A nuclear war will end climate change, but only if we have it in the next few years. After that, even ending civilization won't get all the CO2 out of the air. After the nuclear winter goes away, the climate will warm back up again for awhile, as the remaining CO2 goes out into oceans and sediments.

    The same thing happens on a much worse scale with an asteroid strike. If the strike happens during a high CO2 time (like the late Cretaceous) it won't cause an ice age, because the continents are in a configuration that moves warm water poleward, and there's way too much CO2 in the air. It will cause a horribly destructive winter, but that's a "temporary" effect on the scale of years to decades, not millennia.

    The additional kicker with an asteroid strike in our era is what might happen with oceanic phytoplankton, and this is where it gets technical (and probably where I'm gravely in error, to be honest). I think of it in terms of the Redfield ratios, which are the ratios of nutrients (C:H:O:P:K:N:S:Ca:Fe:Mg:Mo:Mn:Cu:Zn:B:Ni:Cl etc) that permit optimal algal growth. The point of these ratios is dumping a huge amount of CO2 into the ocean won't grow more algae if the ratios are off for any of the other nutrients, notably iron (Fe). Growth is limited, not just by whatever's in short supply (Leibig's Law of the Minimum) but by how far from the ideal ratio available nutrients are, because one can't substitute for another.

    What I'm hypothesizing with an asteroid strike is that a lot of other junk gets dumpws into the ocean as mineral dust and ash. Once it dissolves, it brings surface waters considerably closer to the Redfield ratios, because what's normally missing are the mineral nutrients, like iron. That, in turn, means a lot of algae will grow, sucking CO2 out of the air. This will make bottom waters temporarily anoxic, but since the global thermohaline circulation is still running due to ice at the poles, these waters will be reoxygenated in time, so we probably don't get a Canfield Ocean.

    If I'm right, the nutrient dump from dust runoff, and tsunami debris takes a bunch of CO2 out of the air. It might even take enough CO2 out of the air to put the Earth in the trigger range for an ice age. During this trigger time (which, from the evidence, can last thousands of years), a large and/or high sulfur volcanic eruption might, by causing a "year without a summer," tip the Earth into an ice age for millennia.

    Am I right? Probably not, because I'm not working out the numbers in the phytoplankton step, just BSing it. But that's my speculative mechanism.

    1100:

    Yeah, that confuses me too. But if you read carefully, I said compensation is unlikely and getting less likely, then Charlie picked out that exact fragment of my post to say "YOU ARE WRONG" to, then doubled down when I questioned him on it.

    1101:

    "I've been along (since we went in by adits) both of them."

    So have I :)

    Still wouldn't want to be inside there in an earthquake. The kind of people who poke around in dodgy bits of old underground workings for fun have apparently found a few places where they reckon there's probably a huge mass of water on the other side of not all that much, and there's a lot more inaccessible/unknown stuff, including interconnections between nominally separate workings. If there's enough disturbance to crack the bottom of one of those puddles and it happens to find a way down to where you are you'll probably get a bit damp.

    1102:

    Watch it EC. Asking gasdive to consider realistic values or structural plausibility is "bad faith debating" by his definition. ;-)

    I've explained what bad faith is.

    EC demonstrates it when he argues against things I haven't said. In this case he argues against a tank of liquid sodium metal when I said a pile of shoebox size sealed steel boxes filled with anhydrous salt. Completely different things. As he well knows, or should if he has kindergarten level reading. Since I think he probably can read beyond kindergarten level, I'm left with him just being an arse.

    You demonstrate it when you say you'll accept certain completed projects as proof that I actually know what I'm taking about, then ignore it when I provide the proof. You also display it when you make snide asides, and when you scramble simple maths and pretend not to understand. For example when I say 1 watt of solar produces 900 Wh per year in Edinburgh (and provide a link in case you don't understand or doubt). You then create a new branch of mathematics with the intent to confuse a casual reader into thinking I've made an error. The concept that 1 W makes 900 Wh per year, so 1 MW makes 900 MWh per year is so simple that I just don't believe you were confused by it. You just acted in bad faith.

    And now you're angry that someone is calling you on your bad behavior. You want to behave like a complete arse and then pretend that you're shocked by the behaviour of the person you're bullying. "look how upset and irrational gasdive is everyone"

    1103:

    Coal Bed Methane extraction is bad enough. Drill well into coal bed, separate methane from water and discharge mineral-laden water onto arid landscape. What could wrong?

    1104:

    Meantime, the closest you've come to telling us how to make a moulten salt tank 10km alone the sides is quibbling about which salt to use, and accusing anyone who even asks the question of "arguing in bad faith".

    1105:

    In Edinburgh, each watt of solar produces 900Wh power year.
    I'm not even clear what the units you're using here are. 900Wh means 900 watts for one hour.

    This is a very concise demonstration of one of the problems here. Someone who understands the technology makes a minor point using standard engineering terms, one of the people insistent that the technology can't possibly work says "I have no idea what that means but you are obviously wrong".

    FWIW Watt-hours are a common way to translate joules into a unit that the average person can understand. Electricity is commonly sold that way, for example. Because "one kilowatt hour means a one kilowatt heater running for one hour, or a 10 watt light running for 100 hours, or a 5kW stove running for 1/5th of an hour" is in practice something that people find easier to deal with than "one joule is enough energy to run a 1 watt light for one second, and 3.6Mj will run a 1kW heater for one hour". There are lots of derived units that work similarly, from the British Thermal Unit to horsepower to acre-feet (enough water to inundate one acre, one foot deep... much more intuitive than 1.2Ml).

    I freely admit that I know relatively little about nuclear power plants, but sadly those who favour them are singularly unable to even link to evidence that what they're talking about is feasible (or even possible). Meanwhile the pro-survival faction have repeatedly explained and linked to examples of their proposed solutions actually working.

    Someone who clearly understands neither engineering nor finance is currently well into the design stages of a multi-gigawatt solar farm with batteries and an HVDC link to sell the resulting electricity to Singapore. That... does not fit well with the claim that solar power is useless because it can't produce enough energy to be useful, that energy can't be stored, and it definitely can't be shipped anywhere that it might be useful.

    1106:

    Don't forget that they have a target recovery fraction... it's explicit that they intend to release large amounts of methane (and often carbon monoxide) into the atmosphere.

    That's less "what could go wrong" and more "how bad is this design".

    1107:

    Bellinghman @ 905:

    there's no excuse for not being able to coordinate schedules better so that neither passenger trains nor freight trains have to wait on the other.

    It's (mostly) a single track railway. If you've got trains going in both directions, one at least is going to have to pull over into a passing loop to let the other one past. The best that scheduling can do for that is to make sure the about-to-be-stationary train has just finished getting into the passing loop when the non-stop train arrives from the other direction.

    How many one lane highways are there? When a road doesn't have sufficient capacity for the traffic, they widen the highway. The rails should be owned & operated by the government, the same as the roads and the "airways". In fact, coordinating schedules for using the rails should be done by an agency similar to Air Traffic Control. The railroad operating companies should be free to use the rails on the same basis the airlines are free to use the airways or the trucking companies are free to use the highways.

    And the governments should have a plan for bringing the rails up to a minimum (double tracked) standard the same way the government brought roads (and airways) up to minimum.

    1108:

    paws4thot @ 917: 880 - UK Motorail used special "car transporter wagons" for cars, and a mix of sleeper, seater and dining coaches. The posts you reference covered the early days of rail, up to maybe 1850.

    Ok, I was going by a photo of "Motorail" someone linked to that showed more or less "modern" cars (looked like 1960 or later to me - anyway, definitely post-WW2) loaded onto a standard flatbed rail car.

    A "mix of sleeper, seater and dining coaches and car transporter wagons is pretty much what I'm looking for. The distances involved in implementing something like Motorail in the U.S. would require some way for riders to safely get out of their automobiles occasionally to use the "facilities".

    1109:

    I think what's missing is what happens with all the energy the ejecta dumps into the upper atmosphere. There's certainly a radiative heat burst, but I'm not sure about whether there's also a burst of hard radiation. Some of the heat and radiation would radiate out to space, but a lot will hit the surface. The debris has lost a lot of energy but is still incandescent when it falls. My working metaphor is to think of the plume as a pyroclastic event, just on a scale that makes volcanic activity looks tiny. I think the high energy stuff in the upper atmosphere means the ozone layer is gone too, so there's also a problem with solar radiation on the surface until that's re-established. I've no idea what natural process contributes to the ozone layer and how long that might be disrupted itself.

    My assumption is that the ash reaching the (land) surface is still hot enough to fuse with itself, leading to the formation of a kind of tuff across the area it coats, and while I haven't attempted to calculate relative volumes of material I am making a working assumption the depth is significant. Maybe not enough to form ignimbrite, but certainly in the ballpark of the layer of volcanic ash from Vesuvius over Pompeii. I'm not sure whether the heat makes a difference with material reaching the surface of the oceans, whether the speed of descent means that pyroclast forms on the surface and sinks as rock rather than as dust...

    1110:

    You may wish to read the prescient scientific paper, "On the Feasibility of Coal-Fired Power Stations" by the eminent scientist, Otto Frisch back in 1955.

    https://www.mpoweruk.com/coal.htm

    Note the reference (from the point of view of the year 4955) to the uses prehistoric man made of this black carbonaceous mineral -- "probably used it for jewels and to blacken their faces at religious ceremonies." Oddly enough this "paper" was written in 1955, well before the seminal archaeo-spoof book, Motel of the Mysteries, was written.

    As for the comet-strike scenario being discussed, comets are large mushy lumps of slush and it's very unlikely a cometary strike on the planet surface will be as neat and tidy as is usually depicted in film and TV. By the time Earth's gravity has had its wicked way it's more likely to be spread out over time and space like the Shoemaker-Levy comet impact with Jupiter back in 1994. Not so much a Sudden Impact, more of a Hard Rain Gonna Fall over a period of hours.

    A solid-ish asteroid of sufficient size and velocity probably has enough cohesion to make it deep into the atmosphere and from thence into the biosphere, lithosphere and magmasphere to do some serious localised damage with only (only!) fallout from the impact site spreading around the world.

    A possible case that rarely if ever gets considered is the glancing non-impactor -- meteors have been tracked and observed via radar hitting the upper atmosphere at a very shallow angle and bouncing off. A really big non-impactor in that sort of a trajectory could do a lot of localised damage to the land and sea area underneath its track without causing a near-extinction event globally. The super-tsunami from the atmospheric shockwave if it hits the stratosphere over the Pacific would probably take out most of the US west coast as well as finally ending Australian coal exports for good, so not all downsides. The native Australians could sell beach properties around Urulu afterwards.

    1111:

    Balls. The reason that I got it wrong is that your posts are as much blither and blather as anything that comes out of government, and I typed the wrong word (or omitted the chloride, I don't remember). Yes, I make mistakes.

    I asked for some hard figures, which you have singularly failed to provide. I simply do not know what you are proposing, let alone whether you have a solid basis for what you say. And, since you say there are completed projects, why not give hard figures for one of over 1km^2? That's only 1% of what you say is easy.

    1112:

    Charlie Stross @ 931:

    has to provide electricity and heating for as many as four residences, fifteen people and (usually) a commercial shop on the ground floor.

    In my case, that would be for six residencies and four commercial properties on the ground floor and basement levels.

    The last flat I lived in had no ground floor businesses ... but 12 apartments under the one rooftop.

    Still, if UNESCO would permit it and it could be done to ALL of the rooftops in the area it could provide SOME additional energy, maybe enough to power emergency lights in the common areas?

    1113:

    Elderly Cynic @ 932: You are right that I have said in the past that we need to abandon capitalism, but that was in the context of a complete social revolution, and where we ideally would be. I also said that I have no idea of how to get there from here.

    The currently feasible approaches all involve socialism / capitalism hybrids - and, yes, I agree with Pigeon and others that some aspects of current capitalism need to be shut down completely.

    I agree there are elements of modern finance capitalism that need to be done away with (along with the finance capitalists), but even the Soviet Union wasn't able to do away with capitalism. The best they were able to do was eliminate some of the capitalists and transfer control of capital assets to party bureaucrats.

    1114:

    Nojay @ 946: [1] The lack of toilets on board Federation starships in Star Trek has been explained by the pinpoint use of transporter technology.

    Which led to a very messy arms race developing between the Federation, Klingons & Romulans in the area of transporter technology TARGETING.

    1115:

    It often helps to distinguish capitalism from the use of money, and the payment of interest, dividends and so on. Those things go back before capitalism, and are even mentioned in early writings. So unless people are convinced that ancient Rome was capitalist, some form of differentiation is necessary.

    Wikipedia, for example, says this: Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership and control of the means of production and their operation for profit

    The Soviet Union went much further away from that than the USA went away from socialism, for example. The USA government always owned much more of the USA than private business owned in the USSR.

    1116:

    Re sales of beachfront property... but the Former Guy hasn't bought property in Nevada yet, so Lex Luthor of Superman I won't get to sell beachfront property there.

    1117:

    Charlie Stross @ 1058:

    I think we can safely call the post-impact future the "Tunnels and Trolls" future of humanity.

    I'm reasonably optimistic that the human species (and its radiative descendants) will survive unless we get very unlucky. But that's an aggregate: individually I think we'd be looking at a 90-99.9% die-off. Our current global technological civilization won't survive: a very good result might be a late-19th century technological equivalent with some legacy of culture and records, a couple of centuries after the event.

    Which, presuming there WILL be some future catastrophe of "dinosaur killer" magnitude that cannot be averted, what might be the best way to store information about technology so that it becomes accessible to the survivors sooner rather than later? Is there anything we can do NOW to shorten the period during which civilization would be lost after such an event?

    1118:

    Yes, I make mistakes.

    The same mistake. Over and over, for at least 6 years now. Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.

    You're just being a dick and you don't like it when it's pointed out.

    I asked for some hard figures, which you have singularly failed to provide.

    Just fuck off. I've provided latent heat of fusion, heat capacity, melting points for various salts, round trip efficiency numbers, links to completed molten salt storage plants, links to feasibility studies, for the cable interconnector side of things, cable costs, typical losses per km, completed projects, carrying capacities, construction times both of projects and cable manufacturing plants, every one with references and links to completed cables that verify real world performance. For panel performance, links and numbers for Scotland and other places within cable range, costs to build panel factories, with links to complete factories including startup and running cost, workforce requirements, annual output of completed panels.

    No one is buying your Bullshit.

    1119:

    Yeah, I avoided the rain of fire part of the Chicxulub scenario. While I don't think it's entirely wrong, the two things that are missing IMO are: a) the geologic evidence for it, and b) the mechanism by which so many life forms (particularly birds) escaped the devastation.

    With regards to a) we've got the global enriched-iridium layer, but we don't have the fused ashes of hellfire layer around it. I'm still trying to get my head around how a rain of molten rock could leave so little evidence, but there's iridium-enriched dust and tektites nonetheless. Something's missing here.

    With regards to b) bird pretty obviously survived around Australia and Antarctic, possibly southernmost South America. The problem with the hellfire scenario is that it has so much energy it had to be global. That means no uncooked birdies, even on the far side of the globe. Yet we have birds, so something is wrong with the scenario.

    To me, the evidence strongly suggests that the scenario you mentioned releases way too much energy. I don't know whether the energy release modeled is too high, whether the energy went somewhere else, or whether I just don't understand it, but I'm not able to square the survival I do know about with that scenario.

    1120:

    Robert Prior @ 1062:

    Mao's regime built a lot of deep underground tunnels to protect the Chinese people from nuclear war, would these work?

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/etherflyer/3428137036/

    I find it interesting that the signage to emergency facilities is kept current (or was 15 years ago when I was in Beijing). Also interesting that they put English on the signs.

    I think that's almost certainly earthquake preparedness. China has a lot of earthquakes & lots of tourists. English has become sort of the international language. Even when people can't speak, read or write each other's languages they can communicate using English.

    Earthquakes with a magnitude 4.5 and over (1900–2015). The yellow star is the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

    1121:

    "the UK and EU are slowly moving to ETCS"

    We are not going to see ETCS (we're supposed to call it ERTMS these days) supporting moving block in the foreseeable future, certainly not in the UK. It's been a wishlist feature since before the system had even four letters in its name, but the first time they had a serious look at implementing it they had kittens and ran away, and ever since then it's been one of those things that everyone agrees would be lovely to have and would magic massive capacity out of nowhere at a stroke, but you'd need both an unanticipatable supply of money and an unfeasibly long period of time with no other large-scale things to bother about before it could ever happen.

    (Note: Having ERTMS is not the same as having moving block because ERTMS is like one of those software packages that come in Monkey, Home, Business, Enterprise etc. versions with the swankier names having more features. Moving block is an Enterprise Pro feature that's not even in beta yet.)

    The provision of track, pointwork and signalling has been so efficiently pared back over the years to be just enough to run no more trains than they happened to want to at the time that it is running into "no more paths available" limits in all locations from greatest to least, and putting back what has been lost is going to need both rather a long time and the actual determination to do it, so to make the best use available of what we do have we need to combine trains to move as much in each path as possible, and trying to run lots of little ones only reduces the overall provision.

    That proposal attempts to create an equivalent workaround by means of moving block and non-physical couplings; I don't see why it shouldn't work, indeed some aspects of it are pretty similar to things I already think would be a good idea. Trouble is they're the kind of good idea that is great when you've got a free hand, but a complete pain in the arse to patch into an established railway with its own deeply embedded different ideas that needs not only a major hardware upgrade to give the platform the basic functionality required, but also big chunks of the OS rewritten to support making the necessary kind of use of that functionality.

    Operating practices on US railroads are in many ways very different from over here, and have been right from the start. I dare say it might stand a better chance of fitting in under those conditions.

    1122:

    I think that's almost certainly earthquake preparedness. China has a lot of earthquakes & lots of tourists. English has become sort of the international language. Even when people can't speak, read or write each other's languages they can communicate using English.

    Most big cities in Japan have a lot of English-language signage. When I visited Niigata though, a port city on the north-east coast that carries out a lot of trade with Korea and Russia I noticed the emergency evacuation signs (see the Portal game for the iconography) were labelled in Japanese, English, Korean and Russian.

    1123:

    paws4thot @ 1073: 1070 - 1965 film you mean.

    Gone with Wind was the 1939 film adaptation of the Margaret Mitchell novel. Went With The Wind is a 1976 comedy sketch from the Carol Burnett Show parodying the film which had recently been shown on television for the first time that year (on HBO in June and in November on NBC).

    Margaret Mitchell's first husband Berrien ("Red") Kinnard Upshaw was the prototype for the scoundrel Rhett Butler. He died a pauper in Galveston, TX in 1949. His family was in Raleigh, NC and his brother brought him here to be buried in the historic Oakwood Cemetery, about half a mile from my house.

    1124:

    I don't see where you're supposed to put the coal in. It looks like an internal combustion engine with a feed connection for gaseous fuel. I suppose you could run it off coal gas you brew yourself but in that case there's a big oven thing needs to go along with it.

    It has to be said that a similar kind of device could actually save me money. Methane is somewhere around 4-5x cheaper than electricity per kWh at the meter, or it was the last time I looked, so if I can tweak some old car engine to run off methane and get 30% or so efficiency then I begin to end up paying less for the methane than I would for the electricity. If I was actually burning methane as a heat source in any case, it would certainly make sense to do it in an engine and take the heat I needed from the coolant/exhaust instead.

    IIRC there's even some "alternative generation" subsidy that I could claim and sell the electricity back to the grid and be quids in. There are a bunch of subsidy categories with solar panels getting the most and right at the other end a category for things like internal combustion engines running off "alternative fuels". It's not very much, but it either does mean or is close to meaning with a not unfeasible extra efficiency tweak that I could just leave the thing running constantly on its most efficient throttle setting, dumping the waste heat, and use it as a money generator.

    1125:

    David L @ 1084: At the end of the day, it now makes the entire southern position during the ACW look stupid.

    Easy to do because the "southern position" during the American Civil War WAS stupid.

    But I am a southerner, so I can get away with pointing that out.

    1126:

    This actually belongs in the previous thread....

    Charlie - I just finished Quantum of Nightmares (and boy, is it ever). One silly question: now that that's all over, and Eve is replacing the Council on Skara... can she have them approve an update to the laws, which would get her out of some of her grief?

    1127:

    I don't see where you're supposed to put the coal in. It looks like an internal combustion engine with a feed connection for gaseous fuel. I suppose you could run it off coal gas you brew yourself but in that case there's a big oven thing needs to go along with it.

    Quite right, you need to add a coal gasifier. If you put "coal gasifier" on the search bar of that website, you'll see plenty in all sorts of sizes. Wouldn't hurt to add a coal pelletiser too.

    1128:

    "when I said a pile of shoebox size sealed steel boxes filled with anhydrous salt."

    I can't actually find where you said that, but what do you intend to do with it?

    Measurements from an actual shoebox I happen to have in front of me at the moment: 28.5x15.5x10.5cm, so 0.0464m3. Assuming "salt" = "sodium chloride" that's almost exactly 10kg, or 172.2mol.

    M.pt. for NaCl = 1074K, b.pt = 1738K, average heat capacity over the range between these two points = 67.55J(mol.K), using values from http://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C7647145&Mask=2#Thermo-Condensed

    So changing the temperature of 10kg of NaCl between those two limits means transferring 7725kJ of heat. 772.5kJ/kg or 356kJ/litre, 356MJ/m3. (Of course you can't actually use all that range if it's in a pile of wee steel boxes; you'd either need boxes big enough that you could let the outsides solidify and act as primary insulation without worrying about the losses too much, or something more refractory than steel to make them with.)

    "energy storage for 12 months, not 6, for all UK energy needs not just electricity"

    Looking at http://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1021836/Energy_Consumption_in_the_UK_2021.pdf that is apparently 121 "millions of tonnes of oil equivalent" (fucksake) but would probably be more like 140 if the plague hadn't clobbered transport, so call it 140. Apparently the conversion factor for that stupid unit is a highly suspicious 1 toe = 4.2e10J, so how useful that figure is depends on how much it was worked out by counting real joules and how much counting barrels went on, but taking it as read, it comes out to 5.88e18J.

    5.88e18J at 356e6J/m3 gives 1.65e10m3 NaCl, which is a cube 2.5km on each side. Or a square flat block 10km on each side and 160m high, if you prefer.

    I've completely ignored all losses, inefficiencies and so on, and not allowed any margin for error or capacity increase. Since you're limited to a heat engine for getting the energy back out again and converting it for transmission, you'll get typical thermal-power-plant efficiency on that step, and you'll lose more than half of it. You'll be lucky to get away with less than five of these things (33% overall storage/unstorage efficiency and another two for luck), and I'm not sure how many people are going to be too happy about sharing a neighbourhood with a gigantic tank of lava bigger than most cities.

    If "900Wh power year" means 900Wh per year, ie. 3240kJ total output from Jan 1st to Dec 31st, then that corresponds to about 0.1W overall average. This is pretty much the usual rule of thumb that the average output is about 10% of what it says on the sticker, but omits the usual warning that on average also half the time you get no output at all and the 10% bit only applies to when it's daylight.

    Ignoring that factor of 2 error then to provide the 5.88e18J/year input to one of these facilities with solar power requires 1.8e9 1kW solar panels, or at 1.5m2 per panel, 2722km2 of panels, ie. a square 52km on a side. It's also about 30 panels for every person in the UK, of any age, so it's clearly several times what can ever be accommodated on rooftops.

    1129:

    Yhea, heat storage is not free. Much cheaper than batteries, but not actually free.

    My read on what Gates is doing is that he is aiming to kill natural gas.

    If you look at the investment decisions happening, and what is in the planning stages right now, what "The Money" think is going to happen in energy in most places is a supply which consists of intermittent power mixed with natural gas, with natural gas being at least fifty percent of actual output. Hence NS2, all the natural gas terminals and all the fracking investments.

    This plays very poorly with most other forms of generation, because spikes in intermittent power drives prices to nil, then drop off to require full throttle at much higher prices.

    The natrium fast reactor is intended to be able to shove NG peakers out of this system without picking a fight with the intermittent producers. It will also, if it works, make money hand over fist, because it gets to sell most of its power at peaker rates, which are much higher.

    The French meanwhile, if I read the grid operator report right, seem to have decided that the way to get full utilization of periods where their nuclear + wind capacity exceeds current demand is to dump the power into electrolytic facilities and sell the hydrogen to industry.

    Note, this is not intended as storage - burning it again for power is an option, but only planned for extreme rarity peaks of demand, since the efficiency is terrible.

    The point is to wean more of the economy off fossil fuels.

    1130:

    Averages vs. local minima/maxima?

    1131:

    Averages vs. local minima/maxima?

    Could be. I'd guess the hellfire model is overly simplistic, and if it's ever made three-dimensional on model of a rotating planet, things will be different. Perhaps the central "sploosh" right after impact sent a bunch of stuff into orbit or beyond?

    But weirdness abounds, like high metabolism flying birds surviving where bigger dinosaurs did not. Probably that's something about being able to fly between highly unpredictable food sources or smaller critters keeping populations alive on smaller resource bases, but I suspect more that it's just lost information, stuff that's unknowable because the evidence eroded away millions of years ago.

    1132:

    I gave a general idea, you're demanding detailed specifics.

    That's not quite where I was going, but I appreciate the effort. Perhaps the detailed specifics will close the loopholes in some Red Queen style coevolutionary race between the lawful good rulemakers and the chaotic evil business creeps.

    That might be the best we can do. However, it's probably worth contemplating whether some other approach might work better without getting the lawyers to embroider the red tape at ever higher fractal dimensions (if that doesn't trash the metaphor too badly).

    1133:

    Excellent post. Thankyou.

    "when I said a pile of shoebox size sealed steel boxes filled with anhydrous salt."

    I can't actually find where you said that, but what do you intend to do with it?

    Make many big piles of blocks surrounded by insulation. In response to the claims that you could never get through a winter with storage without giving up all the land to hydro or similar, I said the limiting case was about a year's worth of energy could fit in a square 10 km on a side. I did say that though it wouldn't actually be built that way, (for a host of reasons) and instead would be lots of smaller stores, varying from fitting in the cupboard under the stairs, (to ensure heat through a mid winter blackout and allow heating energy to be bought at the cheapest time of day) through units of shipping container size that could heat a hospital or factory (and be shipped around if required which makes it possible to deliver waste heat to places remote from the source) through to town size district heating systems about the size of gas retorts, maybe using old gas retort sites. Right up to big ones replacing the boiler house and coal yards in existing coal fired plants.

    Measurements from an actual shoebox I happen to have in front of me at the moment: 28.5x15.5x10.5cm, so 0.0464m3. Assuming "salt" = "sodium chloride" that's almost exactly 10kg, or 172.2mol.

    Yes. Small enough that you could carry them up to Paws' 3rd floor walk up and put them in the insulated storage unit that's in his cupboard under the stairs. Long duration ones would probably be bigger, and would need internal heat conductors once they get over a certain size.

    M.pt. for NaCl = 1074K, b.pt = 1738K, average heat capacity over the range between these two points = 67.55J(mol.K), using values from http://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C7647145&Mask=2#Thermo-Condensed

    I can't make head nor tail of that page today as I'm quite unwell. I used [nacl data page on wikipedia] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_chloride_(data_page)) Wikipedia conveniently gives kJ/g which is a lot easier. 0.52 kJ/g for the phase change from liquid to solid or back. So that's 520 kJ/kg which is about 80% of the number you had, but much cooler so the boxes won't melt. Then there's 400 degrees of temperature change from 800 down to 400 but that's not much. From memory it's a couple of hundred kJ/kg, bringing my number to about the same as yours. Of course changing the salt to a cooler one changes that a bit.

    Numbers seem similar, so I think you're right, but as I said above, I used a different range, which takes advantage of phase change from liquid to solid and is high enough to run critical steam in the turbines.

    So changing the temperature of 10kg of NaCl between those two limits means transferring 7725kJ of heat. 772.5kJ/kg or 356kJ/litre, 356MJ/m3. (Of course you can't actually use all that range if it's in a pile of wee steel boxes; you'd either need boxes big enough that you could let the outsides solidify and act as primary insulation without worrying about the losses too much, or something more refractory than steel to make them with.)

    Yeah, needs to be cooler, and the bricks are dumb bricks. All the heating and energy extraction gear is external to the bricks. So an internal insulation layer isn't needed or wanted.

    "energy storage for 12 months, not 6, for all UK energy needs not just electricity"

    Looking at http://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachmentdata/file/1021836/EnergyConsumptionintheUK2021.pdf that is apparently 121 "millions of tonnes of oil equivalent" (fucksake) but would probably be more like 140 if the plague hadn't clobbered transport, so call it 140. Apparently the conversion factor for that stupid unit is a highly suspicious 1 toe = 4.2e10J, so how useful that figure is depends on how much it was worked out by counting real joules and how much counting barrels went on, but taking it as read, it comes out to 5.88e18J.

    That sounds about right. I was using figures that we dug up from somewhere 6 years ago, but the number we agreed on at the time as a target was 1e18J. Your number of 6e18J is of the same order and sounds trustworthy. Oh, and I hate MTOE as a unit too.

    5.88e18J at 356e6J/m3 gives 1.65e10m3 NaCl, which is a cube 2.5km on each side. Or a square flat block 10km on each side and 160m high, if you prefer.

    Looks like you've verified my thinking. I had a smaller energy target, and came up with a smaller volume. I came up with a square flat block of the same size in area, but 100m high. I included losses, which you haven't, which is why your block is only 60% larger despite 6 times the energy target. Later after some thought we decided NaCl wasn't a good match as it was too hot for existing power plants that like 550C, but it didn't materially change anything. I forget which salt was right, but it's already in use for this purpose.

    I've completely ignored all losses, inefficiencies and so on, and not allowed any margin for error or capacity increase. Since you're limited to a heat engine for getting the energy back out again and converting it for transmission, you'll get typical thermal-power-plant efficiency on that step, and you'll lose more than half of it. You'll be lucky to get away with less than five of these things (33% overall storage/unstorage efficiency and another two for luck), and I'm not sure how many people are going to be too happy about sharing a neighbourhood with a gigantic tank of lava bigger than most cities.

    That mirrors my thinking.

    If "900Wh power year" means 900Wh per year,

    Yes, auto incorrect changed "per" to "power" and I didn't catch it. Seems like the meaning was clear though as you got it. I also provided a link which explained the numbers and where they came from.

    ie. 3240kJ total output from Jan 1st to Dec 31st, then that corresponds to about 0.1W overall average. This is pretty much the usual rule of thumb that the average output is about 10% of what it says on the sticker, but omits the usual warning that on average also half the time you get no output at all and the 10% bit only applies to when it's daylight.

    No, it includes those. That's the expected output per year at least according to the website I linked to. We're talking about nameplate Watts, rather than insolation Watts. The 10% figure you're thinking of (which is some decades out of date) refers to the panel or system efficency compared to insolation.

    Ignoring that factor of 2 error then to provide the 5.88e18J/year input to one of these facilities with solar power requires 1.8e9 1kW solar panels, or at 1.5m2 per panel, 2722km2 of panels, ie. a square 52km on a side. It's also about 30 panels for every person in the UK, of any age, so it's clearly several times what can ever be accommodated on rooftops.

    I haven't checked your figures, but 30 panels per person sounds short. Probably about 100. There aren't many 1 kW panels and 1.5 sqm of panel doesn't have a nameplate anywhere near 1 kW. I think you'd need at least double that area to power the UK. Maybe 4 times, I'd have to get out the pencil and paper, but I had my booster yesterday and I'm sore, dizzy and shivering, so I wouldn't trust my own work today. It's really easy to mess up unit conversions. Certainly as you say, that's not going to fit on rooftops alone, which is why I've never said it would. And indeed it's better all round to put the panels where there's sun, and run a cable to the load. However the "we can't trust Johnny Foreigner" seems to put the kibosh on that, at least according to the commentariat. The logic of that slightly escapes me as the UK currently depends entirely on imported fossil fuel and even food of all things (about half of the food consumed in the UK is imported). Maybe they're right though. Given the UK history of stealing everything, including things that are nailed down, Johnny might not be too keen on getting screwed over again.

    In context, the Edinburgh figure was in response to the idea that Bill Gates is trying to save you with Sodium cooled SMRs that incorporate molten salt storage. It shows that even in the absolute worst case of putting the panels in Scotland, SMR is still 4 times more expensive (not to mention not actually existing).

    1134:

    whitroth
    Just read the blurb on your novel. Were you, perchance, influenced by the Larry Niven short: "One Face" ??

    1135:

    including things that are nailed down

    "Whatever is not nailed down is mine. What I can pry loose is not nailed down."

    I thought that was from Captain Pugwash, but when I googled there were all sorts of attributions, some very unlikely, Oscar Wilde. Quote Investigator attributes it to American rail tycoon Collis P. Huntington and I guess the linkage might be Ambrose Bierce (who apparently hated them both and expressed this loudly in print), not that he's associated with it in any way.

    1136:

    This is pretty much the usual rule of thumb that the average output is about 10% of what it says on the sticker,

    For solar that 10% figure or whichever one is used for solar PV represents the annual average production, day and night, summer and winter for optimally-positioned non-tracking panels. Germany gets about 12% for its grid-solar arrays as I recall, the southern UK might get 11% and Scotland perhaps 10%.

    A one-metre solar panel can produce, for a few seconds on the Equator at noon, about 250 to 260 watts. That's the output figure quoted on the packaging, of course just like a sports car's maximum performance (see also wind turbines). In Scotland a perfectly-oriented panel will produce an average of about 25 watts, less in winter, more in summer, nothing at night. That's a total of 219kWh per annum or about 35 quid's worth of electricity at the wall socket. What a savings!

    1137:

    One thing to bear in mind on bulk energy storage generally; the business case for anything like that right now is limited by the existence of gas fired power stations.

    It takes an hour or three for a gas station to spin up and start generating power, so if there is an unpredicted spike in demand you need something to fill that gap. During that time there is an excess of demand over supply, so the power you can provide is valuable. So you can charge the batteries, pump the water or whatever at standard rates, then hold the stored energy against the bat-signal from the grid controllers. When you get the signal you sell the stored energy back to the grid at a much higher price than you paid for it. Subtract out running expenses and you should be left with a profit.

    But your market opportunity is limited to that hour or three. Once the gas stations spin up they can sell power at the same rate you originally bought it, so you can't sell your stored power at a profit.

    This is why all the battery solutions you read about are sized to provide power for an hour or three. There is no engineering reason why they can't be built bigger, its down to the business reason.

    Three possible solutions I can see:

    • The government hikes the price of natural gas generation (taxes, surcharges, whatever) and promises to keep it that way. The increase is enough to make the cycle "wind/solar -> storage -> consumer" cheaper than "gas -> consumer". This creates a big incentive for storage capacities to go beyond the 1-3 hour gas window.

    • The government subsidises storage with the same objective.

    • The government nationalises the lot, recreates the CEGB, and tells them to do the same thing.

    Over the last few months a new ingredient has been added to this mix; we have an energy crisis. Natural gas has suddenly become very expensive and hard to get. I'm still not clear why this has happened. Is it Putin playing games with us (see 17 seconds in), or is it a collapse in someone's gas production, or just higher demand?

    If we had a competent government they would be exploiting this. "Never let a crisis go to waste". They can point at the urgent need to ensure our energy independence, or at least reduce our dependence on Johnny Foreigner. They should be saying that we need a massive scale-up in our renewables, especially offshore wind, and to implement longer-term electrical storage. So they should plan to keep gas prices high via taxes once the international price drops again, with the resulting money shunted to consumers via the benefit and tax systems so that they don't freeze to death in the Winter. That this also accelerates our decarbonisation can be sold as a side-benefit, even though it is the actual point. That way you get both the shire Tories on-side ("Can't trust Johnny Foreigner") and the moderate Left. Encourage lots of jobs building wind turbines in the Irish and North Seas and you also get an electoral boost in those northern marginal seats. What's not to like?

    Unfortunately right now we don't have any kind of effective government. The primary concern of the entire government is keeping Boris Johnson in post, and the primary concern of the opposition is unseating him. Nobody is thinking about energy policy.

    1138:

    1107 - And I quote again "Wh power year"
    I do know what a Watt hour is thank you very much. What I do not know is what a "power year" is, and how you relate one to watt hours. By extension of this principle I can say that, say "900 Watt years" is an average of 900Watts for a period of 1 year. But that just changes the problem with the original posting to what is an "hour power"?
    Note that this is specifically a reply to post 1107.

    1110 - Well, depending on period, after the brand was created, Motorail might have used special double-deck car wagons, or might have used standard rail flatbeds with bridges between wagons. Never the less it was not normal practice to carry passengers in their cars for several hours at a stretch.

    1113 - I agree. A shoe box full of molten metal salt is certainly doable. What needs to be demonstrated is that this is scalable to cubic kilometers, which is an entirely different problem in both strength of materials for the containment, and indeed convection currents forming in the metal salt.

    1130 - That sounds about right, and is the sort of detail I was actually wanting to see, along with some sort of proof of scalability (not from you).
    I won't supply the street address, but my neighbour and I have solar panels on the South facing side of both properties, about 12 panels each, or 40% of what is required per capita from your figures. The "over the road neighbours" have no panels on the street facing South sides of the 8 addresses I can see directly.

    1135 - Now guess why I turn "auto second guess you and get it wrong off". Oh and BTW I have never lived in a flat, 3rd floor or otherwise.
    Accepting that you were second guessed, perhaps you'd like to explain why you'd say "900Wh per year" rather than just "900Wyear"?

    1139 - The only UPS I've seen that can do more than 3 hours are backed up by diesel generators, and indeed are only used in mission or life critical environments like server farms, hospitals and safety assessment facilities.

    1139:

    and Scotland perhaps 10%.

    Scotland a perfectly-oriented panel will produce an average of about 25 watts, less in winter, more in summer, nothing at night. That's a total of 219kWh per annum

    Nice. Two unreferenced assertions that are self contradictory. There are 8760 hours in a year, so your initial unreferenced assertion is not far from the right number of 900 kWh. 8760 hours times 10% times 1 kW being 876 kWh, so not far from the actual figure.

    Then having realised that you've just put your foot in it by confirming I'm right, you produce a conflicting number pulled directly from your arse, 219 kWh. Fascinating specific, two hundred and nineteen.

    Certainly confident. Not "a bit over 200", not "about 220". Two hundred and nineteen. Ballsy. Particularly after someone has already linked a reference to the right number in this very thread.

    Who do you think you're impressing?

    1140:

    It's not just finance capitalism. In the UK (and, I believe, USA) extortion and fraud are legal if done by an organisation according to proper legal ritual. Take a simple example: the sanctity of contracts, including ones agreed when the signatory has effectively no option. The UK has a few, feeble restrictions on unfair contract terms, but they are almost completely ignored in practice, both because it is not illegal to include them and because enforcing them requires the victim to have enough money (and stress tolerance) to sue a large company and win. And there is no law against the company (or the whole industry cartel) then blackballing the winning victim.

    1141:

    Accepting that you were second guessed, perhaps you'd like to explain why you'd say "900Wh per year" rather than just "900Wyear"?

    I'm trying not to engage, but really...

    Because I'm not an idiot? Because I know what I'm talking about? Because I'm not using bullying to make up for my lack of subject knowledge? Because I meant 900 Wh per year (3240000 J supplied each year) not 900 Wyr (28,382,400,000 J with the time it's supplied not specified) Take your pick.

    You'll notice I don't comment on railway signaling protocols or WW2 tank armour. Because I know nothing about it. I've got enough self esteem to not start slagging off someone who has worked in the train industry for 2 decades. My need to appear right about subjects I don't know the first thing about isn't there. I can be confident as a person without telling someone who's implemented the largest train signalling system in the world that I know better. Has it ever occurred to you that your constant sniping, combined with a pretty constant stream of utterly stupid comments isn't doing you any favours?

    1142:

    Now consider efficiency. Heating and melting things using electricity is close to 100% efficient, but converting heat to electricity is NOT. You first have to work out how to keep the equipment cool, because there is no way that the entire construction will operate reliably at 800+ Celsius. Also, even if you can get close to the thermodynamic efficiency, one is talking about a gargantuan local heat source, which is likely to affect the weather for a large area around it.

    Without some kind of idea of exactly what is being proposed, one can't even make a guess at how those would be tackled.

    1143:

    The thing that is often omitted is that an oriented panel shades a huge area behind it, so those, er, optimistic figures are NOT the ones you need for multiple solar panels (even ones on adjacent houses). That is why the raw insolation figures (down to 0.8 MJ/diem in Edinburgh midwinter up to 22 MJ/diem in London midsummer) are the ones to use.

    1144:

    900 Watts is a quantity of electricity, delivered over an unspecified period. 900 Watthours specifies that this 900w is delivered over a period of 1 hour. Is it really a leap of logic rather than an extension of a system to talk about Wattyears as a quantity of electricity delivered over a year?
    Oh and BTW I have post school qualifications in physics, and have been employed in a research role by an Electricity company's research facility, and by a specialist E1/M1 company. Which tends to rather give the lie to your implied claim that you know more about industrial scale electrical systems than I do.

    1145:

    I am surprised that you think it's weird. When there is a famine, larger creatures die off much faster (and there are fewer of them, anyway), and predators die off faster, too. The latter would mean that birds didn't need to fly as much, so wouldn't have needed much more food than mammals.

    1146:

    Moz:

  • You were unclear.

  • Cross-cultural assumptions are gonna get you: compensation from the government for kicking the props out from under industry simply doesn't happen in the UK. (If it did, the government would have gone bankrupt in 1980.)

  • 1147:

    OK, so you have no excuse then. You should know better. You're just a bully who's so frightened, that they can't absorb what they're being told and lash out instead.

    You've quite changed how I look at you. I thought you were an arsehole, but you're just pathetic.

    1148:

    That includes a clear example of egregious blither. No, molten salt storage in cupboards is NOT acceptable, because of the fire risk - even lithium battery storage isn't, and that doesn't NORMALLY run at over 800 Celsius. Indeed, it is safe only in specially fire-protected locations; there are strict rules about where gas boilers may be installed. Yes, you could probably install them in converted fireplaces, for those of us that have them!

    1149:

    How many one lane highways are there?

    Most of the roads in the Scottish highlands are one lane only. (There are passing places roughly every 250 metres; if you meet another vehicle head-on, whoever is closest has to back up to the crossing place and pull in. Luckily parallel parking is a mandatory part of the driving test here ...)

    When a road doesn't have sufficient capacity for the traffic, they widen the highway.

    The get-out clause is for the traffic. As you probably guessed, the destinations at the end of those single-track highland roads are typically villages with fewer than 100 dwellings. There's little enough traffic that you almost never have someone behind you to prevent you reversing into that passing-place.

    There are railways like that, too. For example, about half a mile away from here there's a non-electrified freight line that goes to a waste incinerator. IIRC it's used by about one train a week (it might be daily: I'm not sure). It's never going to be electrified (that'd need maintenance, both of the conductors and the shrubbery/trees alongside that might contact them if they are allowed to get overgrown), but it's still important enough that it can't be shut down and turned into a cycle path like many of the other suburban lines in Edinburgh.

    1150:

    Still, if UNESCO would permit it and it could be done to ALL of the rooftops in the area it could provide SOME additional energy, maybe enough to power emergency lights in the common areas?

    There's a whopping green belt around the city zoned strictly for agricultural/recreational use with no residential or commercial construction permitted.

    It could, in principle, be turned over for PV farms. (Except they're fuck-all use in winter because, as previously noted: 6 hours of weak light isn't going to power 18 hours of heating through the chilly winter nights.)

    As it happens we are going to have to rip out 80% of the UK's central heating infrastructure over the next couple of decades -- it burns natural gas -- and either replace it with hydrogen burners (meaning, all-new pipework: gaseous hydrogen is problematic) or maybe switch to storage headers which could conceivably be charged during the day (rather than using overnight power, which is currently the usage pattern).

    1151:

    219,000 was the number that came out of the calculator when I multiplied 25W average by 8760 hours. That's 219kWh per annum. Most of that power will be generated in the summer, of course but that's what I worked out as the expected annual amount of electrical energy a 1 metre square panel will provide here in southern Scotland, assuming 10% of the rated output (ca. 250W per square metre).

    I am assuming a spherical-cow 1 metre square solar panel for this estimate -- from what I've seen on Aliexpress and elsewhere, individual commodity solar panels intended for rooftop and large-scale solar farms are usually 1m x 0.6m in size but I may be out-of-date on that. Generally rich folks with roof-mounted solar panels tend to talk in terms of square metres of PV rather than X number of panels making up that collecting area.

    I am also assuming zero losses for transmission and conversion to usable house current but I'd expect the controllers etc. to be very much optimised for extreme efficiency given modern electronics so that's a reasonable assumption, I think. If there is in-house power storage such as battery packs in the four-car garage there will be further losses due to round-trip electrochemical energy storage, recovery and reconversion to house current.

    1152:

    even the Soviet Union wasn't able to do away with capitalism

    The irony of actually-existing present day capitalism is that every corporation in the "free market" is internally run like a miniature Stalinist dictatorship. Only instead of firing unwanted persons literally (bullet to cranium) they fire them metaphorically (and dump them on the externality-bearer of last resort, the state).

    Seriously, all the ailments of the Soviet system are already here in the western world, just somewhat redistributed (and unacknowledged by a press and media environment as thoroughly ideologically indoctrinated as that of any dictatorship).

    1153:

    As it happens we are going to have to rip out 80% of the UK's central heating infrastructure over the next couple of decades -- it burns natural gas -- and either replace it with hydrogen burners (meaning, all-new pipework: gaseous hydrogen is problematic) or maybe switch to storage headers which could conceivably be charged during the day (rather than using overnight power, which is currently the usage pattern).

    Are those central heating systems per building? I'm used to district heating here, so there are these power plants which produce both heat and electricity, and they heat water which is routed through pipes to customers. Most buildings here in Finland is to my understanding use central heating.

    Of course that's quite a lot of infrastructure, and easy to get wrong. The pipe for our apartment house is not insulated well enough and it can be seen in the winter because there's less snow over it, and it used to be too close to the building itself. It was quite a hassle to move it a couple of metres outwards (if it breaks and leaks into the foundation, it's not good.)

    The other thing is how you generate the heat - Helsinki is decommissioning the last couple of coal plants in 2023 and 2024, but it's been a long process. My workplace is close to one of these, and there's a coal ship every couple of days, bringing in more coal, and there's quite a lot of coal dust in the air. I'm not sure about the new plants, what are they using.

    1154:

    Which, presuming there WILL be some future catastrophe of "dinosaur killer" magnitude that cannot be averted

    A "dinosaur killer" impactor is a once in 100 million year risk. Our species is 0.3MYa old and mammalian species in general have a life expectancy of 1-10MYa.

    The only reason it's worth worrying about is the risk that developing the tech to deflect a large asteroid away from Earth would enable someone sufficiently murderous to deflect a large asteroid towards us.

    Basically, all we need is a properly-funded sky survey to buy us a decade of lead time, and then a global moratorium on asteroid deflection tech until such time as a threat is detected.

    1155:

    can she have them approve an update to the laws, which would get her out of some of her grief?

    Answering that question would be a spoiler for Season of Skulls, which is all about Eve and resolves her problem (but not in the manner you're probably expecting).

    Current sitrep: draft is at 94,000 words of a target 120,000. I flamed out in November but am now back at work and have redrafted the first 42,000 words: 52,000 words to plough through (about a week's work) and I'll be ready to write the climax and resolution. Then off to the editors for publication hopefully around this time next year. (They crashed Quantum of Nightmares through in six months, though, so Season of Skulls could turn up a few months early.)

    1156:

    District heating is rare in the UK. It's mostly per dwelling, but I don't know how many apartment blocks have common heating. The most plausible solution is electricity, but (a) that means a massive investment in infrastructure, and (b) movement away from generating it by burning gas. We need a government to oversee that, and seem to be lacking one.

    1157:

    What I want to know is what you have against kippers for breakfast :-)

    Actually, there were some other things that I didn't get, but I can wait for a spoiler thread.

    1158:
    ...and both were driven by heavy-duty political power from clandestine nuclear weapons ambitions.

    Please explain why France would have built a fleet of PWRs, useless for generating plutonium, for "clandestine nuclear weapons ambitions" when it already had the bomb.

    Why do people keep repeating this nonsensical lie?

    1159:

    Are those central heating systems per building? I'm used to district heating here

    They're per dwelling. Apartment or house. I don't think we even have building-scale heating for apartment blocks, never mind district heating.

    EC is right about the UK currently lacking a government: they're so riven by factionalism and corruption that the UK is in danger of becoming a failed state. (Today's scandal is a jaw-dropper: government whips -- the party office-holders who dragoon the MPs to vote for the government's agenda -- have actually been accused of blackmail to prevent MPs voting a no-confidence motion against Boris Johnson.)

    1160:

    Another factor to consider is that there are a lot fewer "dino-killer" asteroids and comets around the Solar System compared to even 100 million years ago thanks to God's Vacuum Cleaner, Jupiter plus time. The Great Bombardment period of the early Solar System's history as it coalesced into hot rocks in semi-stable orbits dealt with most of the loose rubble and ice that could pose a threat to us today, time and probability has whittled down the survivors. Could still happen tomorrow though...

    1161:

    Anecdotal data point: my son lives in a flat in London, basically a rectangular box surrounded on 5 sides out of 6 by other heated properties (including the corridor). The 6th side faces south. He has in-flat heating, but barely uses it because the flat is generally too warm rather than too cold.

    1162:

    Returning to the Havana Syndrome saga, there's a long piece in the NYT this morning reporting an interesting development:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/us/politics/havana-syndrome-cia-report.html

    Most ‘Havana Syndrome’ Cases Unlikely Caused by Foreign Power, C.I.A. Says By Julian E. Barnes Jan. 20, 2022, 12:00 a.m. ET

    WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. has found that most cases of the mysterious ailments known as Havana syndrome are unlikely to have been caused by Russia or another foreign adversary, agency officials said, a conclusion that angered victims.

    A majority of the 1,000 cases reported to the government can be explained by environmental causes, undiagnosed medical conditions or stress, rather than a sustained global campaign by a foreign power, C.I.A. officials said, describing the interim findings of a comprehensive study.

    The C.I.A. is continuing its investigation into two dozen cases that remain unexplained.

    snip

    1163:

    "Our species is 0.3MYa old and mammalian species in general have a life expectancy of 1-10MYa."

    And ours is beginning to be self-modifying on a scale of decades. I don't expect H. sap. to be the most interesting thing around in 2500 CE. That, of course, could go either way.

    1164:

    Why do people keep repeating this nonsensical lie?

    It's sort-of true though, but not in the way the Greens portray it. Britain, for example, sold a single Magnox reactor to both Italy and Japan. They were eminently suitable for clandestine operation to produce a small amount of weapons-grade plutonium since they could be refuelled in operation, allowing short exposures of depleted or natural uranium to breed pure-ish forms of Pu239. The Canadian CANDU heavy-water reactors can be similarly short-cycled for the same purposes assuming no-one catches the operators doing it.

    Basically the French in the 1970s had run out of coal just as the first big oil price shocks and energy shortages hit courtesy of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. That was the major impetus for them to start building a large fleet of identical three-loop M910 nuclear power plants in a hurry, using the knowledge gained from their nuclear weapons development program. About half-way through the program they revamped the design a little to get more power out of each reactor (the five-loop version) but there's still a lot of design similarities and parts commonality between the two tranches of reactors.

    Civilian nuclear power follows nuclear weapons development, it does not advance the ability to make nuclear weapons but that's not what the Greens want people to believe so they lie about it.

    1165:

    It's long-standing, too. We have had HOW many major infrastructure enhancements announced? But the only one in recent decades that has had any active government support has been HS2, and that has been emasculated into pointlessness.

    1166:

    Are those central heating systems per building?

    It's not just the UK.

    Much of Canada and the northern parts of the US use individual furnaces to heat every home and natural gas dominates with fuel oil and propane also used.

    And there appears to be zero planning to change to something electric based.

    1167:

    Over the last few months a new ingredient has been added to this mix; we have an energy crisis. Natural gas has suddenly become very expensive and hard to get. I'm still not clear why this has happened. Is it Putin playing games with us (see 17 seconds in), or is it a collapse in someone's gas production, or just higher demand?

    Won't rule out Putin using the situation to play games but the natural gas price surge has happened worldwide.

    It's gotten expensive enough that US electric utilities have restarted coal plants and China has it's coal miners mining as much coal as they can.

    1168:
    As it happens we are going to have to rip out 80% of the UK's central heating infrastructure over the next couple of decades -- it burns natural gas -- and either replace it with hydrogen burners

    If you can make hydrogen you can make methane and just use the same pipes and boilers.

    1169:

    Most ‘Havana Syndrome’ Cases Unlikely Caused by Foreign Power, C.I.A. Says By Julian E. Barnes Jan. 20, 2022, 12:00 a.m. ET

    Yeah, this is me wearing my not-remotely-surprised face.

    None of the foreign powers in question had anything to gain by persistently injuring US diplomats, and the potential for damaging blowback (if they tried to) was immense. Meanwhile, the list of symptoms and the locations where it was alleged to have happened made no sense: it wasn't a consistent syndrome and the host nations lacked any obvious common cause sufficient to promote sharing of an esoteric weapons system unknown to the US military/intel community. Finally, the Trump administration (under which HS was reported) had downsized the Foreign Service by 40%, which might just cause a huge workload increase and morale problems for the survivors.

    1170:

    Yes, although reforming methane from H2 is lossy.

    But this is why I totally don't buy the "hydrogen is the fuel of the future" nonsense: it has a fraction the energy density per unit volume of methane, it diffuses through pipes, the liquid form is a huge headache to handle (as cryogens go it's much chillier -- hence tougher -- than methane), and so on. To burn it in existing furnaces you'd need to replace not only the burners but also the pipework, to carry a much higher volume of gas. You'd also have fun detecting leaks.

    1171:

    I bought a 100W panel for off-grid operation of my hobby (amateur radio), basically so that I can keep my LiFePO4 battery topped up without going near the mains. The panel I bought - https://smile.amazon.co.uk/ECO-WORTHY-Polycrystalline-Module-Battery-Charging/dp/B00HTSVDAM - cost me £90.

    By your maths, I'd need 3 of these to save me £35/year on power bills. That's £270 - for a panel that came with a 10 year guarantee, so it'd save £350 before the guarantee runs out, or £80 savings. In turn, that's a 20% RoI over 10 years. Equivalent savings interest rate would be a bit under 3% - at a time when getting 1% on your savings is hard.

    So yeah, actually. If you have the space for panels, they're economic at retail prices.

    1172:
    That was the major impetus for them to start building a large fleet of identical three-loop M910 nuclear power plants in a hurry, using the knowledge gained from their nuclear weapons development program.

    Arguably the main "knowledge gained from their weapons program" was the knowledge that magnox style gas cooled reactors were great for making plutonium for bombs but shitty for power generation, EDF and Framatome worked on the Westinghouse based PWR designs more or less against the wishes of the military/government which wanted the gas cooled reactors.

    1173:

    Another factor to consider is that there are a lot fewer "dino-killer" asteroids and comets around the Solar System compared to even 100 million years ago thanks to God's Vacuum Cleaner, Jupiter plus time. The Great Bombardment period of the early Solar System's history as it coalesced into hot rocks in semi-stable orbits dealt with most of the loose rubble and ice that could pose a threat to us today, time and probability has whittled down the survivors. Could still happen tomorrow though...

    Don Prothero tackled this in After the Dinosaurs some time ago, but the tl;dr is that it's more complicated than that.

    Chicxulub-scale asteroids appear to hit the Earth more like every billion years or so, based on the available evidence (Chicxulub and Sudbury craters). If you're cringing from extrapolating from two data points, just wait, it gets worse. Remember how hard Chicxulub was to find? There are some other potential craters out there (especially on Antarctica) that are too difficult to get to, plus 70% of the Earth's crust (ocean) recycles on the hundred million year scale, so we've lost most of that data. So we don't actually know how often they hit.

    And it continues to get worse. There are plenty of smaller craters out there. Problem is, precisely none of them are associated with a demonstrable mass extinction, and none are associated with a demonstrable smaller extinction. Why? Fossilization is rare, and most fossils eroded away a long time ago. For much of modern life, there is no fossil record, even though we know their ancestors had to be there.

    An example of the mess is the possible Lesser Dryas event. Did it kill the North American megafauna? Maybe sort of. During that climate shift, the big animals disappeared from around the La Brea Tar Pits over a 200 year period. What's the limit of resolution for dating those fossils? I don't know, but it might be 200 years. Was the Younger Dryas caused by a bolide strike in Northern Greenland (which produced the Old Woman Meteorite)? Maybe....? That's the matching exercise that has to happen. Plus humans were very definitely around, so was it a perfect storm of bad luck? There are known smaller-scale extinctions throughout the fossil record, but the evidence is thin, the timing is imprecise for the event/process (they often stretch for tens of thousands of years) and the timing of an impact is usually similarly imprecise. Chicxulub's timing is comparatively precise, but its date is +/- 10,000 years, due to the dating method.

    Anyway, Prothero makes a case that asteroid strike damage doesn't scale linearly with evolutionary-scale disruption. It seems to go from meh (no effect) to Chicxulub (huge effect) with nothing much in between that the paleontologists can see. Large Igneous Province eruptions are rather more dangerous (cf: Siberian Traps) but then again, we've got plenty of LIPs that aren't associated with mass extinctions either.

    It's "fun" to play with these things, because there are books with the data and models out there. Problem is, there are few data points, the quality of the data necessarily suck, because radioactive dating is imprecise on those time scales, fossilization and preservation demand a lot of luck, and so forth. In the end, you can fit all sorts of models to the data, but defending any model is difficult. That's what's behind the idea of a 100 million year return time for big asteroid strikes.

    Please realize this isn't a criticism of you. I did a faceplant into this stuff when I wrote Hot Earth Dreams and was trying to figure out whether a Large Igneous Province eruption or an asteroid was a bigger future danger (the megavolcano won). Until I looked at the data a bit, I didn't realize how low quality it was.

    1174:

    In that context, I find it interesting that Audi has chosen to make their plant at Werlte (Emsland) produce methane from water, electricity and a local biomass plant's exhaust, instead of just producing hydrogen from the water and electricity.

    It's a demonstration plant intended to show that Audi can scale up production of carbon-neutral fuel to support Audi engines. As it's a demonstration plant, producing enough carbon-neutral fuel for 1.5 million kilometers per year of Audi motoring, they could have chosen to produce hydrogen and ship it locally, limiting the use of hydrogen to just a few filling stations in the area, as Toyota did with hydrogen vehicles in California. But no, they chose to produce methane that could go into the German gas grid instead - which I think says a lot about the business case for hydrogen.

    1175:

    After that dino-killer rant, I'll point out that I do actually support the asteroid watch, not because of dinosaur killers, but because of potential city killers. Those seem to hit around every century or so, at least if we're talking about Russia. Tunguska and Chelyabinsk were about a century apart.

    We need a space watch for two things. One is so that we can rapidly and definitely tell everyone that a bolide strike was not an act of war, to head off World War 3. That's actually quite important.

    The other is that, if we want to head off an impact, we're playing Batman games. Batman takes on gun-wielding goons with hand weapons. Us diverting an asteroid moving at Mach 15 with anything we can launch from Earth involves a similar mismatch in velocities. If we're going to intercept a space rock with a rocket, we need as much warning as possible to have time to get the interceptor up to speed.

    The "fun" part is that if we develop super-fast radar and interception tech, it does, of course, contribute to various arms races. But we won't go there.

    1176:

    gasdive
    Naughty ...
    I & paws & Pigeon are all-too-aware that Australian "Solar power" solutions" CANNOT work ( For all power needs ) in the UK & you won't accept that. None of us are saying that we do not need solar & wind (etc ) but they are not enough.
    We need something else - & nuclear is the preferred option.
    OK?

    whitroth
    When was the Vredefort Structure "opened up"?

    1177:

    Don't you mean a bit under 2%? Yes, for such purposes, they make a lot of sense, but are irrelevant to the national problem.

    1178:

    Also, local extinction is easily recoverable from, so wouldn't show up. The point is that extinction events must be necessarily on at least the geographic scale of the population in question, and the chance of a mere million km^2 of damage covering the whole population of something that occurs in the record is small.

    I don't believe that the damage is a jump function, so much as the record of it is. For example, I am sure that the larger Yellowstone eruptions and the creation of the Deccan traps caused SOME extinctions.

    1179:

    Yes. But the problem comes down to extracting carbon from the atmosphere - if we can do that, effectively, there are so MANY ways we can use it to reduce (and even reverse) CO2 emissions.

    1180:

    No, I mean a bit under 3%; three of my panels is 300W, not the 250W Nojay quoted, and thus they reduce your bills by £350 over 10 years, on an initial investment of £270. This assumes that electricity prices don't go up in the next 10 years, and that when Nojay said that a 250W panel can save you £35/year on electricity, his maths was accurate.

    Working out the RoI of £80 profit on £270 investment says that it's about 2.9% or so - but you should earn a bit more than that because 3 of my panels is 300W, not 250W.

    Which means, in turn, that Nojay's assertion that it's not worth it for £35/year of savings isn't borne out by panels at retail prices - at retail price, filling your roof with panels is a better RoI than putting the money into a savings account.

    On a national scale, this won't fix things - even if we cover all roofs with solar panels, we won't have enough power for UK needs, but it's better than nothing.

    1181:

    Another story of dysfunctional government management of its energy system in Texas.

    Its quite a long article, but worth reading through. TL;DR: Texas has its own grid, isolated from the rest of the US. The politicians and top bureaucrats assigned to regulate the energy providers are in the pockets of the industry, and nobody else understands enough about the system to realise how fragile it is until the lights go out.

    There is an idea in system safety engineering called "STAMP" (System Theoretic Accident Model and Processes). Its basic idea is that accidents are due to failures in control systems. A system can be analysed in terms of the control signals sent by controllers (human and automated) to actuators on the system, and feedback signals sent by sensors back to controllers. Normally the system is "under control", meaning that the feedback loops operate and this keeps the system operating within safe parameters. If those signals get lost or misunderstood, or incorrect signals are sent, then the system can move out of the safety zone and an accident becomes likely.

    So far so trivial. But a key insight of STAMP is that these control systems come in hierarchies; an aircraft may have an autopilot flying the plane, but that is being monitored by the pilot, and the pilot is being monitored by an air traffic controller (and these days by the ATC computers), and the ATC guy has a supervisor, and so on upwards. If the autopilot starts flying in the wrong direction the pilot notices, and if the pilot fails to notice the ATC will notice. At each level you have signals from sensors (compass, altimeter, radar) and control signals (pilot on controls, ATC sending clearances by radio).

    This approach continues on upwards into management and regulation, and ultimately to democratic accountability (if you are in a democracy). For instance, consider the Uberlingen mid-air collision; there was a cascade of failures at multiple levels, one of which was that a single ATC guy was in charge of two bits of airspace, and the computers that would normally have alerted him to a possible impending collision were down for maintenance. That was a management failure; the "sensor" signals that should have alerted them to the need for extra staffing didn't get through, so the staffing system was out of control and not operating within safe parameters. (Aside: some of those managers ultimately got suspended sentences. The ATC guy was shot by a bereaved relative).

    So now look at Texas from this point of view. The low-level control systems worked as intended; the grid shed load to keep the electricity supply on and avoid the need for a cold reboot. But the regulatory system is not operating correctly; regulators are ignoring information from the sensors (i.e. experts and lower-level staff in the power system) and hence the system is operating outside safe parameters.

    Price signals are also supposed to be part of this mechanism, but unfortunately they are very bad at responding to rare events. In theory managers and consumers should both "price in" the risk of rare events; many Texas consumers opted for floating power rates because those are a bit cheaper on average, ignoring the risk of sudden spikes that could wipe out those savings. There was also the asymmetrical risk; when power went out in the winter people were left without power or water for days, but the only cost to the power companies was that they weren't selling electricity to them.

    In theory democracy is the ultimate corrective; the people are the topmost controller in the entire system, and should boot out the people who let it go wrong. However again that requires the people to be responding correctly to the signals they are sent by the sensors, and that the signals are in turn transmitted correctly (which mostly means by the media). But even with the best will in the world, individual voters don't have the time to immerse themselves in the small details of how their world works and hence to make intelligent decisions. Even if you do spend hours at this, the odds that you will be the decisive voter is so tiny that it looks like a clear waste of time.

    I don't know how to solve this problem of voters who can't (not "won't", "can't") take the time needed to make intelligent informed decisions about everything important.

    1182:

    So you meant a 30% ROI on investment over 10 years? I hadn't checked your calculation, but alarm bells rang when you said that 20% ROI over 10 years was a bit under 3% - it isn't.

    1183:

    Yes - £80 return on £270 investment is the raw numbers, and 20% was an underestimate of the actual RoI.

    1184:

    We do have some buildings with shared heating and hot water. I lived in a Lewisham council flat that had central hot air and water. I suspect the place was originally purpose built for pensioners and I just got lucky but it was not bad while it lasted. Probably all sold to landleeches by now.

    1185:

    There are other upfront costs such as the PV power controller/inverter and safe wiring installation and the mechanical structures required for optimal positioning of the panels (there are online calculators to work out this given the owner's requirements -- do you want more power generated in the winter when the Sun is low in the sky all day or maximum power in the summer?).

    Non-optimal alignment because the roof slope is "wrong" will mean less return on investment but standing-up a panel on an angled bracket on a roof is an invitation for the next storm to rip it off along with chunks of the roof. Not having a sloping roof that's exactly aligned East-West also eats into performance as does shadowing from trees or neighbouring buildings. Grid solar arrays at ground level or properly supported on flat-roofed commercial buildings can be arranged optimally for the location and latitude, of course.

    As for warranties extending for a decade or more for something bought off Amazon from a drop-shipper or third-party seller, well it's a nice idea. I know of someone in the US who bought cheap PV panels via a dropshipper and did a DIY rooftop install to save money. He's had one panel fail completely out of a set of ten and two others have gone low-voltage on him within a year (defective individual segments, he reckons). The seller of the panels can't be contacted for warranty returns or refunds, funny that. He's got other problems since he didn't check the building regulations for PV installation and home storage and the LiPo battery unit he fitted in his garage needs relocating and protecting from collision from vehicles. His insurance brokers want fire detection and other safety upgrades installed in the garage otherwise his building insurance will be invalidated.

    1186:

    Also, local extinction is easily recoverable from, so wouldn't show up. The point is that extinction events must be necessarily on at least the geographic scale of the population in question, and the chance of a mere million km^2 of damage covering the whole population of something that occurs in the record is small. I don't believe that the damage is a jump function, so much as the record of it is. For example, I am sure that the larger Yellowstone eruptions and the creation of the Deccan traps caused SOME extinctions.

    Deccan is an interesting case about misperceptions, so let's dive into that. This isn't a personal attack, just a point that time scales really do matter, and all of us are pretty ignorant on those, myself definitely included.

    Quick background: Go read Wikipedia, this is the tl;dr. India used to be part of Africa, but it got spalled off in the Mesozoic, probably by the same huge hotspot that's currently making the Rift Valley. The pieces of that rifting (or sequential riftings) got spread across the Indian Ocean as Madagascar, the Seychelles, and India (the other islands out there are basaltic volcanoes). Around 67 million years ago (if I've got it right), India passed over another mantle plume and started moving quite rapidly north, presumably because it was lubricated by a lot of molten rock under it. That mantle plume laid down the Large Igneous Province (meaning a big-ass landscape of basalt, like Iceland only bigger) until India had passed over it. That rapid process of the creation of the Deccan traps took around 4 million years, from 67 to 63 million years ago (Chicxulub hit at 65 million years ago). India started slowing down around 55 mya, possibly when the northern edge of its plate hit and started subducting under Asia, causing the rise of the Himalayas that continues to this day.

    Now, for comparison's sake, the Pleistocene, aka our ice ages, are only the last 2.58 million years, while the Pliocene preceding that ran from 5.33 to 2.58 million years. The point is the "disaster" of the Deccan traps went on longer than our current ice ages have. It wasn't one continuous eruption, but rather a bunch of shorter, bigger eruptions that continued over that period (or possibly longer!). So the better comparison is with, say, the formation of the current main Hawaiian Islands, which are also big hunks of basalt emplaced by a hotspot. Or with all the different Yellowstone eruptions, although they've been going on for something like 16 million years.

    Did the Deccan or Yellowstone eruptions cause local extinctions? Certainly: insects, weird plants... but not a mass extinction. Heck, the ice ages themselves didn't cause a mass extinction, although a lot of species (almost all hominins, for example) both evolved and went extinct during that time period.

    There's an important point about "extinction events." They're events only because there's a discontinuity in the geologic record. Below some line in a wide number of sites, there's one set of diagnostic fossils in the rock layers. Above that line, there's another. We all naively think of those "lines" as instantaneous events, especially now, because Chicxulub got so much coverage. It turns out that most of these "events" happened over thousands to millions of years. Chicxulub is really an outlier, because it happened very rapidly, and we have unusually good proof.

    I tend to go with Prothero on the discontinuous scale of impact effects, because he spent quite a bit of paper on it. There are, definitely, impact craters that are not associated with extinction events. It's been normal since the 1980s, when the cause of the end Cretaceous was pinned down, to try to pin other extinction events to known, suspected, or hypothesized asteroid impacts. So far, it's never worked. Similarly, there was a multi-decade argument about the Deccan Traps being the extinction cause, not Chicxulub, and that got researched intensively too, because the Siberian Traps did end the Permian. And that hypothesis has been mostly discarded, primarily because the Deccan traps erupted well into the Paleocene, and there's no evidence for further extinctions. Where the research has been done, there's simply not a good relationship between well-dated craters and well-dated extinction events, aside from Chicxulub.

    However, and this is important, hot spots can also create a lot of species. Thousands have evolved on the Hawaiian Islands, for example. The same is true on every island hotspot in the world.

    There's an final irony here that might have been important. Even more than Australia, India was on the antipode from Chicxulub. Very probably, it was a major place where species survived the impact, and we don't think about this because we focus on the destructive aspect of those big volcanoes, not their nurturing role, despite what we see on volcanic islands. The irony is that, once India plowed into Asia starting 55 million years ago, most of its unique lifeforms either got wiped out or dispersed into Asia and became "normal." The only surviving Indian clade there's any evidence for is...lagomorphs, aka rabbits and hares. And if it weren't for fossils, I don't think anybody would have guessed that Insular India might have been Hareheim.

    1187:

    I don't think that it has been said in this thread, though it certainly has before, but a MUCH better solution for northern locations is solar water heating. Subsidies ignored, of course. It's many times as efficient, should last a lot longer, and is much more easily recyclable. The biggest problem seems to be venting the excess heat in summer! The people I know who have it say that it reduces the hot water heating requirements noticeably even in winter.

    1188:

    Only if that was deep, deep in my subconscious. Actually, my editor's reaction after he read the first draft I submitted was that it reminded him of Poul Anderson's 1971 Hugo-nominated Tau Zero.

    But no. Charlie, don't mean to be rude, talking about my book on your blog....

    There's a chapter in the book - a number of the first half was written as short stories - where two of my Enhanced people (genuinely superpowered abilities) demonstrate what people with actual superpowers would do with bad guys, and it's not, as Tom Smith sings, "out bashin' baddies in their BVDs."

    p> After I submitted that as a short, while it was bouncing, I started thinking about it, and decided I had a really interesting universe, and wanted to know more about it. It was obviously in the far future... and then my problem was how to explain things to the reader without multiple infodumps, or every other page beginning with, "As you know, Bob...." So I took people from the not that distant future (2169), and moved them up, using a workable method that fit perfectly with what the people were doing.

    1189:

    Yes. But the problem comes down to extracting carbon from the atmosphere - if we can do that, effectively, there are so MANY ways we can use it to reduce (and even reverse) CO2 emissions

    It's not just extraction, it's storage. Where do you put gigatonnes of carbon? Worse, how do you use as little energy as possible to turn it into something really stable that will stay out of the atmosphere for centuries with no further attention? That's not just a chemistry problem, it's a godsawful infrastructure building problem. As Vaclav Smil put it, we're basically hoping to build an entire reverse of the petroleum and coal extraction infrastructures that have developed over the last two centuries, build that infrastructure in years to decades, and do it with renewable energy. Even with cheap fusion, that's a tall order.

    1190:

    As has been noted many, many times before, at least in the US, heating a house is several times as expensive as heating with gas (which has been cheaper than oil for over 40 years).

    Give me a way to heat my small split level without tripling my heating bill (at least, if not more). I'm retired, on a fixed income, so no handwaving allowed.

    Ok, you can make my novel a best seller, say, by nominating it for the Hugo and the Astounding awards, then the problem goes away. Otherwise....

    1191:

    Leaks in gas lines with hydrogen - well, you could always light a candle. Or you might notice if you suddenly start talking several octaves above your normal speaking voice....

    1192:

    Spoke too soon about India's contribution to the world's fauna. Modern clades that possibly evolved on insular India include modern frogs, lagomorphs, whales, and possibly bats and perissodactyls (horses, tapirs, and rhinos). Nothing random about that assortment... But it does speak to the fact that this assortment evolved despite, and possibly because of, the Deccan Traps eruptions going on the entire time they were evolving.

    1193:

    There are a fair number of smaller-than-dinosaur-killers, and we do know where a number of them are. https://meteorcrater.com/, for example.

    I agree, you do not want that hitting in or around your metro area.

    1194:

    Vredefort Structure - I think you're responding to heteromeles, not me.

    1195:

    Which means, in turn, that Nojay's assertion that it's not worth it for £35/year of savings isn't borne out by panels at retail prices - at retail price, filling your roof with panels is a better RoI than putting the money into a savings account.

    Except of course no one saves money in a savings account anymore given they haven't paid any significant interest in decades.

    So your not competing with the savings account but with whatever investment opportunities are being offered through your various local financial institutions and others.

    Or more likely competing with taking that holiday to the sun for 2 weeks instead of staying home.

    In which case that savings over a decade doesn't look so attractive, and all the more so if you don't think you will remain in the same house for that decade.

    1196:

    I don't know how to solve this problem of voters who can't (not "won't", "can't") take the time needed to make intelligent informed decisions about everything important.

    In thinking back over my conversations (the rational ones) with people who disagree with me on who to vote for, they know "their" vote is for someone who will make a series of bad decisions. But they also feel that this someone will make decisions they agree with. So they vote for them. Because the alternative, in their minds, is evil and thus cannot be allowed to be in charge if at all possible.

    And to be honest I see this attitude from both sides.

    So for someone running for public office the way to win is to make sure you show your tribal loyalty much more than any policy points.

    Which leads to the failures you describe.

    1197:

    The seller of the panels can't be contacted for warranty returns or refunds, funny that.

    When we moved into our current home 30 years ago we got a new phone number. (Remember those days?) A few times we got people calling and leaving messages on our answering machine (and those?) wanting to talk about a warranty and/or repair of the hot water heating system installed on their roof.

    Whoever had owned our number before was long gone and there were multiple folks in the area with expensive roof mounted non functional plumbing setups.

    1198:

    Fit-and-forget rooftop hot water systems are expensive but work well for a decade and more. DIY rooftop hot water systems work fine for the length of a Youtube video or maybe a season or two and then they go badly wrong, often in a very expensive manner.

    I've seen one good solar hot water system. It was built by a Beltway millionaire in Maryland, a DoD engineering contractor. The system had stainless steel marine-grade fixtures (the sort of qualified components he sold to the USN, possibly N-stamp parts), solid metal piping, everything at ground level alongside the outdoor pool, properly laid out and accessible for repair. He had a thing about "renewables" twenty years before it became fashionable with a big hot-rock heatstore under the garage, double-glazing, exterior window shades and airlock doors in the house.

    1199:

    Hydrogen?

    Did I miss something in recent plumbing developments? Riffing on Charlie's points, are there systems where consumer purchasers of hydrogen things can get a local plumber to install and be fairly certain their house will not become an experiment in the local fire department extinguishing a hydrogen fed fire?

    Or even a small business?

    Companies building rockets or similar can custom make and test each hydrogen line. For regular consumer and small business use you need "off the shelf" piping and fittings that "just work".

    H2 is flat out tiny and thus hard to 99.9999999% contain.

    1200:

    District heating.

    Manhattan has it. Chicago down town. Maybe Boston and/or Philadelphia. But to make it work you need really cold long winters and dense housing/businesses.

    Finland and the northern US are not the same. Personally I can't stand cold weather. You know when it get down near freezing. My 8 years in Pittsburgh and Connecticut totally turned my off cold. I can't even imagine living somewhere like Finland.

    As a side note, recently I was trying to find the locations of the original Edison power plants in NYC. Other than Pearl Street I didn't find (quit trying) them but did notice that they sold their "waste" heat to nearby buildings. Was this the first use of such "district" heating that involved modern piping?

    1201:

    work fine for the length of a Youtube video

    To make or watch the video. [grin]

    1202:

    a MUCH better solution for northern locations is solar water heating

    I agree.

    Solar hot water heating took off over hear around 40 years ago, long before PV became culturally accepted. It's waxed and waned over the years. For a long time we had "off-peak" circuits that the supplier (not yet distinct from the grid manager) would turn off and on remotely, and the preferred use case offered for those was to run storage hot water heaters at night. Addressing that other problem, that because you need "base load" you are running generators at a capacity for which there is no demand overnight. While I think this stuff has mostly been evened out, solar hot water hasn't made much of a comeback.. my understanding is that heat pump hot water is so efficient that it makes more sense to use the roof space for PV anyway and run the heat pump systems directly from it during the day, storing heat for later.

    But anyway, I agree largely because this steps around the question of storage (it is a kind of storage) and doesn't involve energy providers much, just depends on workforce issues, as it requires trades with the combined skills of electricians and plumbers. That's clearly not too hard when there's a will, since air-conditioning techs need similar.

    Certainly it's a proven "gateway" for gaining cultural acceptance of PV.

    1203:

    When was the Vredefort Structure "opened up"?

    Vredefort's 2.023 billion years old, +/- 4 million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vredefort_crater)

    Sudbury Crater is 1.849 billion years old (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Basin)

    etc. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Earth#10_Ma_or_more)

    Popigai (35.7 mya) (100 km diameter, vs. 150 km for Chicxulub). It might be linked to the Eocene-Oligocene transition at 33.9 mya. Or, well, 1.8 million years difference is a bit...

    Manicougan (215 mya, 100 km) was 12 million years before the Triassic-Jurassic transition in the middle of the Norian Age, so it's not the cause of any known extinction.

    Acraman (90 km, 580 mya), not associated with any extinction event

    Morokweng (70 km, 145 mya) several million years before the Jurassic-Cretaceous transition...

    You can keep looking. The point is that Chicxulub jumps out both in scale and deadliness. Craters half its size aren't clearly associated with much of anything biologically, and there's not a clear record of much that's bigger within the last billion years. That's the discontinuity.

    1204:

    Greg: * When was the Vredefort Structure "opened up"?*

    It's over 2 billion years old -- it took place during the era of the Great Oxygen Catastrophe, so there was almost certainly no multicellular life around to be rendered extinct by it.

    1205:

    The USA government always owned much more of the USA than private business owned in the USSR.

    For all the accusations of "Socialists!" (not to mention ""Commies!" and "Reds!"*) levelled by the American right at Canada, in my lifetime American governments have always owned more of America than Canadian governments have owned of Canada.

    *Back when "Red" was a pejorative to the right-wing, rather than an aspiration.

    1206:

    The irony of actually-existing present day capitalism is that every corporation in the "free market" is internally run like a miniature Stalinist dictatorship.

    More the reverse — the USSR was modelled on a corporation run on Taylorist principles.

    (At least according to a poli-sci prof I knew. He said that if you look at the organizational structure of the USSR it was based on early-20th-century corporations run by "scientific management".)

    1207:

    Impact Craters
    Reminds me of the [ Initially enthusiastically-received .. until it turned into christian Wanking ] of Julia(n) May's Saga of the Exiles.
    Where reference is made to a major crater in the middle of what is now Europe, not so long ago, geologically speaking: The Ries Astrobleme

    1208:

    a MUCH better solution for northern locations is solar water heating

    Popular in China over a decade ago:

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/etherflyer/195719890

    1209:

    It's over 2 billion years old -- it took place during the era of the Great Oxygen Catastrophe, so there was almost certainly no multicellular life around to be rendered extinct by it.

    Another irony. The "Great Oxygenation Catastrophe" (Go anaerobes???) aka the Great Oxygenation Event, which was either 2.45 Ga to 2.0 Ga OR 2.45 Ga to 0.85 Ga depending on what you consider the end point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event) is an "event" (or if you prefer a catastrophe) that happened over at least 450,000,000 years, possibly up to 1,700,000,000 years. I like the latter, because it ends when oxygen starts building up in the atmosphere, but whichever.

    Anyway, by that scale of things, events are longer periods than epochs. By my reckoning, we're about a third of the way through the catastrophe of animals invading land. We'll never know the end, because the Earth's carbon cycle will break down before the last billion years are up on this event.

    Might I suggest that the standard practice of using multiple chronological yardsticks gets extremely silly? I know I've said it for about five years now, but a billion year-long catastrophe is a rather pessimistic way to look at that much of Earth's history.

    1210:

    It's even sillier when you consider that the year as a temporal yardstick is specific to the Earth, and has only been around for the most recent third of the duration of the universe since the big bang!

    1211:

    Naughty ... I & paws & Pigeon are all-too-aware that Australian "Solar power" solutions" CANNOT work

    Stop being such a condescending prick.

    Australians are as capable of reading a UK table of output by location (which I've linked to) as such clever people as brits. Just fuck off.

    1212:

    The trouble about the older fossil (and modern pollen) record is that it is very hard to distinguish species - generally, the best that is reliable is genera. And there simply isn't enough data to track things down to that level, anyway - witness the frequent reclassifications of even recent fossil species.

    I stand by my point, which is about the statistics as much as anything. Random walks with absorbing boundaries (which is what this is) have exactly the property observed. The massness of extinctions will depend on whether the catastrophe covered all of the habitats of a genus, irrespective of how many actual species were extinguished.

    1213:

    A gigatonne of carbon is not an insuperable object, by modern mining standards. Just compress and heat it (i.e. turning it into coal) and bury it in one of our many disused mines. The hard part is getting it out of the air, efficiently, in the first place.

    1214:

    The Ries Astrobleme

    In a show about the Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 they were interviewing Shoemaker's wife (maybe widow). She said he got so excited when he saw the local cathedral built out of the shocked stone she was afraid he'd pull out a rock hammer and start extracting samples. She calmed him down.

    1215:

    Popigai (35.7 mya) (100 km diameter, vs. 150 km for Chicxulub). It might be linked to the Eocene-Oligocene transition at 33.9 mya. Or, well, 1.8 million years difference is a bit...

    And the Chesapeake Bay one at almost the same instant in geological time.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_Bay_impact_craterhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_Bay_impact_crater

    1216:

    "I said the limiting case was about a year's worth of energy could fit in a square 10 km on a side. I did say that though it wouldn't actually be built that way, (for a host of reasons) and instead would be lots of smaller stores, varying from fitting in the cupboard under the stairs, (to ensure heat through a mid winter blackout and allow heating energy to be bought at the cheapest time of day)"

    OK. To me the thread seemed to have somehow devolved into a mass of confusion with a 10km box of artificial lava involved somewhere but nobody actually having any proper idea what anyone else was on about, and I couldn't untangle it by reading, so I decided to start from the definite bits of starting premise that I did manage to locate and calculate from there, and see if/how the results came to suggest a 10km box at any point.

    I didn't consider subdivision into smaller units because I didn't manage to find an actual suggestion of it, and because I was taking the view that it only works if you use large units that can take the best advantage of the square/cube scaling to minimise the loss of the stored heat, so I didn't think it worthwhile to bother with the extra complication.

    I do not think it's a good idea for the kind of daily scale blackout heat coverage domestic use you suggest, partly because of the losses problem and partly because the insurance companies would do their nut over the fire hazard. (Which I think would be very easy to manage if you've got a ground floor, at least, but it's a waste of time having new ideas anywhere where insurance companies and anything to do with fire come into it.)

    But as Charlie says we've had the basic means of covering for that particular problem for yonks in any case: storage heaters. These were originally a response to the difficulty of matching a mostly coal-fired generation system to the diurnal variation in load, by trying to get the domestic-heating and industrial maxima to happen at different times. People could (in fact still can, even though the circumstances no longer apply) get a knock-off rate for electricity between midnight and 7am to run heating coils in boxes full of bricks of some startlingly dense thermal storage material, and then use the stored heat for warmth over the remaining 17 hours. They were not popular, partly because even with the knock-off rate they were still expensive, and partly because they were dogshit. But they still got installed in rental accommodation long after nobody else used them any more because the landlords weren't paying the bills and didn't want the fuckaround they would get from the insurance companies if they installed gas like everyone else did (see above re insurance companies and anything fire-related).

    There was no need for them to be dogshit; the technology works just fine if you bother to implement it properly. The problem was the universal bad design: they were not big enough to have enough raw storage capacity, the means for controlling the rate of heat release were rudimentary and ineffective, and they had nowhere near enough insulation. So you'd have the place baking hot at 7am, but by the evening when you most wanted them they'd have cooled down and you'd end up using electric fires at full rate to compensate. To make one which isn't dogshit would be trivial, but for some collection of stupid reasons you never saw one that wasn't.

    If you've got the space to put it then the even simpler solution is a great big tank of hot water, which has the advantage of being directly compatible with the usual central heating systems that use water for heat transport.

    "I can't make head nor tail of that page today"

    It is a bit of a pain because it doesn't give heat capacity directly, but it's the first thing I found that had data for the liquid phase. Heat capacity varies with temperature, so it gives you this great big polynomial that fits the curve and you plug in the temperature you're interested in to get the heat capacity at that point. Or you can integrate it to get the average capacity over a range of temperature, which is what I did (way over the top of course, but the integral is trivial so fuck it).

    I didn't look at phase change because I was thinking it's much easier to move the salt through the heat exchanger if it remains liquid. Of course making the heat exchanger distributed for the whole thing would get around that, and the advantages of operation at a temperature which is both lower and constant help a lot with losses and materials.

    "No, it [10%] includes those."

    OK.

    "I haven't checked your figures, but 30 panels per person sounds short. Probably about 100. There aren't many 1 kW panels and 1.5 sqm of panel doesn't have a nameplate anywhere near 1 kW."

    Yeah, I cocked up on that bit. Nojay reckons a 1m2 panel will claim 0.25kW of output (aside: his yearly output calculation is the same as yours - 10% of 0.25kW for 8760 hours - 8760/40 is exactly 219, and it's one of those nice exact integer results which it seems rude to round up even if the precision is unjustified). 0.25kW/m2 is rather more than I'd have come up with if I hadn't cocked up, but taking it as correct, it's a quarter of my cocked-up figure so the corrected answer comes out at 120 of the 1.5m2 panels I was assuming per person. (Or 300 panels if 1mx0.6m is the size they actually are. I was sure I'd seen 1.5mx1m in some article about the constructional aspects of roof installations but I could have misremembered. But that confuses the comparison...)

    About not fitting on rooftops, there seems to be a general assumption in the UK (or at least among those elements who think about it at all) that panels on roofs are the main part or the whole of what it's all about. Since they're actually only a minor part of it, where you put all the rest of them is a major consideration which cannot necessarily be dismissed by assuming solar power is only one of a mixed set of sources, but it rarely does seem to get considered.

    Applying the above x4 correction to the total area estimate gives 11000km2, which is roughly two-fifths of the total area enclosed by the M25 (assuming it to be a circle of 188km circumference). Of course it's a lot less formidable split up into little bits, and I dare say space could be found, but finding it without fucking anything else up too much would be a wee bit tricky.

    "And indeed it's better all round to put the panels where there's sun, and run a cable to the load. However the "we can't trust Johnny Foreigner" seems to put the kibosh on that, at least according to the commentariat. The logic of that slightly escapes me as the UK currently depends entirely on imported fossil fuel and even food of all things (about half of the food consumed in the UK is imported)."

    Well, a good part of it is the strategic vulnerability of having a major part of the energy supply coming over a route which can be severed at a stroke, causing immediate and widespread fuckage which persists without moderation until the severance is repaired. It's a bit binary for comfort. Using partly multiple fixed links to different sources and partly shipping gives better resilience and less abrupt degradation.

    But about that "partly shipping" bit, a significant part of UK foreign policy for the last century has been all about fucking up the Middle East in pursuit of oil, first as strategic fuel for the Navy and then for the country as a whole. It's quite possible that many of the commentariat are implicitly or explicitly bothered about the prospect of a repeat performance in North Africa (which after all is a backwards place full of primitive camel-herding... er, brown-skinned people who need telling what to do, just like the Middle East in WW1)... you can probably guess it's "explicitly" in my case, and I also consider that as a compelling reason for getting off oil which has been clear for a long time and quite independently of any environmental concerns.

    I know all about the bloody food, it goes back centuries and it pisses me off. Napoleon was aware of the possibility of starving Britain out but it goes back long before then. We were actually worried about agricultural insufficiency for a while after that, and changed practices to improve output significantly, but soon forgot about it again, and also allowed the population to increase at the same rate as the increasing output so the situation didn't actually change. Concern during WW1 and even the extended period of rationing during and after WW2 still never convinced us the situation was basically shit. It means Britain doesn't fit my notion of a fundamentally viable country, but nobody else seems to even notice.

    1217:

    A gigatonne of carbon is not an insuperable object, by modern mining standards. Just compress and heat it (i.e. turning it into coal) and bury it in one of our many disused mines. The hard part is getting it out of the air, efficiently, in the first place.

    Where's the energy to make the coal coming from? And, since it isn't diamond and therefore relatively imperishable, how are you going to protect it once you make it?

    AS for taking it out of the air, the usual nutcase methods (like growing a lot of hemp) are probably as good as anything. Especially if you can somehow recycle the mineral nutrients when you make the coal.

    1218:

    The trouble about the older fossil (and modern pollen) record is that it is very hard to distinguish species - generally, the best that is reliable is genera. And there simply isn't enough data to track things down to that level, anyway - witness the frequent reclassifications of even recent fossil species. I stand by my point, which is about the statistics as much as anything. Random walks with absorbing boundaries (which is what this is) have exactly the property observed. The massness of extinctions will depend on whether the catastrophe covered all of the habitats of a genus, irrespective of how many actual species were extinguished.

    Pollen? Who said anything about pollen?

    Most of the chronological fossil record is marine, so we're talking primarily about mollusks and especially reefs. These leave behind by far the best records, as they by definition occur in depositional environments (e.g. underwater) and they're quite durable.

    Indeed, the classic hallmark of a major extinction event is the global disappearance of reefs at a particular time, followed by the appearance of new reef systems created by different groups of organisms. By that standard, incidentally, we are not yet in a major extinction event. If we continue the current course, we will cross that threshold by 2100, probably earlier.

    And before you mention it, I said reefs, not coral reefs. Mollusks can make reefs too.

    While I agree that pollen is wonderful stuff, it's a different system with the issues you mention.

    1219:

    "Now consider efficiency. Heating and melting things using electricity is close to 100% efficient, but converting heat to electricity is NOT."

    Yes, quite. You need two to three times as much storage as you expect to get out of it to cover for that inefficiency, and then there are leakage losses too. The potential Carnot efficiency is pretty good, but you've got the same problem you always have when the potential Carnot efficiency is that kind of pretty good, that you have to throw a chunk of the potential away by diluting the heat so as not to melt the engine. I hate that.

    Jolly good point about the weather. It didn't occur to me at all, and it should have done, even though I was deliberately ignoring losses.

    1220:

    You can recover most of the heat when using it solely to melt things - it's how molten salt/wax/whatever storage batteries work, after all, and you don't have to convert it to electricity! Coal is a pretty durable mineral in itself, and is much more so if buried 10m underground.

    1221:

    Damian @ 1137:

    including things that are nailed down

    "Whatever is not nailed down is mine. What I can pry loose is not nailed down."

    I thought that was from Captain Pugwash, but when I googled there were all sorts of attributions, some very unlikely, Oscar Wilde. Quote Investigator attributes it to American rail tycoon Collis P. Huntington and I guess the linkage might be Ambrose Bierce (who apparently hated them both and expressed this loudly in print), not that he's associated with it in any way.

    It's probably older than that. When you think about it, that's the raison d'être behind European colonization of the "New World"

    1222:

    "Well, depending on period, after the brand was created, Motorail might have used special double-deck car wagons, or might have used standard rail flatbeds with bridges between wagons. Never the less it was not normal practice to carry passengers in their cars for several hours at a stretch."

    They used GUVs a lot too (four-axle bogie vans like a coach with no seats in). No passengers in their cars was basically a safety thing, lumps of flying ballast coming through the windscreen being a cited concern (didn't apply inside GUVs of course, but you really wouldn't have wanted to anyway). They introduced foam rubber mats to tie over the windscreens to protect against this. They didn't work because instead of having a tie-down point in each corner they just had one on each side, so the airflow would get under the bottom edge of the mat and flip it upwards like the peak of a baseball cap. They made useful kneeling mats for railway staff though.

    1223:

    Because pollen has the same problem as vertebrate bones.

    Yes, if you are looking solely for mass extinctions, I am not surprised that you find them, or nothing. Marine molluscs, corals etc. are not generally species that have have very local distributions, though they are often pernicketty about their environment, because of the mobility of their spawn, so you could have widespread extinctions of local land or freshwater species without it showing up in their record.

    Obviously, Yellowstone and Deccan would have impacted land and freshwater species more than marine ones, and the same is probably true of at least some meteorite impacts.

    1224:

    Telemarketing is THEFT!

    1225:

    mdlve @ 1197: Except of course no one saves money in a savings account anymore given they haven't paid any significant interest in decades.

    I still have a small savings account. You're right that it doesn't pay significant interest.

    It's a generational thing. I had a savings acount as a child (when they actually DID still pay interest) and I have one today. But that doesn't mean I have to be an idiot and keep a lot of money in it.

    1226:

    gasdive
    NO IT CANNOT WORK ... for all of the year, all of the time & especially not when it's winter & there is no wind - like RIGHT NOW.
    WHERE is the power going to come from in the middle of the night, when there is no wind & the Sun is not visible, AT ALL, for 15 hours of the day? - - - Answer me that, OK?

    1227:

    In case anyone is interested, The Carol Burnett Show - Season 10, Episode 0002 that has the Went With the Wind comedy sketch can be found on YouTube ... curtain rods & all.

    1228:

    WHERE is the power going to come from in the middle of the night, when there is no wind & the Sun is not visible, AT ALL, for 15 hours of the day? - - - Answer me that, OK?

    It the past 6 years I've answered your sneering condescension with polite (or as polite as I could manage) detailed, costed, referenced multiple parallel proposals for how you can get yourself out of the shit situation that you've made for yourselves and actually avoid dying.

    Today I don't feel well, and so I've had enough of pandering to your ego and superiority complex.

    Fuck off and die.

    1229:

    Re: 'Meanwhile, the list of symptoms and the locations where it was alleged to have happened made no sense:'

    Also - the people affected weren't examined until long past onset. One of the early stories mentioned UPenn researchers who had been asked to review these cases: they commented that too much time had passed.

    Unless such illnesses have always been going but have never been reported until now, this is just plain weird. As for the stress and underlying medical conditions as likely causes: aren't these people usually interviewed and pre-screened for job fitness? (They weren't all DT appointees.) Makes no sense.

    1230:

    "One thing to bear in mind on bulk energy storage generally; the business case for anything like that right now is limited by the existence of gas fired power stations."

    If you confuse a purpose by introducing money then the money becomes the primary purpose and the proper purpose takes second place. If people can see a way to do something cruddily to make more money then they will do that even though it does not produce the best result.

    "It takes an hour or three for a gas station to spin up and start generating power, so if there is an unpredicted spike in demand you need something to fill that gap. During that time there is an excess of demand over supply, so the power you can provide is valuable... ...you sell the stored energy back to the grid at a much higher price than you paid for it. Subtract out running expenses and you should be left with a profit."

    You get exactly the same fundamental situation over the whole range of lesser scales also. You have a switched mode converter stage to provide power to a varying load. When the load increases suddenly it takes the control loop a few cycles to ramp up the output from the converter stage to suit. So you have a reservoir capacitor on the output which releases stored charge until the converter stage catches up.

    On the power-station scale the details are a bit different because it's AC but the operation isn't. While the primary generator is ramping up and cannot maintain the output within spec on its own then the inverter reacts to the electrical conditions by feeding in power from the battery storage to make up the difference.

    On the grid scale it's still the same principle only the "reacts to the electrical conditions" bit is more complex because the conditions themselves are. In particular there needs to be a predictive element so that slow-responding primary generators can anticipate the need to spin up and be ready to provide it when their output is needed, and so that storage elements of limited capacity can be coordinated to store charge when most available, be charged when they are needed, and release it to best effect without running out too soon. The predictive element necessarily introduces some uncertainty, but it's still all a matter of concrete measurable quantities (loads, capacities, response times, states of charge, etc etc) that behave in a well-defined way.

    Now you slap on top of that a control system which instead of working directly with the actual quantities, combines groups of them into single aggregate "figures of merit" and seeks to maximise those. The algorithm for the combination is opaque, and while its results can be broadly predicted they are subject to extreme short-term variations and violent responses to factors like the incidence of collective simultaneous flatulence in Brazil and other such random unanticipated extraneities, so that in the end it basically comes down to "ask the oracle" (who is insane). The output is, as one might expect, at best poorly correlated with any kind of direct measurement of the grid's operation, and the maximisation process is unstable and vulnerable to pathological input, which leads to all sorts of nasty positive-feedback traps where the system gets stuck maximising something irrelevant or even noxious.

    You do this by artificially creating a situation in which large chunks of the power system are not even expected to exist unless they arise as side-effects of operations intended to exploit the deficiencies of that bizarre parody of a control system in order to extract resources from the power system operation and use them for... [shrug] some other fucking thing entirely, so the power system operation has to extract additional resources from its users to compensate.

    The last two paragraphs are not a good idea.

    "Three possible solutions I can see:"

    The first two are basically the same thing: create a system that does not consider the desired outcome to be its purpose, has no real control system nor coordination, does not accept any kind of input other than quantities of one specific unit which is not a unit of any aspect of its performance, and does not display any deterministic relationship between changes to those inputs and any alteration in its performance; then try and modulate one of those inputs in the hope of nudging the system's operation a bit closer to the desired outcome, with no guarantee that it will actually do that or that the system won't discover, in the infernally biologicoid way such things do, some alternative way to metabolise the change in input to its own better advantage instead of to yours.

    The third one doesn't bother with all that crap and just creates a system that does consider the desired outcome to be its purpose in the first place.

    As someone pointed out above, "give someone a job and make sure they do it or else" is after all still how private companies do operate internally. If you don't think it's a workable principle you can't expect to avoid it by means of privatisation. All that means is that different people are giving out the jobs and making sure they get done. But now they are also the ones deciding what the jobs are, and the decisions are made to meet their own objectives, which are not the same as yours... and you don't now get to tell them they're doing it wrong and to pull their socks up or else.

    Of course we need a competent government. But we need one of them anyway, and as I think I've said before I regard it as too obviously necessary a prerequisite, and one which I have absolutely fucking no useful idea of how to achieve, to preface any and every kind of proposal with a restatement of that.

    1231:

    I agree that it's a fairly daft idea for pretty much the same reasons, but the pipelines thing isn't quite as bad as all that. Granted it's from an outfit who make the stuff, but this PDF about HDPE pipes is quite good: http://qenos.com/internet/home.nsf/(LUImages)/WP%20HDPE%20Pipe%20is%20Hydrogen%20Ready/$File/202-qen-wp-hdpe-pipe-hydrogen-ready_final.pdf

    It points out that while indeed hydrogen diffuses through pipes, so does methane, and not all that much more slowly; and because of the difference in energy content by volume, the total rate of energy loss is lower for hydrogen at equal pressure in the same pipe.

    Also, hydrogen doesn't structurally bugger HDPE like it does steel.

    A good deal of the gas network at a local level is still the old coal gas network from the days of every town having its own gasworks. The same pipes would do for methane, and coal gas appliances could trivially be converted to methane by changing the jets in the burners. Coal gas is about 50% hydrogen, and if hydrogen diffusion and embrittlement was a problem it wasn't a big enough one that I've heard mention of it.

    Coal gas has roughly 5/9 the energy content of methane, so going that way the capacity was fine also, but hydrogen is about 1/3, so going that way you need a 3x capacity increase. How much of that is already there spare and how much would need new pipes I have no idea. The local gas network only has to be able to provide 25mbar at the premises, but it can be anything up to 2 bar, and how much it varies with time and distance I have no clue about, so I can't even begin to estimate.

    (A lot of the old metallic pipework has now been internally sleeved with HDPE because of corrosion. This does reduce the capacity a bit, but also removes any possible concern about embrittlement.)

    1232:

    "11000km2, which is roughly two-fifths of the total area enclosed by the M25 (assuming it to be a circle of 188km circumference)."

    AARGH BOLLOCKS

    Forgot to divide by π.

    3.9 times the total area enclosed by the M25.

    Adjust subsequent comments about available space accordingly.

    1233:

    People whose knowledge and expertise I have reason to trust in these matters tell me that solar hot water is simply not sensible any more. Solar PV gathers more energy more effectively in price/hassle terms and you can use the electricity to heat water if that’s your aim. It has the added benefit that you can use electricity for several other things as well.

    I’ll stick with their advice.

    1234:

    11000km.sq? So a bit less than the roughly 1250km.sq used just for roads then. Sure, no possible way that much land could be used for something as trivial as generating some energy.

    1235:

    The more I see the objections people here make to PV the more clearly they show up as overwhelmingly more cultural than technical. So even a dead-end compromise like solar water heating might do them some good as a cultural acceptance gateway drug. Pretty sure they are getting solar anyway, and might continue insisting it doesn’t work as they do.

    1236:

    gasdive
    NO YOU HAVE NOT. Lots of supposedly-costed/worked-out ""solutions" which work very well at your latitude, but not mine or Charlies. the shit situation that you've made for yourselves and actually avoid dying. - Oh, living in London is a death sentence is it?
    How about your blind arrogance? I know we have a problem, but your "solutions" are not sufficient. Someone mentions bulk energy storage - well that is the exact problem we have ... that &/or non-Carbon energy sources that do NOT depend on wind ( not blowing, like right now ) or solar ( not shining much , like right now ). Well?

    CHARLIE? Can you persuade him that he is "not even wrong"?

    Damian
    My "objections" to PV are NOT "cultural" - they are financial & practical.
    The first cost is, probably deliberately, unreasonably high. It only works when the Sun is shining, or, at a lower rate,during cloudy daylight. When do I need power most? Yeah - see my previous multiple posts: In January, at night.
    Um, err ...

    1237:

    "I said the limiting case [snip]"

    OK. To me the thread seemed to have somehow devolved into a mass of confusion with a 10km box of artificial lava involved somewhere but nobody actually having any proper idea what anyone else was on about, and I couldn't untangle it by reading, so I decided to start from the definite bits of starting premise that I did manage to locate and calculate from there, and see if/how the results came to suggest a 10km box at any point.

    Yeah, I couldn't figure that out either. It was like someone saying the new airport would cover the area of 500 football fields and everyone objecting that no one could find 500 football fields in one place and anyway we shouldn't have to choose between aircraft and football.

    I didn't consider subdivision into smaller units because I didn't manage to find an actual suggestion of it, and because I was taking the view that it only works if you use large units that can take the best advantage of the square/cube scaling to minimise the loss of the stored heat, so I didn't think it worthwhile to bother with the extra complication.

    I took the view that in context it was self evident. Like saying British Rail transports 500 million people. It seems self evident that BR doesn't have a 500 million seat train and never will have. Instead there's a long discussion about how trains don't scale to that level. Just because it seems self evident to me doesn't mean it actually is.

    I do not think it's a good idea for the kind of daily scale blackout heat coverage domestic use you suggest, [snip]

    Maybe not. Here in Australia we have big houses. The space taken up by heat storage is still considered too much. The UK housing is basically shoeboxes. The losses shouldn't be too bad, I worked out a bit over 20W for a domestic size one.

    The insurance side of things I don't know. With the right salt or wax it would be cooler than a water heater. However common sense and insurance don't always line up. Maybe with a CE mark or something?

    But as Charlie says we've had the basic means of covering for that particular problem for yonks in any case: storage heaters. [snip a lot of stuff that I really couldn't agree with more about how shit is foisted upon us for no good reason and no one specifically decided]

    Yes, the solutions are mostly there, just not implemented for dumb institutional reasons.

    There was no need for them to be dogshit; 

    [snip lots of good stuff I agree with]

    "I can't make head nor tail of that page today"

    It is a bit of a pain

    Probably beyond me on a good day to be perfectly honest. Plus at this 'back of the envelope' stage accuracy isn't important.

    I didn't look at phase change because...[snip]

    Beyond those great reasons, there's a lot of molten salt setups that require the salt to stay molten, so if people are familiar with that they expect they're all like that, even when you tell them 30 times that they're not.

    Yeah, I cocked up on that bit.

    That doesn't matter. This is just an order of magnitude search for solutions, not a 50 million pound government feasibly study.

    About not fitting on rooftops, there seems to be a general assumption in the UK (or at least among those elements who think about it at all) that panels on roofs are the main part or the whole of what it's all about.

    So I've found out. Not sure what to do about it. Telling people that's not what it's about doesn't seem to do anything.

    Since they're actually only a minor part of it, where you put all the rest of them is a major consideration which cannot necessarily be dismissed by assuming solar power is only one of a mixed set of sources, but it rarely does seem to get considered.

    I think we've considered it a lot on this blog. There's no answer that people like. At some point it's going to have to be somewhere people don't like. Or accept the alternatives, which are much worse than making an agribusiness plant look different. Even if you have classified your industrial landscape "outstanding natural beauty".

    Applying the above x4 correction to the total area estimate gives 11000km2, which is roughly two-fifths of the total area enclosed by the M25 (assuming it to be a circle of 188km circumference). Of course it's a lot less formidable split up into little bits, and I dare say space could be found, but finding it without fucking anything else up too much would be a wee bit tricky.

    Worth reading "Sustainable Energy – without the hot air" by David J. C. MacKay. Spoiler alert, country size energy solutions require country size solutions.

    "And indeed [snip me waffling on]  ...about half of the food consumed in the UK is imported)."

    [snip] It's a bit binary for comfort. Using partly multiple fixed links to different sources and partly shipping gives better resilience and less abrupt degradation.

    Yes, a problem that can be alleviated but not eliminated.

    But about that "partly shipping" bit, a significant part of UK foreign policy for the last century has been all about fucking up the Middle East in pursuit of oil, first as strategic fuel for the Navy and then for the country as a whole. It's quite possible that many of the commentariat are implicitly or explicitly bothered about the prospect of a repeat performance in North Africa (which after all is a backwards place full of primitive camel-herding... er, brown-skinned people who need telling what to do, just like the Middle East in WW1)... you can probably guess it's "explicitly" in my case, and I also consider that as a compelling reason for getting off oil which has been clear for a long time and quite independently of any environmental concerns.

    Spot on. I'd include myself amongst those who think depending on people who you've punched in the face over and over is a bit fraught.

    I know all about the bloody food, it goes back centuries... [snip a lot of interesting stuff I didn't know] Concern during WW1 and even the extended period of rationing during and after WW2 still never convinced us the situation was basically shit. It means Britain doesn't fit my notion of a fundamentally viable country, but nobody else seems to even notice.

    It's amazing what people get used to. We have 2 weeks reserve of liquid fuel in Australia (if the reserve is full). If there's a supply interruption we have 2 weeks (assuming there's no panic buying) before food supplies stop going into the cities. No one cares.

    1238:

    _My "objections" to PV are NOT "cultural" - they are financial & practical. _

    Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

    Sorry, the main lesson about being inside the box is that, in general, you don't know you're inside the box. It's the same way that fish don't think water is a thing. And you'd get at least a little bit of benefit of the doubt if you were even a little bit less unpleasant about it. But I guess some people really are just consumers of the way the world is and won't put any effort into improving it, but they will complain about proposed solutions before, during and after they enjoy the outcomes.

    1239:

    If there's a supply interruption we have 2 weeks (assuming there's no panic buying) before food supplies stop going into the cities. No one cares.

    It's worse than that Jim! There's an additive used to reduce nitrogen oxides in diesel exhaust that most modern trucks need to run, which is a kind of synthesised urea. Due to COVID there has already been a supply chain shortage (ex China) that has already led to delays in all sorts of industries. See

    https://theconversation.com/australias-shortage-of-diesel-additive-adblue-is-serious-but-we-can-stop-it-going-critical-173588

    1240:

    AARGH BOLLOCKS

    Doesn't matter. These sort of discussions are for working out if ideas are possible or orders of magnitude out. If the number comes out at 11 million sq km, then it's not fitting in the UK no matter what, forget it. If it's on the same order as a city, then you can run numbers more carefully. One city size or three doesn't matter at this point.

    Same thing with money, if its 500,000 pounds a year for each person, forget it. Even if further study cuts it to 50,000. You're still barking up the wrong tree.

    And in this case, time to implement. It's got to be quick. 4 years, perfect, doesn't matter if it's really 15, if it's 40, then forget it.

    1241:

    Which didn't stop Russia being convicted of doing it by much (most?) of the USA and, God help us all, the UK's lickspittle media.

    https://lansinginstitute.org/2022/01/14/havana-syndrome-a-fact-of-russias-hostility-against-u-s-diplomats/

    1242:

    Pigeon @ 1232:

    If you confuse a purpose by introducing money then the money becomes the primary purpose and the proper purpose takes second place. If people can see a way to do something cruddily to make more money then they will do that even though it does not produce the best result.

    I agree. The trouble is, all the alternatives suffer from exactly the same problem, but with less visibility.

    Money is basically a numerical model of the economy; when we say something costs £1 that is a measure of the amount of resources our civilisation needs to put in to providing that thing. As a civilisation we don't have infinite resources, so we need to make trade-offs between things. (I know you realise this; I'm just laying out the pieces here). We translate resources into money so that we have some kind of general way of comparing the resource costs of apples and oranges.

    We also have the problem of incentives. It would be nice to believe that everyone is community-spirited and will naturally do the best they can for everyone else, but that isn't so. People are generally well-disposed to people they can see and interact with directly, but anyone not personally known is a distant abstraction who doesn't matter at an emotional level. Hence the saying (often attributed to Stalin) that "one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is a statistic". So if we want people to act in a way that benefits the society generally when they would prefer to be doing something else then we need to provide some kind of personal incentive. To incentivise someone to do something you first need to determine exactly what the thing is, and then establish a relationship between that thing and some kind of reward-punishment scale. Rewards and punishments both consume resources, so one of the trade-offs we have to make is how much of our resources to spend on these incentive systems.

    Goodhart's Law says that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Capitalism makes money both a measure and a target, so of course money ceases to be a good measure. Or more pithily, "you get what you pay for". Economists call this the agency problem.

    OK, so if money is a bad measure, and therefore a bad target, lets get rid of money. Umm. Back in the 1970s I heard a joke about a computer that was told that most accidents on stairs happened on the top or bottom steps, so it recommended that the top and bottom steps be removed. Proposals to replace money as a basis for making decisions have much the same logic.

    Impossibility proofs are always tricky, but I'm reasonably certain that any method of making decisions that doesn't include money as an explicit incentive will fail in one of two ways (possibly both):

    • The incentives will take some other form, but they can't be better than money because of Goodhart's law: whatever scale is used for measuring and incentivising will automatically become a bad measure.

    • There will be no incentives, and as a result the entire system will run into the ground because nobody can ever be bothered to do anything.

    The exact failure mode of a large organisation depends on a lot of things, so I can't say that "if you recreate the CEGB then the result will be X" for some specific X. But I can say with a high degree of confidence that it isn't going to work significantly better than the current system, and may well be a lot worse. One common failure mode is empire building: people are rewarded for having a lot of underlings, so everyone tries to accumulate underlings as fast as possible. In Goodhart's terms, underling count becomes a target, and so ceases to be a good measure.

    Back @ 830 you said "I want a system which is not deliberately set up to promote [the parasites'] existence.

    No system is deliberately set up to promote parasitism, but whatever system you set up will be infested by parasites over time unless you include a control mechanism. This is a corollary of Goodhart's Law. The question is: how do you design a system to minimise the impact of the parasites? Putting everything in one big black box has proven to be a bad design.

    1243:

    Somewhere up-thread there was discussion of autonomous rail cars. Here is an article on the subject.

    1244:

    No system is deliberately set up to promote parasitism

    Respectfully disagree with that. In the general case, that's specifically what Capitalism is and means. Capitalism is specifically and explicitly about providing owners of capital with a means to live from the work of others without themselves doing anything to earn a living. It's set up that way by the system, there's no particular logical reason for it to be possible.

    1245:

    I recall seeing a presentation on autonomous rail transportation, individual self-powered cargo vehicles being routed around the rail system in the UK. That was back in the early 1980s if memory serves. Since then, crickets.

    1246:

    For the reason I gave in #1089. The technology is irrelevant; there simply is not any spare capacity.

    1247:

    Damian
    Are you in the UK?
    If not, you may not realise the ( IMHO - deliberate ) obstructions put in the way of installing one's own PV here.
    My practical objections are the ones about long dark winter nights, when there is no wind.
    Yet: my house is theoretically almost perfect for PV: The "S" wall faces 157° - so the "W" wall & main back roof automatically faces 247.5°
    But the return on investment is almost negative. Game not worth the candle.

    Paul
    Autonomous rail ....
    Yeah, right. OK ... IF you have the spare track-&-time capacity. We don't, or not mostly, anyway.
    Not on the pages, but "London Reconnections" have spotted this & are discussing it internally.

    1248:

    Me: No system is deliberately set up to promote parasitism

    Damian: Respectfully disagree with that. In the general case, that's specifically what Capitalism is and means.

    It depends on what you mean by "capitalism" and "set up".

    Capitalism wasn't designed: it evolved out of feudalism and mercantilism. Nobody in government said "I've got this really neat idea, lets call it capitalism". The nearest you get to a blueprint was Adam Smith. His point was that the capitalist system worked better than mercantilism, but he wasn't planning a new thing, he was describing what he saw around him. His contribution was a theoretical framework for understanding something that was already happening.

    Capitalism is specifically and explicitly about providing owners of capital with a means to live from the work of others without themselves doing anything to earn a living.

    Does that actually stand up to observation? I can think of a few people who actually do live off capital but don't earn a living (Paris Hilton springs to mind). But my impression is that most of the very wealthy do actually work; they go to an office pretty much every day, where they read paperwork, meet people, make decisions, and generally do all the other stuff that looks like "work". They may be badly over-paid for that work, but its not idleness. And capitalists who don't do that work tend not to last very long; all their money gets syphoned off by the parasites when they aren't paying attention.

    (The original people who lived off the labour of others without doing work were the feudal aristocrats who preceded the capitalists. For them "trade" was a dirty word. They looked down on the grubby capitalists who actually had to work for a living, until suddenly owning lots of farms stopped being a money spinner, they discovered that now the capitalists had all the money, and started having to marry their daughters off to capitalists to stop their estates being repossessed).

    *It's set up that way by the system, there's no particular logical reason for it to be possible. *

    (I assume "it" is "be paid far more money than your work is worth".)

    Its an epiphenomena; if you read "The Wealth of Nations" there is nothing in there about billionaires; in fact in that mythical unicorn "the free market" there wouldn't be any billionaires because free markets provably eliminate inefficiencies, and the billionaire boss is an inefficient way of doing things. So no, its not "logical" in the sense of someone looking down the list of requirements and saying "So therefore the design must include the billionaires here." Its just that you always get them in one form or another.

    1249:

    (Paul: I was the person who posted that very same link to the Ars piece about autonomous railcars a couple of days ago.)

    You are wrong about Paris Hilton: she's a celeb/influencer who has carved out a business empire based on her personal brand that's now worth more than the Hilton hotel chain, according to its market valuation. Per wikipedia, her perfume line alone has brought in revenue of over US $2.5Bn to date. She's actually quite, quite terrifying to read about -- I'm certain she's a lot smarter than her carefully-curated public persona ("airhead heiress") suggests.

    1250:

    Yes, I have heard that before. It is true that it is a lot less hassle, but it is NOT true that you can use the electricity to heat water in winter. The conversion loss renders it a waste of time. You can trivially check that for yourself. I know people with both, and their experience matches the physics (surprise! surprise!(

    1251:

    I was the person who posted that very same link to the Ars piece about autonomous railcars

    Oops. My bad.

    You are wrong about Paris Hilton: she's a celeb/influencer who has carved out a business empire...

    Interesting. So, does anyone have any good examples of actual idle rich people? I.e. spending most of their time spending money instead of doing stuff calculated to increase their wealth?

    (I was tempted to say "spending most of their time having fun", except that I really enjoy my work, so where does that put me?)

    1253:

    The problem is that empty frivolity gets boring after a while. So most of the "idle" rich find something to fill the empty hours with, and it's not necessarily unproductive because if you throw enough money at something you almost invariably get results.

    (Random example Mackenzie Scott, formerly Bezos, net worth $62Bn: in the past two years she's donated $8.5Bn to charity and seems to be determined to give it away to good causes -- but the money is piling up faster than she can spend it, even at her current prodigious rate.)

    1254:

    There's a bit of nasty politics lurking, too.

    In most of the world, including the UK, I can get subsidies (from interest free loans through guaranteed high feed-in tariffs to straight cash) for fitting photovoltaics. I can also get subsidies in colder areas (again, including the UK) for thermal panels.

    However, combined PV-T panels are generally out of scope for at least one, if not both, of the available installer subsidies in virtually all regions. Which means that the people buying large numbers of panels buy separate PV and thermal panels, pushing the volume market in that direction - the people buying large numbers tend to have the space to fit both to meet their usage.

    From a physics point of view, this is suboptimal; one of the limiting factors in PV panel efficiency is panel temperature, and PV-T panels address that by cooling the panels in the same way solar thermal panels are cooled.

    The resulting panels aren't as good for the thermal side as a pure thermal panel, but that's compensated for by considerably more efficient PV output; further, you can tune the system if you use a heat pump instead of a simple heat transfer loop so that the thermal output is as good as a plain thermal panel, and you still get more electricity out than a plain PV panel.

    The panels themselves aren't that challenging to produce, either - start with the PV layer, and run thin pipes underneath it for the cooling water. However, as you have to forgo subsidies to use them, they're less popular, and we run into the mass-production chicken-and-egg.

    1256:

    The more I see the objections people here make to PV the more clearly they show up as overwhelmingly more cultural than technical. So even a dead-end compromise like solar water heating might do them some good as a cultural acceptance gateway drug. Pretty sure they are getting solar anyway, and might continue insisting it doesn’t work as they do.

    The ongoing problem, both on this site and out in the rest of the world, is the blind assumption that because A works for me it must work for everyone - and lots of hand waving that problem B is actually a solved problem despite lacking any evidence.

    If I had a house (a very big if given property prices these days) I could in theory put solar water heating on my roof.

    Except these are the forecast high/lows (in Celsius) for the next 5 days - -5/-10, -8/-20, -6/-10, -7-25, -13/-21

    Now in theory in the day the sunlight will thaw out the system, but that thing will be frozen solid overnight - and the odds are lots of leaks created by the freezing of the water.

    Alternatively, I could drain the system when in danger of freezing - much added hassle, but more importantly a drained system isn't providing any hot water at all either.

    So this in a way amply demonstrates the problem that many of us have with solar - it simply isn't reliable enough for the realities of where we live even though it works perfectly for you where you live.

    1257:
    Except these are the forecast high/lows (in Celsius) for the next 5 days - -5/-10, -8/-20, -6/-10, -7-25, -13/-21

    Antifreeze?

    1258:

    There's also the flip side assumption to watch for: if it doesn't work for me, it's not worth doing at all.

    Practically, if we're to stave off fossil-fuel induced civilization collapse, we need a variety of solutions, where the solutions mesh together to deal with (maybe) 5% of the problem - be that 5% all year round in a fixed location, 5% in all locations but seasonal, or 5% as a mix of season and location.

    In turn, that means identifying everything with a positive energy return, and working out if (or how) to make good use of it. Maybe you'll need nuclear in the winter - or maybe solar in the summer will allow us to produce enough Sabatier-process methane to make up for the winter. The trick, though, is that we need to use everything that provides a component of the solution - even if (say) it only solves the problem for summer months.

    1259:

    A properly designed and constructed solar hot water system uses an antifreeze-type solution in the primary loop running through the sky-facing piping. There's also usually a biocide to stop fungus and algae growing in the system (one Youtuber has a homebrew algae growing system he built which looks remarkably like a solar hot water heater.)

    Note I said "properly designed and constructed" there. Assuming it's cold but the sky is clear and sunny during the day then a solar hot water system would produce some warm water even if the air temperature remains below freezing. Obviously its energy output is going to be less than during the summer but, like solar PV even in winter it will produce some energy for domestic use.

    BTW a quick search turned up details on Panasonic home PV panels. They come with a 25-year guarantee, they're a name brand that's likely to stand behind their guarantee and they cost about twice as much per square metre as the Chinese drop-shipper panels mentioned above. The online reference says they're actually 20% efficient, not 25% as I thought most PV panels are (300W dataplate for a 1.6 metre square panel) so the ROI for fitting decent-quality PV panels falls a bit more than my original BOTE estimate. I may have been thinking about "racecar" PV technologies that can get 25-28% efficiency at greater cost than commodity polysilicon panels can achieve.

    1260:

    Yes. They aren't cheap, but they DO collect essentially all of the sunlight as heat, unlike photovoltaic conversion. Also, the 20% conversion efficiency assumes perfectly clean panels, and they wouldn't stay that way long where I live, or be practically cleanable (both fairly typical for the UK). 15% is an optimic figure for efficiency in practice, and is what I use.

    1261:

    Yes, it does stand up to observation.

    Many years ago, Robert Reich asked the question on a broadcast commentary, "what do CEOs do that makes them worth ten times what the company president gets?"

    The ultrarich, as a class, are about ego. Therefore, they go to the office (no one ever suggested that they don't have what I call "white man syndrome", that is, you are what you do for a living, and no job means no meaning), and play general "FORWARD" with whatever "bright idea" they've had.

    Evidence: deadlines for something that bear no relation to what is actually achievable, even with "whatever it takes" hours a week of everyone below them.

    Or, for that matter, I worked for Ameritech in the mid-nineties, in a start-up division that was going to be their entry in the long-distance sweepstakes (remember long-distance companies?). They nearly killed us with insane hours for two years, in one year we went from four teams to 27... and then, after spending three-quarters of a billion dollars, shut it down and gave it up.

    And then there was the "rightsizing" of the nineties, where the pre-Murdoch WSJ noted had nothing to do with corporate efficiency or anything other than Wall St. rewarding the CEO's stock options, and they laid people off until Wall St. stopped rewarding them at some point.

    1262:

    However, you are still ignoring the real downsides. This is particularly confounded in this case by people not budgetting in the total costs, both of building and maintaining the other facilities and of what we are losing by taking an approach (e.g. loss of farmland or moorland carbon-fixing).

    The worst is spending limited resources (whether money, political will, land area or whatever) on an unproductive technology, thus blocking actual improvements. Basically, solar power in the UK is mostly gesture politics.

    This is also why I object to electricification of our vehicle fleet as a solution - it isn't. At most it is part of a solution, and arguably not the greater part.

    We need to tackle the issue as an engineering problem, work out a path that leads where we need to go, put resources behind approaches compatible with that pro rata to the benefit they will deliver, and NOT put resources behind ones that are incompatible with it or even just irrelevant.

    1263:

    So enjoyable I watched the whole thing. Thanks!

    Btw, his last suggestion, a switcher? There existed switchers that literally ran not on steam, but compressed air, for uses where no sparks were allowed.

    1264:

    Oh, electrification is great.

    Now, the trick is to force 90% of the people who drive to commute every day, 90% being one person in a car, to use public transit. That would be huge.

    1265:

    Re: Don't Look Up

    I did see the movie, and it really isn't about a comet hitting the Earth, that is just a plot device. The real plot is about how people react to undeniable evidence that the world is about to end. The producers/director freely admit it is really about how people/governments are treating climate change (the other really active sub-thread!). The movie was filmed, I believe, before Covid, but they also admit it works for that too.

    It is not completely serious, think of it as black satire, although we know from OGH's experience how satire and reality keep blending together.

    1266:

    Indeed, but what I see you and a lot of others on this blog do is say "this only solves 5% of the problem, therefore it is worthless". Solar power in the UK is a perfect example - even in the UK, it has a positive RoI on energy invested, and as an engineering problem, solar is a component of the final solution. It only solves the summer peaks in England, but it's a net positive overall.

    Vehicle fleet is a different case - we also need to reduce the size of the vehicle fleet considerably, because we cannot afford the energy input of replacing the entire fleet without running out of time. We thus need to consider things like cargo bikes for the last mile, small EVs (mobility scooters, eBikes etc) for those unable to walk or cycle easily instead of cars, and many other things as well.

    Part of the problem here is that we don't as a country have the political will to fix this stuff - and people like you are used as justification for telling me that I should just buy an Audi Q8 for my personal use instead of considering an e-assist bike or a Tesla because "electrification isn't the solution". The underlying problem won't go away while we wait for a complete solution - and arguing that we should not take any partial steps because they don't provide a complete solution has resulted in people not taking any steps at all but going for business as usual.

    We are not going to get out of this crisis in time if we continue to wait until we've engineered a perfect solution - we have wasted 20 years trying to do that and got nowhere. At this point, we need to take partial steps and see what happens. Remember that the option is not "solar panels or not use that energy" right now - it's "solar panels or rely on gas instead" - and relying on gas instead is eating into our remaining time till critical.

    1267:

    I was referring to the UK. Electrification is being used to move towards MORE dependence on road transport (with the excuse that it's now GREEN), ignoring the extra problems it causes and the fact that our electricity is and will be generated mostly from burning fossil fuels. Remember that electrification of the fleet and converting heating to electricity will triple our electricity requirements.

    1268:

    Antifreeze?

    I see Nojay has noted that this is done for a properly designed system. The problem of course is that drives the price up, making it harder for people to afford and to justify.

    And even with antifreeze I doubt you are getting any significant amount of hot water out of the system.

    Today sunrise was at 7:46 and sunset is at 17:15. So maybe 5 hours of reasonable sunlight fighting against the outside temperatures, and not providing any hot water heating at the peek times.

    So, if you live in the right place it can be a benefit, but for many of us it is a lot of money for little summertime gain.

    1269:

    And opposition to electrification is being used to move towards more dependence on road transport, but burning diesel or petrol instead.

    The move to more dependency on single-occupancy road transport is happening regardless of the vehicle fuel type. All that "no to electric" does is shift us to more diesel and petrol cars instead of electric cars.

    And when you start actually squeezing your elected councillors on reducing that dependency, there's a lot of shouting from a small number of people about how insisting that it be easier to walk or take the bus is "genocide of the disabled and elderly", rather than an acceptance that single occupancy road transport is not the answer.

    1270:

    That's because you haven't done your calculations correctly, or thought things through. If it solved even 5% of the problem, I would say "go for it". I am pretty sure that solar farms are actively harmful (even for just our CO2 balance), which leaves PV on buildings. At MOST, that might solve 1%, and is being used as a fig-leaf to avoid doing anything more productive.

    The problem with the fleet is mostly because the push to electrification is harming our attempts to move in the directions you describe. Also, you may not have noticed that it has given the DaFTies the excuse to build more roads and promote private vehicles.

    1271:

    "As for the stress and underlying medical conditions as likely causes: aren't these people usually interviewed and pre-screened for job fitness?"

    Yes they are, but as for the stress part of that I can assure you from a fair amount of experience and observation that pre-screening makes no difference whatsoever.

    1272:

    Converting heat to electric tripling or more than that the heating bills - which, you'll note, is what I said, some posts back.

    1273:

    "Fighting the outside temp".

    Let's see, somewhere here I have in my library a book on solar hot water from the seventies. IIRC, they had you build boxes, with glass covers, and the black pipes were inside that, so that they were protected from outside temperatures to some degree, with the additional benefit of the glass turning sunlight into heat....

    Of course, as I type that, my instant reaction is to put Fresnel lenses inside the glass, to focus it on the tubes.

    1274:

    Re: 'Which didn't stop Russia being convicted of doing it by much (most?) of the USA ...'

    I can't tell whether you're being sarcastic or not. And I haven't yet read all of that article you linked to although I did look up the org - mostly specialists in spy-ops, poli-sci, econ, etc. --- no scientists.

    Below are some articles on electrical and microwave deep-brain stimulation for use in surgery, medicine, rehab, etc. written by real scientists. This research is very important because it can be helpful for accident/injury victims, offset some aging-related declines in muscle and cognitive function --- maybe even be useful for long-haulers from various microbial infections. So, overall, I think this is too potentially beneficial to dismiss as someone's fantasy scenario. But as shown during the current pandemic - no way am I going to put my trust in non-scientists/medicos on what is fundamentally a sci/med issue.

    Various article abstracts on how EBS is being studied and used - now includes examining drug dependency.

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/electrical-brain-stimulation

    Neuroplasticity -

    https://www.koreascience.or.kr/article/JAKO201808962642958.pdf

    'The experience of a new environment can lead to changes in the connections of the nerves throughout life [1]. The ability of the brain to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections is called neuroplasticity [2]. Neuroplasticity is the basic mechanism of learning and memory and is the result of the restoration of functions after cerebral nerve damage. Conventional rehabilitation methods do not directly change the brain but mostly improve the function of the brain through appropriate environmental changes.

    Noninvasive brain stimulation is a method of neuromodulation by stimulating certain parts of the brain without surgical treatment using a magnetic field or an electric current. A transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is currently being used clinically [3]. Although TMS has the advantages of noninvasiveness and inability to cause skin irritation, it has the disadvantages of requiring expensive equipment and causing noise.

    TMS is based on the induction current induced by a change in magnetic field. The magnetic field in the tens of kHz is widely distributed to include all areas of the brain. Localizing the stimulation area in the brain is possible because microwave has a short skin depth. In this study, microwave is used as a method to change the action potential of the nerve. Moreover, the nerve firing rate (FR) is modulated by controlling the pulse repetition frequency (PRF).'

    https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7062898

    'A Miniature Energy Harvesting Rectenna for Operating a Head-Mountable Deep Brain Stimulation Device'

    Excerpt:

    'A deep brain stimulation device is successfully operated by the rectenna at a distance of 20 cm away from a microwave energy transmitter of power 26.77 dBm. The motivation of this paper includes creation of a deep brain stimulation device that operates indefinitely without a battery. From the application standpoint, the developed energy harvesting rectenna facilitates long-term deep brain stimulation of laboratory animals for preclinical research investigating neurological disorders.'

    For the spy fans - would it be possible to configure a mobile phone, laptop or mobile head-set work similarly? [Seems almost everyone at any office - and even outdoors while walking their pet or driving - is wearing these devices all the time.]

    Any tech can be used malignantly - but you won't be able to tell unless you acknowledge that such a tech is possible and then study it and its consequences thoroughly.

    Sorta related - impact on 5G networks on aircraft articles have been popping up on news feeds. No idea how this would impact how well EM/MW signals would be delivered, whether there'd be any interactions, etc. (Figure folks here would probably know or come up with good guesses.)

    1275:

    EC @ 1265
    SPOT ON:
    Electrifying all the cars, but not the railways, yeah? Providing semi-fake "subsidies" for PV (etc) panels then screwing the user for payback charges ... etc - etc - etc ad nauseam

    Simon F
    No - I don't know about "the others", but I recognise that PV / Solar / Wind power are, all of them, very useful.
    But they are not enough - we need more than that.
    This is what gasdive refuses to acknowledge or accept ...

    1276:

    Interesting. So, does anyone have any good examples of actual idle rich people? I.e. spending most of their time spending money instead of doing stuff calculated to increase their wealth? (I was tempted to say "spending most of their time having fun", except that I really enjoy my work, so where does that put me?)

    Yeah. Me. Except I'm not rich. My wife does well enough that I don't have to get paid to work, which is a good thing. I'm volunteering my own situation to save all the retirees, disabled, and stay-at-home parents from educating you properly, although they really, really should.

    Here's the thing: many vital jobs--mothering, for example--not only do not pay, they require the worker to pay quite a lot to do them. These essential workers have their living needs covered by others, while they're stuck doing this work full time.

    Many activists are in my boat: we're not getting paid for our work. Rather, we stumbled into a situation where we could do it without getting fired for it. That's why there are not very many of us around. Unfortunately, systems like much of US environmental law are adversarial by design. If there aren't (unpaid) activists in the adversary position, there's no way to stop problems, because that's part of our job.

    The worst part is that this is a centuries' old strategy of keeping the riff-raff out of things like decision making and controlling money. You not only don't pay to do the job, you make it cost money to get the job, and you make it easy for employers to punish any of their employees who try to do it anyway. Thus, the only people who can sacrifice their time and resources to perform the great goods of governance, politicking, and (until recently) being trustees for the trusts of the rich and powerful, are those for whom paying work is anathema.

    And thus, by making governance a low-paying job* and requiring all sorts of training and other sacrifices to do it, you paradoxically set it up so that only the rich rule.

    *Yes, if you're feeling a facepalm coming on for all those times you called for politicians' salaries to be reduced, you now get it.

    1277:

    Firstly, I've done the maths - solar PV ends up solving about 5% of the problem, and is a net gain even including solar farms. You clearly haven't, and are asserting that it won't help from ignorance.

    Secondly, I'm pushing locally for movement away from the use of single occupancy vehicles within the Ring Road around my town; I can tell you that you're simply wrong when you say that the push to electrification is harming our attempts to move in the right direction, because fleet electrification is not. The people actively working on this at local government level put out press releases about electrifying the car fleet, sure, because that's the only thing they think they can do without become unelectable.

    We have had a big win at the last local elections, where several candidates who explicitly said that they were opposed to single occupancy vehicles in town got in, and have been pushing for changes, but the pressure against it is nothing to do with electrification once you move beyond the headlines; it's that most of our elected representatives are utterly terrified that if they make it even slightly harder to use a single occupancy 7 seater vehicle as your only form of transport outside the home, you'll render yourself unelectable.

    Now, I'm hoping that the candidates I (and others like me) backed last time win re-election. But, to quote one local councillor (under Chatham House rules): "we can't restrict single occupancy vehicles; if we do that, they'll start deliberately blocking public transport routes, and that'll mean the buses become uneconomic." When pressed on whether this behaviour would be illegal, the same councillor then said "yes, but if we push the police to act on the obstruction, the headlines will all be about how we're picking on innocent motorists". It's taken huge pressure, but they're now looking into whether it would be acceptable to use cameras (I'm outside London, so we need special permisssion for this) to enforce no entry signs, and the big back-pressure wasn't "but my EV!", it was "but what if I make a mistake while driving? It's unfair to punish me for a simple mistake when I'm driving!"

    None of that has anything to do with electrification; it's all about a fear that if they pick on law-breaking drivers, they'll upset the voters. Seen elsewhere is the notion that London's ULEZ and Manchester's CAZ are not about pollution, but about "punishing the ordinary man"; again, EV or not isn't relevant, it's the same idea that if you make it harder for drivers to go somewhere in a 3t Range Rover with only themselves in it, then you're simply out to inflict pain. When you confront these same people with the benefits to alternative forms of transport of not having to share congested roads with motor traffic, they simply demand that you fix it without making it harder to use single occupant vehicles.

    And so we get stuck. The elephant in the room is that we simply don't have the physical space to support everyone who works in the centre of town driving in instead of taking the bus, or cycling, but there are no acceptable solutions to this that are (a) free of political pain, and (b) don't involve creating more road space without removing any of the other uses of space in town. In turn, this means that the only politically acceptable way to solve the issue is to somehow fold space so that we can fit 6 lanes, all at least 3 metres wide, in a 5 metre wide road.

    Now, if you follow this via the press releases, all you'll see is the local council patting itself on the back for supporting electrification - but that's being done because it's the only thing they can talk about without getting hammered from all sorts of places.

    Oh, and we consistently see that surveys about traffic get a lot of pro-car responses from "local residents" whose ISP is https://www.kyivstar.ua/ - when you then remove all "local residents" who are unwilling to either collect or have a code delivered in the local area, the responses swing massively away from the pro-car side. However, when we do that, the press kicks up a fuss about how it's undemocratic to not listen to "local residents" - despite the fact that there's decent evidence that the "local residents" aren't even in the same country.

    1278:

    There's also the flip side assumption to watch for: if it doesn't work for me, it's not worth doing at all.

    True, though I'm not seeing it on this site.

    What I am seeing is a lot of it has to be be solar, and if solar doesn't work then you need to move.

    1279:

    On energy storage, I remembered something about using molten Silicon. This is what I remembered:

    https://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/News/store-and-generate-energy-using-molten-silicon#:~:text=mitigates%20safety%20risks.-,Silicon%20has%20unique%20properties%20that%20allow%20it%20to%20store%20more,stored%20is%20converted%20into%20electricity.

    This is a newer development:

    https://www.solarpaces.org/mit-proposes-pv-to-discharge-energy-from-2400c-silicon-thermal-storage/

    Basically molten silicon with the heat extracted by PV, seems a good idea.

    As for the current debate, my comment from the last about electric cars applies. Basically, change is coming, adapt or we ALL die.

    1280:

    How much did you budget for the extra food we have to import and the carbon that is not being captured by plants (or the oxygen generated, or the atmospheric filtering)?

    In most parts of the UK, the reason that hammering single occupancy vehicles will not work is that there is not enough commonality of requirement. Yes, that is a consequence of our private car policies, but is where we are at. For example, the proportion of workers who are have fixed working hours is MUCH smaller than it used to be and, in many places, they are a minority. So we need a more practical solution.

    In the short term, we need to reduce the size and power requirements of private cars used for such purposes (ideally to the sort of glorified quad cycle Pigeon and I have proposed in the past), reduce the amount people need to drive in the first place (think out of torn superstores), increase the amount of cycling as an alternative to driving, rather than walking, and those are precisely what is being harmed by the CURRENT approach to electrification.

    Oh, yes, in THEORY, it's irrelevant, but not in practice.

    1281:

    Latest fun lab science project on the block: "Decarbonization tech instantly converts carbon dioxide to solid carbon."

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220119121411.htm

    Does it scale? Of course. Eutectic Gallium-Indium is readily available at, erm...

    Well, there's a lot of Gallium produced. 330 tons/year. https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020-gallium.pdf

    About the same amount of Indium is produced too, 770 tons/year. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/62409.pdf

    So really cool tech, but I'd give a note about that whole scaling up to handle gigatonnes of carbon thing.

    1282:

    Now, the trick is to force 90% of the people who drive to commute every day, 90% being one person in a car, to use public transit. That would be huge.

    As long as people live very dispersed from where they work this will be a problem. It's not like the River Rouge plant back in the day. Or the Pittsburgh area steel mills, also back in the day. Where the mill/factory workers lived within a mile or so of the mill/factory and walked to work.

    Now days most people live miles from where they work and except for some odd situations most people who live near each other don't work near each other. So you wind up with a system where people spend all kinds of time commuting to transfer points then commuting some more. And people will decide on a personal car almost every time. Even with no time savings. At least with the personal car they have more control over their time.

    Speaking from a USA perspective.

    1283:

    1269 - My problem with an EV is that the EV I need does not exist. I need one that can keep up with the traffic on a 70mph speed limit road, do 40 to 50 miles unrefuelled in Winter, and costs under £3000. Unless there are some well-used early examples of something like a Nissan Leaf or Renault Zoe, I can't think of a single type that meets all three criteria. Reasoning:-
    1) Speed; the best (shortest) routes I need it to cover are all UK NSL dual carriageway for about 10 miles.
    2) Range. I presently can't refuel at the far end of this trip, so I have to allow for doing a return journey that I must make 3 times a week, under the worst conditions I've encountered (roads closed by Police due to flooding). 3) Cost. I honestly can't spend more that about £3000 on a car ATM.

    1280 - OK, so what's your proposal for home healthcare, like healthcare assistants 3 days per week (minimum), district nurses, doctor home visits, if they can't travel in single occupancy vehicles? I'm not saying it can't be done; just that a "SOV bad" knee-jerk is not a solution.

    1284:

    I budgeted for solar farms on land that is not currently used for crop growing; the land in question currently grows a mix of pebbles and grass, and the nearby Arqiva-run solar farm shows that grass still grows behind the panels - they do not produce 100% shade.

    You're also not taking into account where I live - there is good public transport running 24/7, there are alternative transport methods like cycles and scooters available to hire. And yet even charging £200 in a "workplace parking levy", where the council increases business rates by £200 per parking spot in use between 9am and 5pm for vehicles without a blue badge is heavily opposed as "anti-car and hence anti normal person".

    Similarly, there's a set of bollards in town that constantly break, but are supposed to prevent cars from getting to certain locations in town centre unless they're loading or unloading. The local Pedestrian Association ran a protest there, where they simply stood where the broken bollard is, and the police ended up having to arrest 3 drivers for literally running protesters over in sight of uniformed officers. None of the drivers had permits to be passing through that location, and had the bollard been working, it would have prevented them coming in against the No Entry sign.

    The local press ran their story on this as about how the police are criminalising innocent motorists for an honest mistake - despite the fact that by the time the story was published, one of the drivers had already stated on social media (later brought up at trial) that their intent was to kill the protester for being in their way, and also added that No Entry signs are only advisory, anyway.

    The same publications that run this sort of attack on anything that might reduce the grip of the private car also recently ran a story about a woman elsewhere in the country who was penalised for parking a 4 tonne Ford Ranger Twincab in a car park, on the basis that it's "not reasonable" of the local authority to treat a 4 tonne vehicle that you require a C1 licence to drive as a light goods vehicle instead of a car.

    This is what makes it hard round here - there are alternatives (lots of them), but any attempt to impose anything that restricts the use of the private car at all, at any time of day, is seen as a war crime by the local press.

    1285:

    What I am seeing is a lot of it has to be be solar, and if solar doesn't work then you need to move.

    Yes. But I'm the one who got pilloried here for saying we need to abandon the lower Mississippi River. We (the US) are spending eye watering amounts of money to keep the Mississippi flowing down the same channel it has since us pale faced folks started that town near the end of it. And guess what? Big Muddy has it's own opinion of where the channel should be now. So we passed a law in Congress saying, nope, do what is needed to keep it flowing "here". So now we build dams, spillways, and such plus all kinds of flood control in New Orleans and the few hundred miles of rivers around it because our efforts have now made the river bottom ABOVE street level in New Orleans.

    The Old River Control Structure WILL fail during a flooding even at some point in the not to distant future and create all kinds of economic havoc. But until that failure we (the USA in general) will live in denial of a painful reality.

    1286:

    Extend the existing CPZ parking permits to permit essential workers to get around in SOVs.

    Remember, though, that what's currently being heavily opposed is not stuff that will affect those people - it's things like businesses having to pay to have parking spaces in the part of town that's well served by alternatives. That is apparently "unacceptable", because if you have to pay £200/year in extra taxes for a parking space to be occupied Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm, you're "dooming the elderly to an early death".

    We're not talking outright bans on SOVs at all - just restricting some of the antisocial ways they're used. But even something as trivial as "if your business is in an area well served by public transport, and does not permit the public to visit, then you will pay £200/year in extra rates for each parking space used by the business between 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday, unless the user has a blue badge" is enough to create huge amounts of noise.

    Thankfully, my local councillors are now holding firm against the noise - they're cottoning on that plenty of us use cars when appropriate (I have a Skoda for various use cases where my bike and cargo bike don't work, including going up to the in-laws just south of Gretna Green), but don't want the city to be giving space preferentially to cars when it could have plenty of room for pedestrians.

    1287:

    "There are some other potential craters out there (especially on Antarctica) that are too difficult to get to"

    Whaddabot the extremely sensitive gravity surveys carried out by satellites like GRACE and GRACE-FO? Do they show the known and possible other craters?

    1288:

    That didn't come out in the post I originally replied to.

    1289:

    "11000km.sq? So a bit less than the roughly 1250km.sq used just for roads then. Sure, no possible way that much land could be used for something as trivial as generating some energy."

    You appear to have dropped a zero from your second figure. Ignoring that, your comment also appears to imply that the land area being used for roads could be used to site solar panels. It can't. It's got roads on it.

    There is though a fair bit of wasted area alongside major roads, like the sides of motorway cuttings/embankments, which can't be used for anything else. That would certainly be a good place to find some of it, and I'm jolly sure I'm not the first to have thought of that.

    I didn't say it would be impossible to find the space. I said it would be tricky. Not only is it a very large total area, even if it is split into lots of little bits, but there is the requirement to find it rapidly, and both the scale and the speed exacerbate the difficulty by amplifying consequences which are insignificant enough to ignore on smaller scales. One which springs to mind is the step change in rapid run-off of rainfall from rendering 11000km2 of area suddenly non-absorbent. I don't actually have any idea if that really would matter or not, but it's a question that needs to be answered, and it's a dead certainty that there will be plenty of other things of that kind which need to be first understood to exist and then considered.

    In any case much of the point was to emphasise that the idea of sticking it all on the roofs is not the end of the story as it is often supposed to be, but in fact can't do more than make a minor contribution. And the way the numbers have come out says it still can't be much of a contribution even in a realistic situation where solar power is only part of the input, never mind the hypothetical extreme example of 100% solar plus 100% efficient storage that the calculation was about. I don't think I expected it to be quite as inadequate as it turned out. So the problem of "where do we find the land" needs to be addressed in any case, even if it is a lesser amount. Again, I'm not saying it can't be found at all. I'm just saying it does need some looking for.

    1290:

    "Alternatively, I could drain the system when in danger of freezing - much added hassle, but more importantly a drained system isn't providing any hot water at all either."

    No, but if it's gathering so little heat that it can't stop itself freezing then it's not going to be providing any hot water anyway.

    There's no need for the draining to be any extra hassle either. You could very easily arrange the system so that the panel loop just drains back into its reservoir when the circulating pump is off.

    Remarkably, they can provide significant heat output even if the air temperature is below freezing, although you do have to have taken good care to insulate the panels well (multiple glazing on the front and thick wads of something that won't go soggy when left on the roof for years round the back and sides, and the pipework too). Also, even if they don't gather enough heat to use the output as hot water directly, they still provide a useful amount of preheating so you need less energy from other sources to get it hot enough.

    1291:

    There is though a fair bit of wasted area alongside major roads, like the sides of motorway cuttings/embankments, which can't be used for anything else.

    I've seen one neat suggestion for utilising motorway verges, back from the emergency stopping lane -- ground-level vertical axis wind turbines. They would recover some of the energy from the vehicles driving along the road and displacing lots of air and convert it into electricity for the grid.

    1292:

    So this in a way amply demonstrates the problem that many of us have with solar - it simply isn't reliable enough for the realities of where we live even though it works perfectly for you where you live.

    The ones I saw in China were used to pre-heat water for hot water heaters — a way of cutting energy usage rather than replacing one technology with another. Better to think of them being like regenerative brakes for hybrid cars rather than EVs to replace ICE vehicles…

    1293:

    Speaking as a Philly ex-pat, Chicago ex-pat, Austin, TX, and Space Coast of FL, and now DC 'burb resident, at least 80% of the idiots driving in are single people in a car, commuting from the 'burbs, every day.

    Never mind "kiss and ride" or "park and ride" (oh, right, let's increase the price of parking, which will encourage them to, uh....)

    I can remember years of riding the Metra in Chicago, where it goes right down the Kennedy, watching thousands of idiots on the highway as we cruise past them, but "it's not as convenient".....

    1294:

    And why not put solar over the roads?

    1295:

    the trick is to force 90% of the people who drive to commute every day, 90% being one person in a car, to use public transit

    Why I didn't use public transit (when I commuted): time.

    Driving: 45 minute drive.

    Transit: walk to bus stop (15 minutes), take bus to subway station, take subway (2 lines, so transfer in middle), take bus to school. Total time including waiting for transfers and between modes: 150-180 minutes.

    Factor in minimal cargo capabilities (marking and textbooks are heavy) and inclement weather… and public transit was not really a viable option. And I worked within the same metro area I live in.

    Could I have moved? Yes, but not to a house I could afford, so back to renting in a largely uncontrolled marketplace. (Also, back to hassles of no private outdoor space, neighbours just the other side of a thin wall, etc…)

    1296:

    John Hughes @ 1255: Parallel Systems Autonomous Pod Train is an Obvious Grift

    When I read the original referenced article, I could see a lot of problems still to be resolved - like how do they handle road crossings - but I didn't get a GRIFT vibe from it.

    I was reminded of something I read back in the early days of LASERS ... "A solution in search of a problem". We know LASERS found all sorts of problems they solve today. I expect all these "autonomous" vehicle proposals will eventually do the same ... or else they'll go the same way as those "road railers".

    I also read somewhere that 99% of inventions turn out to be failures. Some of them are GRIFT, but most are just ideas that didn't work out.

    1297:

    "There are some other potential craters out there (especially on Antarctica) that are too difficult to get to" Whaddabot the extremely sensitive gravity surveys carried out by satellites like GRACE and GRACE-FO? Do they show the known and possible other craters?

    How do you guess? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilkes_Land_crater

    Problem is, until someone does the truly boring work of drilling into it, we won't really know how old it is or what it is precisely. It's been bracketed as less than 500 million years and more than 100 million years, so that might mean something.

    Of course, it's 450 km across, 2.5 times wider than Chicxulub. The lack of evidence for a freaking huge death wave suitable for the size of the crater is mildly disturbing.

    1298:

    The lack of evidence for a freaking huge death wave suitable for the size of the crater is mildly disturbing.
    There's this. What sort of rock is under that Wilkes Land crater?
    Direct measurements of chemical composition of shock-induced gases from calcite: an intense global warming after the Chicxulub impact due to the indirect greenhouse effect of carbon monoxide (2009) (Paywalled, but sci-hub has it...)
    and the papers that cite it: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9424245074753122536&as_sdt=5,33&sciodt=0,33&hl=en

    1299:

    pigeon @ 1286
    the EV I need does not exist. - you, too?

    1300:

    How low can you go?

    Your claim was that with temperatures of "high/lows (in Celsius) for the next 5 days - -5/-10, -8/-20, -6/-10, -7-25, -13/-21" the result would be:

    Now in theory in the day the sunlight will thaw out the system, but that thing will be frozen solid overnight - and the odds are lots of leaks created by the freezing of the water. Alternatively, I could drain the system when in danger of freezing - much added hassle, but more importantly a drained system isn't providing any hot water at all either.

    I point out that that is bollocks. Add some antifreeze and you're good down to -35C.

    So what do you do? Admit that you were wrong? No, you start whining that it wouldn't generate much heat in the depths of winter.

    Fuck off you dishonest prick.

    1301:
    There's also the flip side assumption to watch for: if it doesn't work for me, it's not worth doing at all.

    True, though I'm not seeing it on this site.

    Bwahahahaahha!
    1302:

    The lack of evidence for a freaking huge death wave suitable for the size of the crater is mildly disturbing. There's this. What sort of rock is under that Wilkes Land crater?

    Not a clue. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46612-y : "Wilkes Land in East Antarctica remains one of the last geological exploration frontiers on Earth. Hidden beneath kilometres of ice, its bedrock preserves a poorly-understood tectonic history that mirrors that of southern Australia and holds critical insights into past supercontinent cycles."

    Translating: no one to my knowledge has tried to get a rock core from under the ice. It was likely once part of Australia, likely similar to South Australia, whatever that means. The paper cited above works off outcrops above the ice, which don't include the gravitational anomaly.

    I'd also point out that the climax of the first X-Files movie took place over the anomaly, for what it's worth.

    1303:

    1292 - Using someone else's figure of 30m^2 PV per capita, and my figures for houses like the ones my neighbours and I live in, it comes out at solar panels on all domestic roofs makes something like 24/90 of needed capacity, and I'm working with UK semi and detached housing, not blocks of apartments where the issue is significantly worse (more people, less roof area).

    1294 - Are you sure about that? A significant amount of the more competent "vehicle styling" effort since the 1970s has gone into making wake vortices collapse rather than expand (reduced drag, hence higher theoretical top speed and lower actual fuel consumption for the driver). This also means less verge wake for the vertical axis turbines.

    1298 - Similar personal account - Taxi (free to me by statute law) takes ~35 minutes. "Public transport" is 15 mins walk to station, 35 mins on train into city centre, 10 mins walk to relevant bus stop, 13 mins bus, 12 mins walk to hospital: Total 1:25 hr not including waits for train and bus.

    1302 - That was me, not pigeon.

    1304:

    Yes, apparently I dropped a 0.

    No, I wasn’t suggesting that roads can magically be used for solar.

    What I was pointing out is that we are entirely used to roads occupying a lot of land (though actually, not as much as one might guess - the figure I gave 12500km.sq - is from Sheffield Unis land use survey that claims 0.049% of land is road. I don’t think that includes all parking etc though) and claiming that A Whole Eleven Thousand km.sq is a Massive Problem is perhaps being disingenuous.

    And given how little reason I have trust claims from EC, I’ll stick with relying on advice from greenbuildingadvisor.com staff. They have a good history of actual research.

    1305:

    Re solar hot water.

    I haven't seen any discussion or mention of any solar hot water systems that use a design less than 50 years old, and even then it was on the context of "it doesn't have to be that bad, it could be only as bad as this design I saw in a 50 year old book that wasn't up to date when it was published"

    A modern solar hot water collector is an angled black tube, part filled with a working fluid at its vapour pressure. The lower portion is surrounded by a glass tube, that has been evacuated. Because of that, the lower portion cannot lose heat by conduction or convection and so the outside air temperature has no effect on it. The upper portion protrudes into the hot water tank, or into a coolant circuit.

    In operation light enters the glass vacuum tube from any direction (front, back, sides, diffuse, direct, makes no difference) and strikes the black tube transferring energy. That becomes heat, making the black tube heat up. Some radiates away, but the vast majority is transferred to the working fluid inside the tube, boiling the fluid. The gas rises, to the top, increasing the vapour pressure. Eventually the vapour pressure is high enough that the boiling point of the fluid is lower than the temperature of the upper water tank. At that point the vapour condenses on the inner wall of the tube and runs down to the liquid in the lower part of the tube. As it condenses it gives up heat that is transferred to the water tank (or circuit). This system can easily boil water, even when the outside air temperature is well below freezing.

    When there's no light, the black tube cools by radiation down to the temperature of its surroundings. The liquid working fluid in the bottom part also cools. The gas phase working fluid in the top part stays at the tank temperature, but because the hot gas is light, and the liquid gas interface area is very small, and any hot liquid tends to float, the transfer of heat down from the tank into the tube is for all practical purposes zero. The tube acts as a one way heat valve, letting heat up into the water tank but not allowing it down and out.

    1306:

    Returnals Eternals Infernals 773:
    Hellnoy II, you missed this bit: Hellboy II: The Golden Army | Tooth Fairy Swarm Scene in 4K HDR https://youtu.be/CSkHnz5a68Q?t=476
    Watched all the youtube-available Hellboy II clips.
    Doesn't exactly match the movie, but close:
    31 EXT. SIDEWALK - NIGHT 31
    The crowd is screaming. Half a dozen smoldering fairies
    climb out of the smoking crater and snarl at the crowd.
    People shrink back in horror. One of the hungry critters
    jumps at a woman but-
    BLAM!! Hellboy shoots it in mid-air, ...
    efficiently shoots its fellows....
    Manning hurries forward, witness to his worst nightmare. A
    sea of camera flashes explodes on a grinning Hellboy.
    HELLBOY ...
    I guess we're out now.

    Oh OK, sure.

    wings unfold
    Just fucking say it, tired of playing with an entire armoury locked behind your disbelief.

    If you'll listen to me, "Be/Become Yourself, Fullfill Yourself, Protect the Weak".
    Make these times more interesting. (TVTropes jokes tend to get mocked, though. :-)

    Look at the Lyrics. "Look into the Left eye, now Right, Right, Left, now look Centre". It's a Mirror.
    Hm. (That's something I actually do, along with alternating eye closures. :-)

    1308:

    Gahhh, remember to proof read before hitting submit not after.

    "Eventually the vapour pressure is high enough that the boiling point of the fluid is higher than the temperature of the upper water tank."

    1309:

    "When there's no light, the black tube cools by radiation down to the temperature of its surroundings. The liquid working fluid in the bottom part also cools."

    And it should go without saying as it's perfectly obvious: it doesn't matter if that small amount of working fluid freezes. However given my history of assuming the perfectly obvious is obvious to everyone... I thought I should state the perfectly obvious.

    1310:

    "when we say something costs £1 that is a measure of the amount of resources our civilisation needs to put in to providing that thing."

    That may have some influence over it costing £1, but there are so many other influences that the £1 ends up indicating very little about the amount of resources used. There's too much noise to extract a useful signal.

    Your own example of how a storage facility is managed describes a system which depends on the £1 not being a measure of resources used. The amount of resources the storage facility uses to provide a given amount of discharge is a fixed quantity determined by the physical properties of whatever it's using for storage: a certain amount of deterioration of the batteries for a battery plant, a certain amount of bearing wear and runner erosion in a pumped storage plant, etc. It remains the same regardless of any external circumstances. But in your system the storage system only even exists because the number of £1s they can make the same amount of discharge cost varies wildly for reasons totally unrelated to the amount of resources they use (and the larger that number is the less choice anyone has about paying it).

    "We also have the problem of incentives."

    We've got a solution to that. I don't think it's a good one, but that is not a useful complication here; the point is it exists, it's in universal use, it mostly is considered to be a good one, and it's demonstrably successful in motivating people to do all kinds of shite they don't want to do. It's simply that everyone needs a job, and that means they can be told what to do and if they don't do it they don't have a job any more.

    "It would be nice to believe that everyone is community-spirited and will naturally do the best they can for everyone else, but that isn't so."

    The idea of trying to make some piece of complex national infrastructure function by dividing it into independent units interacting without any effective control implicitly assumes that it is so. But the incentive those units are given to make them operate at all is all about doing the best they can for themselves. It seems to be assumed that the notion of "what's good for the system is good for its parts" will be enough to make these contradictory aims align. But the incentive is so perverse that the notion isn't necessarily even true, and it certainly isn't true that "what's best for the system is best for its parts", which is what you really need.

    "Goodhart's Law says that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"."

    Yes, but the severity of the problem depends strongly on how loosely related the measure is to whatever the real target is supposed to be. The more distant the relationship the more liable it is to be perverted. If you take the actual target as the measure, it's hard for it to cease to be good. (Of course you also have to consider the higher-level problem of whether you've specified the target itself correctly, which is related, but not the same thing.)

    "There will be no incentives, and as a result the entire system will run into the ground because nobody can ever be bothered to do anything."

    This also happens when there are incentives that don't have any meaningful relationship to the purpose. Railtrack had the incentive of making money and the purpose of maintaining the rail network. The two were not aligned, so they pursued the incentive while not bothering with the purpose, until the system was run so far into the ground that trains started coming off the rails and the government was forced to take back control.

    "No system is deliberately set up to promote parasitism"

    Disproof by counterexample, described at length in previous posts.

    "Putting everything in one big black box has proven to be a bad design."

    Same with putting it in a collection of smaller, blacker (legal prohibitions on internal inspection) boxes interacting by a non-deterministic mechanism riddled with opportunities for unintended consequences.

    It's the black box aspect which indicates the underlying cause: governments are determined to renege on their responsibility to manage things for the good of the country. They can't be arsed to get involved (including learning how not to fuck it up) and find some way to dump the responsibility where they hope they can let it get on with itself most of the time. Different kinds of black-box system are simply different ideological flavours of the same renegade tendency.

    We're back to "It would be nice to believe that everyone is community-spirited and will naturally do the best they can for everyone else, but that isn't so", the responsibility of government to reconcile that with the need for things like national infrastructure which naturally are "do the best one can for everybody else" kind of things, and the need for competent and responsible government that will actually put the effort in instead of finding ways not to be arsed. That last at least does appear to be something we agree on, and I guess also on the intractability of the problem of how the fuck do we ever actually get one.

    1311:

    A significant amount of the more competent "vehicle styling" effort since the 1970s has gone into making wake vortices collapse rather than expand (reduced drag, hence higher theoretical top speed and lower actual fuel consumption for the driver). This also means less verge wake for the vertical axis turbines.

    Anyone who's been broken down at the side of a main road waiting for help to arrive will have noticed the wind blast from trucks going past at 50-60mph. That's the main source of of the energy I'd want these wind turbines to "recover". There's also regular wind to take into account too. Vertical-axis rotors near ground level are not as efficient as high-mounted three-blade wind turbines but they do get the truck-wash as a freebie and they're a lot easier to install (no thousand-tonne lump of reinforced concrete needed for the tower base).

    1312:

    I point out that that is bollocks. Add some antifreeze and you're good down to -35C.

    So what do you do? Admit that you were wrong? No, you start whining that it wouldn't generate much heat in the depths of winter.

    Fuck off you dishonest prick.

    Nice, someone points out the fallacy of your argument and you result to name calling.

    I thought it would be obvious, but apparently not.

    If you need to resort to using antifreeze it means your system inherently isn't providing much in the way of hot water for a significant part of the year.

    That in turn destroys the financial case. Because as much as some like to pretend otherwise most people can't afford to make changes like this on environmental grounds and need to see that it is a wise use of their limited financial resources.

    Toronto Hydro says it's $44 a month for a family of 4 to run an electric water heater - but few people run electric water heaters in this area because of natural gas piped into the house.

    Natural gas is significantly cheaper, about 1/3 the cost of electric.

    Which means the yearly cost of running a natural gas water heater is about $175.

    This(*) site, about sustainability, states that you can save 60% of your hot water bill in Ontario with solar heating.

    So that means your solar water heater cuts the yearly bill by about $87.

    So over 10 years you potentially save about $900.

    Except the panels for a solar water heater are themselves $1,000 or more, never mind the additional parts and installation (full professional installs are talked about at $3k to $6k).

    So the system will cost you more than you save over 10 years.

    So no, it's not that people are anti-solar, it is simply that in this environment it doesn't make sense financially.

    1313:

    A modern solar hot water collector is

    I think a 2 loop/stage solar hot water heater would be a great thing. And I'd like to make allowances for one if added later to a replacement house I might build.

    But ....

    Around here with our 80'-100' tall lob lolly pines I suspect what you describe is too fragile. Every 5 to 15 years we have a storm big enough to take down some of these trees. During Fran 25 years ago with winds of just under 80mph it is estimated that over 10% came down. They mostly don't fall with a crash. In general they gradually leaned over till they ran into another tree, a power line, or a roof. Or when we have ice storms or a heavy wet snow the lower limbs (which are 60' to 80' off the ground) will come down. Think of a 15' spear with the butt end about 5" to 10" across aimed at parts of your yard or house. On top of what happens when our large oaks and similar have issues.

    Which is why my truck is on the street tonight with no trees nearby as it normally sits beside my house but with overhead power cables that would block it in if they came down.

    1314:

    If you need to resort to using antifreeze it means your system inherently isn't providing much in the way of hot water for a significant part of the year.

    Nope, nope, nopeity nope nope. (Stealing from Charlie)

    For those of us who live where it freezes hard very rarely, those who forget this get to deal with busted systems. If the weather can get much below freezing for more than 12 hours at a time you'd better have a 2 stage system. I messed up a few years ago and forgot to winterize an outdoor faucet just before we were headed to Germany for two weeks. The previous 4 or 5 years it had not mattered. And it was a few degrees below freezing most of the week leading up to that trip. As I prepped the house and realized my mistake I literally went under the house, cut the line in half, and plugged the feed. The outside faucet was frozen and I had no idea if when the temps rose if it would be a new water feature or not.

    My point is all it takes is one joint to be busted by a small bit of water to ruin a single loop system.

    In many of the places where people live.

    1315:

    There's also this; quite recent: Relationship between impact-crater size and severity of related extinction episodes (Michael R.Rampinoab, February, 2020)

    Thanks Bill.

    As noted above in 1205, correlation is a tricky business with the craters. Chicxulub is the only one where there are fossil beds across North America (Jersey, North Dakota) that show its effect. The others are within a few million years of a mass extinction/era transition.

    To give you an idea of the difference, the K-Pg boundary has a complete loss of reefs, non-avian dinosaurs, most oceanic plankton, etc.

    The Eocene-Oligocene boundary at 33.9 million years, and is dated by the extinction of a foraminiferan as charted in Italian marine sediments (love that marble). The problem is, if you look at the mammal ages from the Americas overlap the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, so it's not clear that there's any terrestrial signal for an extinction event outside Europe.

    Popigai in Siberia might have formed at 33.9 mya, not the 35.7 +/- 2 listed above. Problem is, that result was reported in 2014 in the popular press, but never made it into print, although its main author listed it as in preparation in 2019. So yeah, not sure if it's a good result or not.

    Those are the data underlying the correlation between asteroid strikes and extinctions.

    On the good side, I do agree with your author that Chicxulub plowing into the nascent Gulf of Mexico kicked up a lot more troublesome crap than it would have if it had plowed into deep ocean sediments, the Canadian Shield, etc. That part gets lost, but it appears to be why Central American volcanoes can have a disproportionately large impact on global climate today (they're drawing on high-sulfur magma, among other things).

    1316:

    You don't need Fresnel lenses; the black pipes are mounted on a black metal plate so the whole area collects heat. (Or they are a black plate, such as an old central heating radiator painted black.)

    Those were no good in the winter though. The simple box isn't good enough at retaining the heat. You have to make it with double walls and 10cm-odd of good insulation, and lag the absolute crap out of the pipework, and it's still no good because you lose too much heat through the glass. You deal with that using multiple glazing, but in the 70s nobody had any way of putting that together that you could leave up on the roof and never have it end up permanently fogged over with condensation between the panes, so you'd mostly had it.

    These days we have good enough goo that you can rely on it to maintain a seal more or less indefinitely, and it doesn't require any special conditions to apply, so you can get double glazing panels cut and assembled to any size you want while you wait, and not worry about deterioration any more than with single sheets of glass.

    In warm weather, though, you can get away with something very crude. I tried to make a minimalistic one using a sheet of clear polythene and a sheet of black polythene, cut from plastic bags, welded together with a magnifying glass round the edges and in the complement of a zig-zag up the middle, and mounted between an old door and a sheet of some grotty fake perspex stuff. It basically pulled itself gradually apart and dissolved into a mass of leaks, so I only got maybe 20 minutes operation out of it, but it lasted long enough to get quite hot enough to wash with.

    1317:

    That may have some influence over it costing £1, but there are so many other influences that the £1 ends up indicating very little about the amount of resources used.

    I agree completely, but there is one important use, albeit not directly relevant to the discussion at hand. If it sells for £1, then you can be sure that no more than £1 worth of resources went into it (subsidies aside).

    That means the oft repeated argument "this renewable system is of negative benefit, it never repays the energy that went into making it" can in most cases be quickly disproved. For instance 1W of solar costs less than 0.2 USD.

    Usage Price: Electricity for Industry: 35 kV & Above: Beijing data was reported at 0.730 RMB/kWh in Nov 2021

    https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/electricity-price-36-city

    That's 0.12 USD, so a made in China panel cannot have consumed more than 1.6 kWh (1666 Wh) during production. Even siting that resulting panel in the worst possible location, Edinburgh, it will make that back in under 2 years at 900 Wh per year.

    Since obviously electricity isn't the only input, and some of that 0.2 USD is profit, labour, materials, interest on capital, etc, the pay back is obviously less than that.

    Of course the true believers reject that simple and obvious argument out of hand, but you can't change that.

    On the other hand, if a source of electricity costs say, 20 USD per W, then it may have taken up to 166 kWh to produce, and require 166 000 hours of 100% capacity output to be sure that it has paid back the energy required to make it. That's about 20 years of 24/7/365 operation. In that case anyone arguing it's a net benefit has the much harder task of actually tracking down what energy input went into making it and proving that their solution is actually beneficial.

    Again, the true believers reject that simple argument out of hand.

    1318:

    when we say something costs £1 that is a measure of the amount of resources our civilisation needs to put in to providing that thing

    So America requires way more resources than other countries to make insulin?

    https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-insulin-by-country

    So much for that fabled Yankee ingenuity!!

    Also, am I to assume that in 2015 the resources required to make Daraprim went up by 5000%? Because the cost certainly did. Dunno about you, but keeping a CEO in Wu Tang Clan albums isn't what most of us think of when considering resources required to provide something…

    (And it can't be just the CEO, as the price still hasn't dropped (at least according to GoodRX.com), despite Shkreli being removed.)

    1319:

    You were unclear.

    Hard to believe when you knew immediately that I was clearly wrong. But ok, fair enough.

    1320:

    "A modern solar hot water collector is"

    I think a 2 loop/stage solar hot water heater would be a great thing. And I'd like to make allowances for one if added later to a replacement house I might build.

    I'm it sure how to fit those two statements together.

    Generally speaking with a modern H/W there's a mains pressure tank on the roof with collection tubes sticking out the bottom. I'm not sure where you're seeing even one loop, let alone 2.

    As for building your replacement house where trees fall on it, or catch fire and fall on it, or have lethal size lumps of ice rain down on it, I'm really stumped (nudge nudge) how you could get around that. I guess you can't have a modern solar hot water system on a house that's intended to burn in the next fire or be crushed by a multi tonne tree falling on it or have its occupants killed by falling ice or tree limbs.

    1321:

    with a 10km box of artificial lava

    On that note, I saw a wonderful "debunking" video of Musk's claim that you could replace all electricity generation in the US with a 100 mile on a side square of solar panels. The conclusion from the video was that Musk was correct give or take 10% (the video maker's answer is ~95 miles) but that the video maker really, really hates Elon Musk. And therefore the fact that no-one would actually build a 100 mile square array of edge-to-edge solar panels meant that Musk is obviously conclusively and utterly wrong in every detail and is probably trying to commit fraud. I was amused until I realised that the poster was serious, and not just satirising "debunking" videos.

    I feel the same here about a lot of it here. "that can't work in the UK because the numbers given from the UK are correct". Paul doesn't count because he has actually paid for solar panels and they work for him even though he's in the UK. And so on.

    I am reluctant to mention solar hot water in Australia, because obviously I live on a different planet with different physics and just because I can see 20 year old solar hot water systems from my house doesn't anything. The bleakly amusing thing is that those systems probably would not work in the UK, or at least not very well, because they're single insulated flat collector models that don't work very well in a Sydney "winter" when daytime air temperatures sometime stay below 10°C for most of the day. Modern systems use evacuated tubes and oil as a working fluid, and they have really good ways to deal with cold air as well as excess heat (the older SolaHart models used to fall back to emptying the whole hot water tank... and a lot of guttering systems fail when 200+ litres of boiling water is poured into them).

    FWIW in Australia PV + electric heat pump is cheaper to install than thermal hot water because you don't have to have plumbing on the roof (and plumbers don't like installing it), and the efficiency numbers are more or less even. So it comes down to "spend more money for a shorter warranty" and most people don't. Plus derisory though it is the feed-in tariff for electricity is not zero but there's no way to sell excess hot water to anyone. Admittedly that's become less relevant as the cost of the grid connection rises while the cost of batteries falls.

    1322:

    It gets below freezing here. So the collector loop has to have anti-freeze or something besides potable water. And then transfer the heat to the inside system. And at the end of the day not be worth it. But if I built new I can at least make it NOT HARD to add if I change my mind.

    As to things falling. This is about how to retro fit existing stock. I got fed up with my lob lollys and took them down 9 years ago. So all I need is a grate of some sort to protect my heat collector. And I can make the roof face in the correct direction. Ditto for solar.

    But again, all of these wiz bang ideas run into very location situations that can stop them cold. Around here the trees and existing construction can make it hard to retrofit. On top of people's expectation of what a house should look like. Now in Florida which doesn't have all that many tall trees and many many concrete walled houses without much in the way of asphalt shingles on plywood over rafters roofs, these things could be installed onto much of the existing stock. And dealing with it being cold enough to freeze is a special enough event that maybe they can use water in the primary heat loop.

    As others have mentioned, different areas and geographies will need different solutions.

    1323:

    Same as me. To drive door-to-door (even if I qualify for an on-sire parking space which I don’t) is a shade under 70 miles. So I use public transport for the bulk of the journey. In total, this takes 1:30-1:45 each way.

    However, to get to that public transport I drive using a single occupancy vehicle - a shade under 6 miles taking 30-35 minutes from my front door to boarding the train. I could use public transport, but that would more than double the time for that section of the route going out and involve waiting an hour for the bus on the way back. It breaks down as 10 minutes walk to bus stop, wait for bus, 50 minutes to station, wait for train…. A hour to travel 6 miles plus the waiting time. Factor in lugging laptop, packed lunch and personal kit and you’ll understand why I drive that leg.

    It is my intention to replace my ICE with electric - when my ICE becomes uneconomic to repair and I don’t need to factor in daily commuting and emergency trips to elderly relative and chauffeuring said elderly relative to various appointments both in their town or elsewhere.

    1324:

    And all this dual loop and vacuum tube and antifreeze guff is probably something to do with why the advice is to use PV instead. The power you get can be used for anything, including for example running a heat pump, which will give you about 3X the heat wattage than the electrical. Which pretty much obviates the claims about the hot water being more efficient. And when you don’t need to heat water you can run the computer you use to complain about how electric vehicles don’t come in the right colour for your oh-so-precious sensibilities. Or you could mine bitcoin and thereby piss off almost anyone with a brain.

    1325:

    Not enough roofs in the U.K.? Does that include south-facing walls?

    1326:

    "Shell’s Massive Carbon Capture Plant Is Emitting More Than It’s Capturing."

    On one hand it's the first of it's kind, and prototypes don't always function the way we want them too. On the other hand... yeah, about what you'd expect.

    1327:

    Evacuated tubes do have their place, because they work with diffused light and in other crappy conditions, plus most of them have concentrators built in and those can be made smaller or larger pretty much on the whim of the manufacturer. So in a few places they make really good sense.

    Think the south wall of places close to the Arctic Circle. I vaguely recall them being tried in Antarctic, but that may have just been to prove a point "tested at the south pole" or somesuch.

    The trick is, as always, to see what's available commercially where you live (generic you) and what the local installers of such things say. It can also be worth looking into whatever scandals and disasters have occurred with the technology just so you don't end up buying Bondor solar PV+hot water long run roofing or Solar Roadways or whatever the "really good in theory" idea of the day is.

    I duly rang such a person a year or two ago and got their firmly expressed opinions about several things I was considering, and decided to go cost-no-object on a heat pump hot water system, powered by whatever PV panels I can find in a skip and a top of the line inverter plus solar charge controller. The short version is: second hand solar panels are typically ~5 years old and ~90% of nameplate, but if you pay more than ~1/3 of the current price per watt for new you're getting ripped off. But the heat pump setup is a PITA to fix, cheap ones often you can't get parts for after 10 years, and the better ones are also more efficient and come with better insulation. The electronics between PV and grid more or less likewise, with the caveat that if they last 10 years under full load you're doing well (in Australia, where outside air temperatures of 40+ degrees mean the electronics spend a lot of time at 60+ degrees and that's not good for them).

    1328:

    I think you're overthinking it. In the context that I described (owning capital gives you income you don't directly work for) I am a capitalist and probably so are you. My superannuation account grew 8-9% last financial year despite no contributions going into it. While I worked most of my life to earn the capital in that account, the growth figure is entirely unearned on my part. Or rather, I earned it simply due to owning the capital on which it is based. I assume you also have some kind of retirement savings that are invested in a similar way. I'm not saying that "capitalists" are necessarily bad people or that the premise (that you can earn money by having money) is necessarily a bad thing. Similarly parasitic relationships in nature are not necessarily bad either, though I guess I'm playing a bit fast and loose with the term, since we usually use other terms for relationships of mutual interdependence... I think that for me when people talk about this feature of capitalism as an end in itself, or by some circular logic as a "natural" arbiter of fairness, that's when it becomes explicitly parasitic. The point is it's a mechanism that's ethically neutral (more or less) and the pejorative side to terms like "parasite" only apply when the mechanism itself works in a way that is destructive to some of the parties involved.

    And for clarity, when you see investor entrepeneurs working hard, what they are usually working at is managing their investment portfolio rather than directly contributing their labour to the businesses they have bought into. In that case they are specifically not using their labour to create the value that business exists to create: their contribution toward that is the capital itself. Suppose I invest in a company that wants to make shoes. I'm one of many investors whose contribution allows the company to build a factory and hire workers, managers and so on, establish a relationship with retailers... all the things it needs to make shoes, sell them and do business. I am not a shoe maker, I don't manage shoe makers nor do I sell shoes. Yet I've contributed to the business and get a share of the value it creates. I might work quite hard analysing the ROI on various investment opportunities and managing my funds across them, but I don't contribute directly to the value that those investment vehicles create other than by offering capital. It's not a rich people versus poor people distinction, it's a question of how value is created and distributed.

    The point is that this stuff isn't necessarily good or bad, it's an element to how civil society works. There are problems when people treat it as an end in itself or argue that being rich is a virtue in itself, or treat an abstraction of some otherwise simple process (such as "the market") as an ethical principle. Our civilisation has some major problems at the moment that have come from doing these things for a long time: climate change is one, probably the one that will do the most harm. There are people who argue that the problems are because we haven't done those things hard enough, or purely enough and maybe there are ways they make sense. For example, if you privatise the air, then air pollution is an actionable tort against property, proportional to the price the owner can get for the right to breathe. The hypothetical dystopian universe where that happened in the late 19th century might have avoided the problem with climate change altogether. But in general I think most of us see the moral universe that sort of thinking leads into as undesirable. Myself, I sort of stick with Kant and to an extent Singer on this - sentient beings are moral beings and ends in themselves; sentience is hard to nail down, but the Singerian view that it entails the ability to have preferences about the future has a lot to recommend it. It does lead, probably, to an ethical imperative for veganism, but I'm not convinced that is a valid argument against it (argument by consequence is a well documented fallacy after all). My handwaving rationale is that we're not morally perfect, but you'll immediately spot that's a bit of a cop out. Shrug, we're all living our own lives and working it out as best we can.

    1329:

    I vaguely recall them being tried in Antarctic, but that may have just been to prove a point "tested at the south pole" or somesuch.

    (https://www.bas.ac.uk/bas-goes-solar/)

    1330:

    Well that obviously can't work in the UK. It might work in the 88% of the Earth south of Lizard Point and heck it might even work in 7% of the Earth north of Dunnet Head. But in the rest? The 5% majority of the surface of the earth? Not a chance!

    1331:

    Brilliant! Both you for finding it and them for doing it.

    1332:

    Re: 'The local press ran their story on this as about how the police are criminalising innocent motorists for an honest mistake ...'

    OOC - have these types of behaviors and stories become more common since Covid in your area? I ask because I think that the spotlight on antivaxers seems to have provided more opportunity for more people to become comfortable with actively protesting against gov't policies.

    What's also a concern is the lack of polls conducted/reported about how various demographic segments support or are negatively impacted by such behaviors. Basically there's a lack of putting these situations within the actual larger overall perspective.

    1333:

    mdive @ 1315
    Those figures are very similar to the ones here, in London, when you take the installation costs inside the equations. Which is why we don't do it ... as you say: it's not that people are anti-solar, it is simply that in this environment it doesn't make sense financially

    1334:

    1314 - Agreed, as far as it goes. There is also at least some work being done on reducing wake turbulence from trucks (hence trucks with side skirts, teardrop profile roofs on some high cube semi trailers, cab spoilers on more or less anything where the cargo box is higher than the cab roof...). I'm not saying it's a "solved problem", just a problem with reducing significance.
    Actually, there's more drag per vehicle on modern fitted stock goods trains due to the complete lack of detail aerodynamic shaping...

    1315 - Agree with you, not least because "some antifreeze" means something like 60% ethylene glycol for -45C. (source varies, but any table of properties should confirm).

    1326 - Different use case, similar conclusions. :-)

    1327 - Which of my stated requirements (summary. Fast enough to feel safe in 70mph speed limit, 50 mile unrefuelled range, price to buy GB£3000 or less) is unreasonable then?

    1328 - Walls might present a better right ascension than roofs at 45N or above, but have these other issues such as windows, doors, other walls at right angles to the South facing one you want to install the PV on...

    1335:

    Walls might present a better right ascension than roofs at 45N or above, but have these other issues such as windows, doors, other walls at right angles to the South facing one you want to install the PV on...

    Roofs are a sweet spot for putting PV panels on -- they're sloped which helps alignment with the Sun's arc of travel, they're not being used for anything else except keeping the rain off, the extra height lifts the panels out of shade from stuff at ground level etc.

    The bad news is that roofs aren't designed (yet) with the intention of putting significant amounts of PV structure on them later so current fitments are a bit of a bodge depending on the age of the building, the slope of the roof etc. with a lot of hope that the roof structure plus PV panels can cope with the extra wind shear if a storm blows through.

    Sure there are PV roof tiles and other concepts but they have their own problems and a lot of the proposed products turn out to be Biggest Breakthrough Since Breakfast vapourware.

    1336:

    Pigeon @ 1313:

    I think I see the fundamental difference in our perspectives. You (if I may attempt to summarise it down to one paragraph) see this as a problem in political ethics: you want the Bad Parasites removed from the system and replaced by Good People. If good people are making the decisions, it follows that the decisions will also be good, and everyone will be happy.

    I, on the other hand, see this as a problem in systems design; we need a system to run our electricity supply. This system must meet certain requirements. If the system is well designed then it will meet those requirements and everyone will be happy.

    Hence my use of the term "black box", which in system engineering terms means "a component that does a defined job via defined interfaces, with known failure modes, and I don't need to know any more than that".

    [Me] "Putting everything in one big black box has proven to be a bad design."

    Same with putting it in a collection of smaller, blacker (legal prohibitions on internal inspection) boxes interacting by a non-deterministic mechanism riddled with opportunities for unintended consequences.

    In system engineering we call that a collection of components. That is something you can analyse from a system point of view. I can't see anything non-deterministic about it. Also, OFGEM have quite a lot of powers to poke around inside the supply companies, so not as black-box as that. Its one of those defined interfaces I mentioned.

    On the other hand, putting the entire system inside one black box isn't a design, its an abdication of design.

    [On incentives] It's simply that everyone needs a job, and that means they can be told what to do and if they don't do it they don't have a job any more.

    In which case you should be very happy with our privatised system: here is a list of energy companies that have gone bust. Their managers were supposed to ensure that their customers got energy at a contracted price. They failed to do that, and now they don't have jobs. Oh, and the people who invested in those companies lost money too. What about this don't you like?

    From a system design point of view "goes bust" is a failure mode of a private company. The system was designed to tolerate this failure mode.

    Taking a step back from that, in general having a huge swarm of drones just following orders tends not to work very well; the only organisations that have done this long-term are the military, and they have rather specialised needs for order-following.

    Blindly following orders is a recipe for disaster. Orders and SOP are fragile, so you need people to be able to figure out the right thing from time to time. At which point the requirement is not just "do the job" but "do the job well". This problem increases as you move up the hierarchy; determining whether a senior manager is doing their job well is highly non-trivial. Writing down the requirements with enough specificity be used in front of an employment tribunal while still giving them scope to actually do their job well is basically impossible.

    (The military is the only system that uses blind obedience as a basic control mechanism, but they have exceptional requirements).

    From a system design point of view this can be analysed as a problem with bandwidth; communication between nodes in a network is limited; if everybody has to know what everyone else is doing then communication costs are O(n^2) and rapidly grow prohibitive as the organisation gets bigger. So large organisations have to be split into components. However in a hierarchichal command and control organisation the top nodes in the network then become bottlenecks for communication. This is worsened by the observed tendency in hierarchies for upwards communication to be heavily restricted anyway, especially when the news is bad.

    It seems to be assumed that the notion of "what's good for the system is good for its parts" will be enough to make these contradictory aims align.

    Its not assumed, its designed. The trick is to componentise the system in a way those aims are aligned instead of being opposed.

    [Goodhart's Law] Yes, but the severity of the problem depends strongly on how loosely related the measure is to whatever the real target is supposed to be. The more distant the relationship the more liable it is to be perverted. If you take the actual target as the measure, it's hard for it to cease to be good.

    What actual target would that be? What is the purpose of the UK power industry? "To provide power" obviously, but at what cost? How reliably? While emitting how much CO2?

    You need to balance all of these factors somehow. As if that wasn't a big enough issue, there are long-term factors where the planning time-frame is measured in years, but the incentives have to be applied now if they are going to be any use. So any measure at all is going to be very loosely related to the real target.

    Take another look at my post @ 1183, and especially the article I linked to. That is the story of another privatised and regulated energy system where the system failed badly, and just about managed to avoid total collapse.

    [From the linked article] ...the Railroad Commission of Texas, regulates the state’s oil and gas industry—or at least it’s supposed to. In practice, it seldom does. Its three commissioners are elected, and their campaign coffers are filled by oil and gas industry executives. Following the 2021 blackout, the commissioners expressed little interest in learning why the February storm caused statewide outages only in Texas, not in neighboring states and states far to the north. They instead aggressively defended the industry they’re supposed to regulate, arguing publicly that the state’s failure to require winterization of natural gas providers played no role in the disaster.

    To you this is probably an example of the Bad Parasites being in charge. To me its a failure of system design; the regulators have been set up to be captured by the people they are supposed to be regulating.

    For many of the lawmakers, the lengthy hearing was a crash course in the labyrinthine mechanics and bureaucracy of the state’s grid.

    If the democratically appointed legislators don't understand it, what chance does Joe Public have? And if Joe Public can't understand, how is democracy supposed to function?

    This leads to a more general governance issue. The UK seems to do governance and regulation a lot better than the USA. Elsewhere in this thread Heteromoles has complained about having to do work as an environmental activist that ought to be done by the EPA. This seems to be a persistent emergent property of the American government system. I suspect that the problem is actually too much democracy; those Railroad Commission regulators are democratically appointed, but none of the voters can tell if they are doing their job; they probably just vote on party lines.

    So there is a job for a bureaucracy here, as regulators. How do you regulate the regulators? Still a hard problem.

    1337:

    Pretty sure that's at least partly implicit in my post that you replied to.

    1338:

    I was simply stating a fact. The fact that the claim was obvious bollocks was ignored by the usual anti-Russian hate speech merchants. It's not that microwaves can't cause such problems, but that creating a 'death ray' so that they can be aimed from other buildings is almost impossible, and that they are relatively easy to detect.

    1339:

    "You're also not taking into account where I live - there is good public transport running 24/7, there are alternative transport methods like cycles and scooters available to hire."

    I was talking about the UK as a whole; I didn't realise that you weren't; such a situation is atypical. I fully agree that the politics are as you say, but what I am saying is that going for the politically easy 'solutions' not merely doesn't tackle the majority of the problem, it actually harms doing so. For example, in your situation, ride sharing is almost an irrelevance.

    Incidentally, scooters are one of the actively harmful 'solutions', as they endanger pedestrians and discourage walking.

    1340:

    There is a huge amount of misinformation being posted about solar power in the UK, due to people jumping on one set of figures and ignoring the whole problem. Yes, I expect to get flamed for saying so.

    The 11,000 square kilometers (a) is unshaded flat area equivalent (UFAE) and (b) assumes that we can store at least 3 eka-joules for 6 months. If we can't, make that between 110,000 and 300,000 square kilometers, depending on where the solar farms are. But even that assumes that we can store 100 peta-joules for a week. All that is speculative technology, so let's assume little storage.

    HOWEVER, the saner posters weren't talking about our total requirements, but as a (temporary?) way of reducing gas usage, so lets assume 5% or 550 square kilometers (see later).

    Unfortunately, those figures are an underestimate, because they don't account for the fact that such power increases our total construction, maintenance and disposal costs. We need 100% of our requirements by other mechanisms anyway because solar power goes out at night or, even with a fair amount of storage, drops by a factor of 10-30 summer to winter.

    Worse, normal plant growth fixes 500-1,000 tonnes of carbon per square kilometer in the UK, and solar farms stop that. Oh, yes, plants will grow underneath, but their productivity (including carbon capture) is pro rata to insolation in the UK, and damn little light gets to ground level. Even 5% of UFAE will reduce our carbon capture by 275,000-550,000 tons of carbon, and you can calculate for the larger areas.

    Plus, of course, that the more farmland we build over, the more of our food we have to import, with all of the carbon use that entails.

    Our road areas are misleading, not least because much of the network is centuries old and shaded; no, I don't know how much is 'new build', but I believe the Sheffield figures included most parking (not all). On this topic, the verges are NOT generally suitable for solar power, because they are often shaded but mainly because they are one of our most important wildlife refuges (yes, the UK is THAT bad).

    I don't know exactly how much UFAE is available on rooftops and in 'waste' areas, but my estimate is that it is very unlikely to be more than 2,000 square kilometers. That looks like enough margin for the 5%, but I doubt VERY much that more than a small proportion is suitable without rebuilding (think concrete and more CO2). So we are back to covering farmland and green areas.

    HOWEVER, by real objection is not the above, but that solar power is being used as a distraction from tackling thew real problems. We could much more easily reduce our power demands by 5%, which would have more benefit, AND potentially lead on to yet further reductions. But, partly because of the solar power fetish, we are going precisely the opposite (e.g. trying to criminalise Insulation Rebellion).

    1341:

    So all I need is a grate of some sort to protect my heat collector.

    Do you get hail? We periodically get hailstorms bad enough to seriously damage vehicles, which then take ages to get repaired because everyone needs new glass and bodywork at the same time — which is not what you want to happen to your primary heating system!

    If I'm still living here when my furnace needs replacing I'm probably going with a heat pump. I could see solar as an adjunct to that, but given my roof is three stories up I'd want something that didn't require me to be able to get to the collector to protect it in case of hail.

    1342:

    I think that the spotlight on antivaxers seems to have provided more opportunity for more people to become comfortable with actively protesting against gov't policies.

    I think it's not just anti-vaxxers. Trumpists and their ilk have been emboldened into ignoring polite social norms and getting in-your-face with people/causes/policies they disagree with, or that inconvenience them. And in many cases, they've got away with it enough to encourage them to do it more.

    1343:

    here is a list of energy companies that have gone bust. Their managers were supposed to ensure that their customers got energy at a contracted price. They failed to do that, and now they don't have jobs.

    I don't know about those companies, but here in Ontario we had energy marketers who set up their companies to extract all the profit when customers paid more than the cost of energy and go broke when energy prices rose. Customers thought they were hedging against price rises, while in actuality they were getting (legally) scammed.

    Thanks to the wonders of numbered Ontario corporations all assets were not held by the company legally responsible for purchasing the energy — even the office furniture was owned by someone else.

    Managers were responsible for ensuring that their companies turned a profit.The lower-level folks may have lost their jobs, but those in control knew their real task and were prepared to move on (with very nice bonuses before the companies declared bankruptcy).

    1344:

    Paul
    Correction: The UK seemsused to do governance and regulation a lot better than the USA.
    We have some bad cases of Regulatory Capture ongoing - Water & the Environment (Agency) are particular present cases in point.

    1345:

    The bigger problem is that the manufacturers' cartel has used new regulations and electrification to increase the prices way beyond inflation, by making equivalent-functionality vehicles larger and MUCH more gimmicky. This isn't going to be stopped by 'market pressures' because they know they have their customers over a barrel. Nor is the insurance / car hire problem.

    It's not just the prices, but things like larger cars cause harm in many ways (including to cyclists, pedestrians and horse-riders) and more complicated ones cause more hard-to-recycle waste.

    I have posted my (fairly common) requirements before, and what needs to be done, but it all comes back to needing a government that rules half-sanely.

    1346:

    Re: 'The local press ran their story on this as about how the police are criminalising innocent motorists for an honest mistake ...' This may be related to over 80% of the "local press" in the UK being owned by six national / international companies.

    1347:

    On the subject of energy prices, we've just had renewal quotes for our gas (LPG) and electricity:

    • gas price for a fixed 1-year deal is ~25% up on first half of 2021
    • electric price for a fixed 1-year deal is ~100% up on current 2-year deal from 2020

    The electric supplier recommends not renewing but falling back onto their default (variable) tariff which is covered by the UK price cap, which itself will be raised by an unknown amount in March/April.

    1348:

    Do you get hail?

    Yep. But I have NEVER been in one where anything was damaged. Like tornadoes, you build reasonable but get to assume you personally will never be hit. Because 99.9999% of the people (or more) never will be impacted in a damaging way by either.

    Same logic applies to PV.

    You're in the Toronto area. I'm in central North Carolina. We have more variation east to west in North Carolina in weather events to plan for than exist between you and I.

    For everything described here local situations make universal solutions a waste of time.

    1349:

    And so you demonstrate that one of the biggest problems in the US with getting people to use public transit is that the people running the transit, and the people who appoint them, are under, implicit or overtly, of the oil companies.

    In general, public transit in the US sucks dead syphalitic GOP roaches.

    Your argument isn't why you don't use public transit, it's why we need to fix it.

    And, when I'm appointed Transportation Czar for the US, 100 of all execs and managers for every transit company will be required to use that transit system every day to go to work, and failure for, say, more than three times in a one month period gets you fired for cause.

    1350:

    No, no, it's not that the US requires more resources, it shows how inventive we are.

    Of CEOs increasing their ROI and the value of their stock options.

    1351:

    "stumped (nudge, nudge)"

    That's brilliant. Brilliants STUPID. Or perhaps you are blind to how much a tall tree contributes to keeping a house cooler in the summer, and cutting wind in the winter.

    I've been staying out of the name calling - for example, I don't ever read JBS's posts anymore, but this was over the top deliberate on your part.

    1352:

    Lack of aerodynamic shaping one freight trains? I suppose the fact that they're all drafting each other has no effect? Nor that freight does not often travel at over 50mph or 60mph?

    1353:

    In the US, also, the local press either does not exist, or has been bought by large chains... which have been bought by hedge funds.

    For example, my SO got a subscription recently to the Baltimore Sun for the Sunday paper. She has discovered it has zip news in it, and she reads it. A couple of more-or-less international articles from the NYT international news, and nothing but social crap.

    News about Baltimore, or the cops, or the city council, or...?

    Nope.

    1354:

    How about a DIY future? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/01/this-22-year-old-builds-chips-in-his-parents-garage/

    I have to wonder what the change is in his chance of getting cancer in the future.

    1355:

    He's hoping to get to a 4004 chip soon. If he keeps this up, he'll turn into a manufacturer, providing chips for refrigerators and the auto industry.

    1356:

    Greg Tingey @ 1302: pigeon @ 1286
    the EV I need does not exist. - you, too?

    The EV I want (or would like to have) exists, but they don't sell it here in the U.S.

    1357:

    gasdive (he, him, ia) @ 1311: Gahhh, remember to proof read before hitting submit not after.

    "Eventually the vapour pressure is high enough that the boiling point of the fluid is higher than the temperature of the upper water tank."

    I think I understood what you were describing, but a link to a photo or diagram would be helpful.

    1358:

    something costs £1 that is a measure of the amount of resources So America requires way more resources than other countries to make insulin?

    I'd phrase it is the cost provides a guide to the maximum possible quantity of resources required. So a $2 item is unlikely to require more than $2 worth of steel to make, for example.

    But even that has a forest of caveats, for it not including the damage done by making and shipping the thing (ie, the slave-made phone doesn't include an allowance for compensating the (descendents of) the slaves for enslaving them), and subsidies can be quite well hidden (the way China exploits the complex rules for international postage that means it's cheaper to post something from China to Australia than within Australia).

    But in general, if you can buy solar panels from multiple manufacturers/ suppliers for a given $ per watt, it's pretty safe to assume that they don't contain more than that $/watt of resources in the finished product. Otherwise people might be tempted to buy them purely for the scrap value (the US copper penny, for example)

    1359:

    To be explicit: nothing in that maximum value of resources prevents extremes the other way. If I can buy a copper penny for one penny from the bank and persuade you that this "embodied NFT" has immense value on the SuperExtremeCrypto exchange, then sell it to you for $1M ... that does not change the 1.3 pennies worth of copper that went into it, but it does mean you can be pretty darn sure that there's less than $1M worth of copper in it.

    The flip side is that anything "free as in beer" is very likely not being sold at a reasonable price. Whether that's "free shipping" (you know how Amazon treats its workers) or "free with any purchase", whatever you're being given is at best advertising. At worst, obviously, it's a problem-disguised-as-opportunity (decorated with only the finest cadmium-based paint!) or a crime (market manipulation or similar).

    1360:

    David L @ 1325: It gets below freezing here. So the collector loop has to have anti-freeze or something besides potable water. And then transfer the heat to the inside system. And at the end of the day not be worth it. But if I built new I can at least make it NOT HARD to add if I change my mind.

    As to things falling. This is about how to retro fit existing stock. I got fed up with my lob lollys and took them down 9 years ago. So all I need is a grate of some sort to protect my heat collector. And I can make the roof face in the correct direction. Ditto for solar.

    But again, all of these wiz bang ideas run into very location situations that can stop them cold. Around here the trees and existing construction can make it hard to retrofit. On top of people's expectation of what a house should look like. Now in Florida which doesn't have all that many tall trees and many many concrete walled houses without much in the way of asphalt shingles on plywood over rafters roofs, these things could be installed onto much of the existing stock. And dealing with it being cold enough to freeze is a special enough event that maybe they can use water in the primary heat loop.

    As others have mentioned, different areas and geographies will need different solutions.

    You don't need antifreeze or a two stage system. Just design it so you're only running water through the collector when the temperature inside the collector can be above freezing.

    I remember DIY designs from Mother Earth News that featured a roof-top "collector" fed by a small pump from a tank mounted inside the attic; which you were going to insulate anyway, since insulation was the first step towards energy independence. When the weather got too cold you just switched off the pump and the collector drained into the tank. No antifreeze required. Also put a photocell switch or a couple of temperature switches in the control circuit so the pump only ran when the sun was up and heating the water running through the collector.

    Most of the time the solar heat didn't provide really hot water, but it did pre-heat water so that it took less energy to bring hot water up to a usable temperature (takes less energy to heat 80°F water up to 120° than it does to heat 55°F water, so if you can get that first 25° from the sun ...).

    The electricity to run the pump was provided by the DIY wind turbine you made out of an old pickup truck alternator charging the battery bank you salvaged from an old fork lift.

    Back in the 70s when I was a subscriber Mother Earth News was published out of Hendersonville, NC so just about anything that would work there would work here in Raleigh (35.31N lat vs 35.79N lat) and they're about 200 miles west of here and about 1,800 higher elevation. So most things that worked in Hendersonville, would probably work in Raleigh ...

    Maybe not in Buffalo, NY or Jacksonville, FL (or London or Edinburgh ... or vice versa) ... BUT that's OK because they had contributors from ALL OVER THE WORLD, so if one idea wouldn't work in your area, maybe another idea would.

    POINT IS instead of name calling because a particular application isn't suitable for your area, think about the CONCEPTS instead and think about how they might be adaptable to your particular situation.

    PV electric is probably not going to be a big contributor to Scotland's energy needs. But it might have some marginal utility. If not, find something else that WILL work & quit the name calling.

    Maybe we need an updated Whole Earth Catalog for the 22nd Century.

    1361:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1342: Incidentally, scooters are one of the actively harmful 'solutions', as they endanger pedestrians and discourage walking.

    Depends on the scooter. Those mobility scooters seem to be used by people who CAN'T walk. It doesn't discourage walking, it enables people who otherwise would be home bound to get around and do for themselves. Basically they're no more threat to pedestrians than kids on bicycles or people pushing strollers (prams?) ... and you should demand the same courtesy from them as you would demand from kids & nannies.

    Also, here in the U.S. "scooter" more often means a two wheel, limited power motorcycle type vehicle - not requiring an operator's license so they're popular with persons who have lost their driving privilege, but still need to get back & forth to work. And those "new" things you can buy (or rent) that are like a skateboard with a steering wheel, but you're not supposed to ride either one of those on the sidewalk, so again not a threat to pedestrians.

    And in the rest of the world, it seems like there are a lot more scooters than there are automobiles.

    1362:

    You're in the Toronto area. I'm in central North Carolina.

    I've got family in Calgary, who've been hit by hail and had two vehicles badly damaged.

    Hail is frequent enough that I'd like any heating system I own to be warded against it, rather than relying on rapid repair (given likely supply chain issues in the event of a hailstorm that hits my area).

    1363:

    whitroth @ 1354: I've been staying out of the name calling - for example, I don't ever read JBS's posts anymore, but this was over the top deliberate on your part.

    Splinters & planks dude, splinters & planks.

    1364:

    I've got family in Calgary, who've been hit by hail and had two vehicles badly damaged.

    As I said, it's all local. I'd want some protection. And yes I've been around lots of times with hail on the ground but not enough to damage a car. Or solar something.

    But again, it's all about geography and local weather. If I lived in Oklahoma or Kansas I'd want a house to have a place designed to keep me alive more than a normal indoor closet. But where I've lived, (Kentucky, Pittsburgh, Connecticut, North Carolina, and a bit of Texas) going crazy to worry about hail or tornadoes is just not worth the $$ or effort. Do something reasonable and plan for insurance.

    1365:

    There is a huge amount of misinformation being posted

    At last, a statement I can agree with.

    I don't know exactly how much UFAE is available on rooftops and in 'waste' areas, but my estimate is that it is very unlikely to be more than 2,000 square kilometers.

    As usual, numbers and very specific limitations pulled directly from your arse without even bothering to wipe the shit off it.

    2000 sq km isn't even half the area of gardens in the UK.

    (http://www.wlgf.org/garden_resource.html)

    The total area of gardens in the UK is estimated at about 433,000 hectares or 4,330 square kilometres, a bit more than a fifth the size of Wales.

    The parameter that limits solar to flat ground is completely unsupported by any links, references or even reasoning. For the simple reason that you simply made it up. Obviously the land need not be flat and can be steep enough that conventional farming isn't possible.

    (https://datadrivenlab.org/china/ruicheng-chinas-pilot-county-of-renewable-energy/)

    This is typical of all your posts. Spew a gut full of garbage that you've simply made up on the spot, knowing it takes hours to refute point by point, then call the detailed refutation "as boring as a government report" and ignore it, only to spew the same misinformation the next day.

    Moreover, as usual, you provide no alternate. Vague moaning about "fake greenies" isn't an alternative. Nor is just saying the word "Nuclear". What does it cost, how long does it take to build the factories, how long for the factories to make the parts, how long to build the parts into grid supply systems, how much supply is needed? None of those are given, no examples in practice are quoted.

    1366:

    And those "new" things you can buy (or rent) that are like a skateboard with a steering wheel, but you're not supposed to ride either one of those on the sidewalk, so again not a threat to pedestrians.

    The key word being "supposed".

    Calgary has one of the scooter rental companies, and I've been hit by people on them tooling along the multi-use paths and pedestrian areas. Glancing blows, but potentially nasty*.

    *Toronto had pedestrians killed by a cyclists. In one case the cyclist claimed that it was the pedestrian's fault, as she should have looked both ways for bicycles before exiting the shop into the sidewalk. The cyclist was fined $3.75 (the fine for riding an adult-sized bike on the sidewalk. I'm sure that was a comfort to the bereaved. In another AFAIK it was a hit-and-run and the cyclist was never caught.

    1367:

    That's brilliant. Brilliants STUPID. Or perhaps you are blind to how much a tall tree contributes to keeping a house cooler in the summer, and cutting wind in the winter.

    Mate, I wouldn't even pitch a tent under a tree. Even if campgrounds didn't have signs up in 8 languages warning me not to, (which doesn't stop stupid tourists having their camp crushed by a falling tree on a regular basis). Nor would I build a house so close to trees that the fireys can't get a truck between the house and the trees without risking having a tree fall on them (a volunteer was killed by a falling tree two days ago). It gets to 48 degrees here in summer. I'm perfectly aware of how nice shade is. I'm also aware that a house is much more pleasant when it's not on fire and bedrooms are more cosy without a 50 tonne tree through them.

    1368:

    Somewhere way up thread there was an odd statement about how above a certain degree of latitude if you did not some form of heat during the night, you were going to "die". That, in fact, the northern latitudes would have to be "abandoned" due to problems in supplying them with power. Since there are several contributing members of a certain age, and many others with deep historical knowledge, I kept expecting someone to contradict this strange notion, yet no-one has. So, a bit of a personal reminiscence to provide some grounding:

    Back in the late '80s I came to Edinburgh to study AI. In my first year I lodged with my grandmother, in Trinity. Brought up a poor wee, soft sassenach London boy I was used to the joys of central heating, to whit, a radiator in every room. No such thing in my grandmother's house. Come the winter, I was treated to the spectacle of ice on the inside of the window pane when I woke in the mornings. But, no matter, so long as my blankets were thick and many, and a hot water bottle had warmed the sheets, I was quite comfortable in the night.

    Strangely the same was true for my grandmother. She lived, until she died, for many years in these conditions, never bothering with even an electric blanket until she was quite frail, finally succumbing to a diabetic coma in her 90s.

    Having lived in Canada and Russia on occasion I understand some concern around the need to provide central heat at some point during the day, but it is not essential to life. These regions were inhabited long before the advent of fossil fuel, and there is no dependency on it. Rather, there is a quality of life dependency on it. I foresee a future not of abandoning northern latitudes, but rather adjusting the expectation of what living in such a latitude means. Cold nights and warm blankets. Rather as the southern latitudes will need to adopt a Fremen lifestyle, though that is more questionable for population densities as we have it now.

    1369:

    If you're transport czar, I'd also recommend sacking executives who are consistently late for work. Because that's what happens to their customers.

    (https://smallbusiness.chron.com/labor-laws-lateness-67936.html)

    1370:

    ...we are going precisely the opposite (e.g. trying to criminalise Insulation Rebellion).
    Fascinating. Had never read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulate\_Britain_protests. Criminalizing protest in general is a really bad look. Pushing hard for dramatically improved building insulation is a good move in the UK, though civil disobedience needs to be combined/coordinated with other tactics IMO.

    1371:

    I think I understood what you were describing, but a link to a photo or diagram would be helpful.

    Here's an animation. This one uses a loop, but the same principle for roof mounted storage (if you live somewhere that favours tile rooves) just that the heat pipe sticks into the tank.

    https://youtu.be/BZtkHHNoyjA

    1372:

    Re economics of solar/wind, externalities from burning fossil carbon are getting a free pass in the cost calculations. Carbon taxes are very difficult politically, but realistic carbon taxes should be high, e.g. hundreds of pounds per ton of carbon burned. Linked previously, from late 2019; (venue not typical for such pieces):
    The Human Cost of Anthropogenic Global Warming: Semi-Quantitative Prediction and the 1,000-Tonne Rule (Frontiers in psychology, 2019/10, Richard Parncutt)
    He suggests the pushing of an easy-to-remember narrative that one future premature death is caused every time roughly 1,000 (300–3,000) tonnes of carbon are burned. I.e. work to include such externalities (mortality is just one such) in the baseline thinking about carbon burning and decarbonization.
    Basically, burning fossil carbon now also burns our children/grandchildren(/descendants), to selfishly maintain a comfortable current lifestyle. A ton of high carbon coal would be a (human) millideath, or 3 millideaths. (I'm ignoring the lower estimates of mortality cost of carbon as improbable.)

    1373:

    Moving on to another subject ...

    The U.K. were major participants in the international consortia that developed the Concorde & Airbus. The Concorde is no longer flying, but how has Brexit affected U.K. participation in Airbus and other efforts with European partners like the Panavia Tornado and the Eurofighter Typhoon?

    As I understand it the U.K. aviation industry had shrunk too much (along with the individual industries of the European partners) for them to go it alone, but by teaming up with with France and Germany and other European aviation industries they managed to develop aircraft none of them could afford to develop individually.

    The Europeans are obviously still working together, but what's going to happen to the U.K.'s participation?

    1374:

    That's because unless we can live without fossil fuels arguments about whether we should are pointless.

    So the current discussion that takes as axiomatic that no-one lived further north than 50 degrees until fossil fuel use was ubiquitous needs to progress to some conclusion before we can really discuss whether people should continue living that far north without fossil fuels.

    I have been tempted to simply accept the arguments given and say that obviously then the only possible option is to simply abandon the uninhabitable far north. Doing otherwise just prolongs the agony and makes it less likely that anyone will survive post 2100 or so. But I don't think anyone here expects to live beyond that point either way, and since none of us have kids that we care about that argument is irrelevant.

    1375:

    Robert Prior @ 1345:

    I think that the spotlight on antivaxers seems to have provided more opportunity for more people to become comfortable with actively protesting against gov't policies.

    I think it's not just anti-vaxxers. Trumpists and their ilk have been emboldened into ignoring polite social norms and getting in-your-face with people/causes/policies they disagree with, or that inconvenience them. And in many cases, they've got away with it enough to encourage them to do it more.

    Seems like at some point we lost the ability to require people to conform to social norms against selfish assholes harming people with their lawless behavior. It's more than just bad manners. Somehow we're regressing to the lawlessness of frontier days. And that has to be reversed or civilization is going to cease to exist.

    Robert Prior @ 1369:

    And those "new" things you can buy (or rent) that are like a skateboard with a steering wheel, but you're not supposed to ride either one of those on the sidewalk, so again not a threat to pedestrians.

    The key word being "supposed".

    Calgary has one of the scooter rental companies, and I've been hit by people on them tooling along the multi-use paths and pedestrian areas. Glancing blows, but potentially nasty*.

    *Toronto had pedestrians killed by a cyclists. In one case the cyclist claimed that it was the pedestrian's fault, as she should have looked both ways for bicycles before exiting the shop into the sidewalk. The cyclist was fined $3.75 (the fine for riding an adult-sized bike on the sidewalk. I'm sure that was a comfort to the bereaved. In another AFAIK it was a hit-and-run and the cyclist was never caught.

    Again it comes down to the government's willingness to enforce laws against harming others.

    Here in Raleigh if you get caught riding one of those "scooters" on the sidewalk, you're going to get a ticket same as if you rode a motorcycle or an automobile down the sidewalk. Ignore the ticket & don't pay the fine and you COULD go to jail.

    And an accident caused by a cyclist (or "scooterist") riding on the sidewalk that caused personal injury would have the same penalties as an accident caused by driving a motor vehicle up on the sidewalk.

    A hit & run by a cyclist resulting in death to a pedestrian is no different than a hit & run by the operator of a motor vehicle.

    Maybe you should ask why local authorities won't enforce the laws anymore?

    1376:

    Mate, I wouldn't even pitch a tent under a tree. Even if campgrounds didn't have signs up in 8 languages warning me not to, (which doesn't stop stupid tourists having their camp crushed by a falling tree on a regular basis). Nor would I build a house so close to trees that the fireys can't get a truck between the house and the trees without risking having a tree fall on them (a volunteer was killed by a falling tree two days ago). It gets to 48 degrees here in summer. I'm perfectly aware of how nice shade is. I'm also aware that a house is much more pleasant when it's not on fire and bedrooms are more cosy without a 50 tonne tree through them.

    Botanist here. Can I call a small time-out while I try to translate between Australian and American?

    Thanks.

    First, I get the problem Australians have with trees near homes, especially after the last fire season. My condolences. I also regularly walk by a Eucalyptus camaldulensis (river red gum) which is busy dropping large trunks in small windstorms, bless it's rotten heart. And I understand this is normal for the species? So I get why someone who lives with fire tornadoes and a plethora of widowmakers wouldn't want a tree shielding a house.

    There are tree species here in the US that are similarly prone to breakage. Scarlet oak back east in my experience, and Sitka spruce up in the Pacific Northwest.

    Thing is, most Americans don't live with Aussie levels of jutifiable paranoia, so we have our trees around. And our lack of paranoia is often justified. For example, various oak species are pretty gosh darn fireproof (coast live oak in my area). Redwood forests are known as "asbestos forests" for a reason, and it's not the breathing hazard.

    So rather than argue across the cultural/vegetative/intercontinental chasm, I'd suggest, I don't know, aiming elbow jabs better while holding hands and singing kumbaya or something. Because in some places, it's okay to live under a tree. Those places are just not in Australia right now.

    And while we're at it, someone please explain to me why trees are planted as windbreaks, even though their biologically incapable of breaking wind. English is so annoyingly asymmetrical sometimes.

    1377:

    Horza @ 1371: Somewhere way up thread there was an odd statement about how above a certain degree of latitude if you did not some form of heat during the night, you were going to "die". That, in fact, the northern latitudes would have to be "abandoned" due to problems in supplying them with power. Since there are several contributing members of a certain age, and many others with deep historical knowledge, I kept expecting someone to contradict this strange notion, yet no-one has. So, a bit of a personal reminiscence to provide some grounding:

    [ ... ]

    Having lived in Canada and Russia on occasion I understand some concern around the need to provide central heat at some point during the day, but it is not essential to life. These regions were inhabited long before the advent of fossil fuel, and there is no dependency on it. Rather, there is a quality of life dependency on it. I foresee a future not of abandoning northern latitudes, but rather adjusting the expectation of what living in such a latitudes will need to adopt a Fremen lifestyle, though that is more questionable for population densities as we have it now.

    Another thing I remember from reading Mother Earth News was there were a lot of design ideas for WELL INSULATED houses, including some from the far north of the U.S. where a house might be built that was so well insulated that you didn't really need to heat it; just the excess heat from electric lighting was enough to keep it warm. In fact what you needed was some way to keep the house from overheating.

    Of course those were houses lighted with incandescent bulbs. I guess you might need to add a little heat if you switched over to LED bulbs now. Principle is still the same. A well insulated house shouldn't require a great deal of additional heat to keep it warm enough for comfort.

    So if you can't add additional energy, can you do something to reduce the amount of energy required?

    1378:

    So, your grandmother didn't have her food cooked in the winter. Indeed, did without food deliveries, either to her, or her local shop. The local shop did without lighting, heating, refrigeration, cash registers? The local bank didn't have electric alarms, nor did it have deliveries of cash? The cash machines were never refilled? Card transactions at shops were done on imprint machines that waited till summer to process? The police walked everywhere, as did the fire brigade? Ambulances consisted of a wheelbarrow and a strong neighbour? The neighbour you had to go next door to summon because they're were no phones until summer?

    Yeah you could live through winter in the UK without fossil fuels, solar, storage, cable interconnects. People lived through the siege of Stalingrad. If that's what you looked forward to every winter, would you stay, or leave given the chance?

    It all boils down to a few simple statements and a bit of logic.

    Global civilisation can't survive a 4 degree temperature increase.

    If we (or any subset) continue to burn fossil fuel we will get a 4 degree temperature increase.

    The UK can support a population of about 2-4 million without the support of a global civilisation, just from the perspective of food alone, let alone imports of fertiliser, farm machinery, pesticides, oil for farm machinery and so on.

    So from those we get some choices.

    The UK drops fossil fuels as does everyone else in the world, and implements renewables to replace them. This seems like an obvious first choice. Life goes on much as before.

    The UK drops fossil fuels as does everyone else in the world, and doesn't implement renewables. There's no heat, light, phone, transport, services, medicines, food, water, sewerage, garbage collection, mechanised farming, imports and so on.

    The UK drops fossil fuels as does everyone else in the world, and does implement renewables or some nuclear but not storage enough to cover winter. As above, but for only 3 months of the year.

    The UK doesn't drop fossil fuels, but everyone else does. Civilisation collapse is delayed but still inevitable. The rest of the world can then either:

    Recognise that Britain is special, has a special place in the world, with a special history, and if Britain wants to destroy civilisation then it's probably for the best, so they not only let them get on with it, but continue to dig up fossil fuels and ship them to Britain so Britain can remain Britain. As is right and proper.

    Or

    Blockade them, and if that doesn't work.

    Bomb the fuck out of them until they stop burning things.

    Last alternative, it doesn't matter what Britain does because not everyone drops fossil fuels. Global civilisation collapses. Supplies of fossil fuels to Britain stop. So there's no choice but to drop fossil fuels. Supplies of things to make renewables stops. So there's no option to switch to renewables. Imports of food stop. Local food production collapses. It turns into the siege of Stalingrad, but it never ends.

    I'm pro survival. I like the first option. However I think the last option is the most likely. Note that only the first option doesn't include a 90% drop in UK population.

    1379:

    "...and since none of us have kids that we care about that argument is irrelevant."

    Speak for yourself. I've got two kids and care deeply for them both, and for any conceivable grandchildren.

    1380:

    Bill Arnold @ 1373:

    ...we are going precisely the opposite (e.g. trying to criminalise Insulation Rebellion).

    Fascinating. Had never read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulate_Britain_protests. Criminalizing protest in general is a really bad look. Pushing hard for dramatically improved building insulation is a good move in the UK, though civil disobedience needs to be combined/coordinated with other tactics IMO.

    Doesn't seem like THEY are actually "criminalizing protest" though.

    THEY arrested protestors who violated the law "for various offenses, such as criminal damage, causing danger to road users, wilful obstruction of the highway and causing a public nuisance." AFAIK, all of those laws pre-existed the protests, the laws appear to serve a useful, valid government purpose (highway safety) and it doesn't appear to me there's any kind of selective enforcement against the protesters and not against other violators ...

    After repeated violations the government (?) sought an injunction against the protestors violating the law in the future.

    Civil disobedience is a valid protest tactic, but you have to be willing to accept the legitimate consequences of your actions, particularly if you choose to violate other laws unrelated to the purpose of the protest.

    1381:

    gasdive (he, him, ia) @ 1374:

    I think I understood what you were describing, but a link to a photo or diagram would be helpful.

    Here's an animation. This one uses a loop, but the same principle for roof mounted storage (if you live somewhere that favours tile rooves) just that the heat pipe sticks into the tank.

    https://youtu.be/BZtkHHNoyjA

    Thanks. I got it now.

    1382:

    In this case I'm certainly willing to accept that it's my parochial view of trees as death machines, just waiting to kill, that colours my view.

    However, that doesn't jell with the description of the local trees.

    In general they gradually leaned over till they ran into another tree, a power line, or a roof. Or when we have ice storms or a heavy wet snow the lower limbs (which are 60' to 80' off the ground) will come down. Think of a 15' spear with the butt end about 5" to 10" across aimed at parts of your yard or house.

    So the description includes lower limbs that are 60-80 ft up, and directly over the house and yard. It also includes trees, that don't fall, but do gently lean over. I'm told that these sorts of rooves can't carry a PV panel or a 250 litre h/w tank, but they can carry a tree big enough that the lower limbs are 80 ft up (as long as it's lowered gently I suppose)? That does sound like a recipe for sharing your bed with a tree trunk, but I could be interpreting it wrong.

    1384:

    I don't think you're interpreting it wrong, but I don't know whose house your talking about. Not mine, certainly.

    1385:

    That does sound like a recipe for sharing your bed with a tree trunk, but I could be interpreting it wrong.

    Nope. You got it right. But those are the lob lollies. I took out 12 a while back. Plus a couple of dogwoods that were almost ready to fall over from rot. And an oak that turned out to be 2/3s dead once the pines were out of the way and you could see it. I still have a large oak (60 ft or more) that I like even if it does drop 20 or so trash cans of acorns every 5 or so years. And a nice (but gradually dying from ice storm damage) maple. Plus a Magnolia. And 4 of those crazy pines but they are next to the power lines and I don't want to spend $3K or more to remove them. They are very likely to NOT hit my house if they come down.

    But the 1000s of acres around me are full of these lob lollies. The seem to mostly have been planted around 1915 or so based on my ring counting every now and then. All with single family or garden apartments intermixed. Many of us are gradually removing them but we are in the middle of "all trees are sacred" folks which leads to lots of arguments about which trees should come down and why.

    As to waking up with one in your bedroom... Once or twice a year around here in the news. I know personally know someone that had several on their house at once. (2+mil people in the area) When the entire tree comes down it tends to come down slowly and mostly really messes up your shingles, roof framing, and creates a lot of leaks in the rain. It is the limbs that drop off that are worrisome. These crazy things grow up by dropping off lower limbs. So when they get to 80' or more what comes down is a 10' to 30' long spear. A heavy one. Those will come through your roof. And do.

    1386:

    Rarer since COVID-19. We had a massive drop in traffic during lockdown, and Reach plc (who own all the local press) have discovered that people really, really appreciated the effects of reduced traffic. As a result, running "poor innocent motorist" stories has been found to be a good way to reduce their revenue if done too often, so while they still run them, they're rarer than they used to be.

    They still run them, since that appears to be Reach plc national policy, but they're not nearly as common as they were, since Reach plc knows that running them upsets local readership.

    1387:

    The scooters in question are a licensed hire scheme, with number plates, a requirement that you have a valid driving licence, and a reminder every time you use them that using them on the pavement is illegal and can result in points on your driving licence.

    In practice, they're not used on the pavements as a result, because you're trivially identifiable from the number plates, and the hire scheme is quick to pass your details to the police with complaints. They also have GPS, and if your GPS track is consistently on the pavement, you get an alert in the app; keep it up, and your details are apparently passed to the police.

    As a result, there have been more collisions with car drivers over 60 (ignoring the other age groups) driving on the pavement to get round traffic since the scheme started than with the scooter scheme.

    1388:

    JBS
    I still have 2 copies of the "Whole Earth Catalog" ( Next & Last, respectively )
    You are so right - we need a regular update ...

    Airbus had 50 fits over Brexit, but, after much panicking & shuffling, the ( Very large) components are still being made here. Even Bo Jon-Sun's version of Juche didn't go that far.

    1389:

    I am undecided whather that assumption is a delusion or a straw man - perhaps both. Fossil fuels were essentially unused in the UK until the 18th century, and did not become dominant until the 19th. I lived in an unheated house through 1962/3, and remember when few people had cars.

    As I have said, repeatedly, it is essential that we change direction from using ever more energy to do the same things. Yes, there are 'sacrifices', but they are far more tolerable than most people think, even for old fogies like me. Unfortunately, to make those feasible, we need to stop the disinformation, take (governmental) action on obstacles, and engage the public.

    No, I do not think that we can do fuck-all and wait for technology to save us. Nor do my calculations indicate that technology CAN save us, without doing the above, or even that it will do much good. We are tackling the problem in the wrong way.

    1390:

    They are still lethally dangerous, mostly because they can't brake at anything like a safe rate. It's a rare (well-maintained) bicycle that can't brake at 0.5G before the rider goes over the handlebars, and that is (I believe) still the lower limit for car brakes. And they have no reflectors or lights, yet are legal to use at night. My objection to them is that they are a disastrous design from the point of view of safety.

    The key point is that most accidents occur in circumstances like when a pedestrian crosses the road, and the driver fails to stop, as required to by law. AND they are allowed on cycle tracks (though not cycle lanes!), which are often intimately involved with and used by pedestrians. Also, my observation is that those legal and managed schemes are dominated by less well managed ones and illegal use; I have never seen any with with registration plates, which are not required which, in turn, means that the police have no easy way to identify an illegal scooter.

    https://www.gov.uk/guidance/e-scooter-trials-guidance-for-users

    1391:

    I lived in the Southern UK, and even with central heating there was ice on the inside of the (single glazed) windows and the hand basin drain regularly froze in the bedroom I had from age 7.

    1392:

    1364 - In the UK a (motor) scooter (sometimes just "scoot" as a noun) does require a driver's licence. A mobility scooter (sometimes buggy) is an electrically powered vehicle as per your para 1.
    An "electric scooter" as per the MZN link in your para 2 is illegal to use except in certain areas where they can be hired as a "test case" or on private land not open to the general public.

    1368 - Obviously the land need not be flat and can be steep enough that conventional farming isn't possible.
    Any chance you'll actually define "flat", oh and "conventional farming"? (hint - this doesn't have to mean "arable land").

    1369 - Why am I not surprised?

    1393 - the police have no easy way to identify an illegal scooter Are you in Glasgow? If yes then E-scooter is illegal on public land. Easy enough?

    1393:

    I was referring to what has been legalised as part of trials in the UK, not the (numerous) forms of older, better-designed scooters; yes, I should have been explicit for the benefit of non-UK readers. Sorry. See #1393.

    Also, the assumption that, because vehicles are not allowed on the road they are no danger to pedestrians is wrong in the UK. Pedestrians have MORE right to use the road than vehicle users do, many roads have no or inadequate pavements, and many pedtrians quite properly do use the road. Look up the "Share the road" campaign.

    1394:

    paws & others - "scooters"
    Taken to mean adult-carrying electric machines, often with no lights, illegally ridden far too fast on pavements.
    As all of a pedestrian / cyclist / car-driver ... they are a fucking dangerous menace, usually ridden by morons. They need outright banning, I'm afraid.

    1395:

    Re: '... ilk have been emboldened into ignoring polite social norms and getting in-your-face with people/causes/policies they disagree with, or that inconvenience them.'

    And now this - so many ways this 'legal' action can overturn centuries of human rights progress.

    https://www.wearegreenbay.com/news/local-news/thedacare-files-lawsuit-to-keep-employees-from-leaving-for-ascension/

    https://www.wbay.com/2022/01/20/thedacare-seeks-court-order-against-ascension-wisconsin-worker-dispute/

    Since both health facilities serve the same geographic area (people), the only difference is which health care provider they'll be going to. The judgement (IMO) is:

    (a) not about healthcare for users, it's about healthcare as a revenue stream

    (b) the rights of corp$ supersede the rights (freedom) of the individual

    Apparently a key point in the argument is that since the complaining facility is labeled a particular 'level', losing these docs would mean that this facility wouldn't be able to deliver that 'level'. My issue with this is: it's the docs not the label that deliver the medical care. These docs will still be available to provide care - just not under your roof. So what if you lose your 'level' designation.

    WI looks top-heavy in GOPs.

    FYI - the judge sided with the corp, not the people.

    1396:

    I just came across a VOX article from a couple of years ago that is basically the TL;DR form of a detailed study done at MIT. It uses 20 years of fine-grained wind and solar data from four different US state systems to investigate the storage requirements for an all-renewable system. Continental-scale interconnections aren't considered.

    https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/8/9/20767886/renewable-energy-storage-cost-electricity

    The MIT study:

    https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9

    Storage Requirements and Costs of Shaping Renewable Energy Toward Grid Decarbonization Joule, Volume 3, ISSUE 9, P2134-2153, September 18, 2019

    "Here we study which characteristics most impact renewable electricity costs, including cost features of proposed storage technologies. Considering 20 years of resource fluctuations, we capture large, infrequent events affecting storage requirements. We estimate that cost-competitively meeting baseload demand 100% of the time requires storage energy capacity costs below $20/kWh. If other sources meet demand 5% of the time, electricity costs fall and the energy capacity cost target rises to $150/kWh."

    1397:

    Anybody care to weigh in on the news release by the UK foreign office about Russia allegedly having a hand-picked puppet to run Ukraine post-conquest?

    Sounded like utter nonsense to me: no proof offered, just the assertion. Aimed at raising, rather than lowering, tensions. The question is: why? Who on earth would benefit from making war in Ukraine more, rather than less, likely?

    1398:

    The USA military-industrial complex, similar unscrupulous armament manufacturers and financiers, and arguably the current regime in Ukraine(*). We have heard such tripe many times before (remember the repeated "invasion imminent" stories?)

    I am seriously concerned that the current massive shipments of armaments from the USA and UK to Ukraine is likely to (and possibly intended to) encourage Ukraine to launch an attack in order to recover its territory and complete the pogrom it started in 2014, the people it attacks (both Ukrainian and Russian) will respond, that will be spun in the West as "Russia has invaded Ukraine", and things will spiral out of hand. Think Sarajevo, 1914.

    (*) Independent sources (Reuters, Al Jazeera etc.) have reported on Ukraine's increasing criminalisation of political opposition. This cannot but help them with that.

    1399:

    Come the winter, I was treated to the spectacle of ice on the inside of the window pane when I woke in the mornings.

    That was normal for me growing up in Saskatchewan, and we had central heating and double-glazed windows. Lows of -35 to -40 make even double-glazed glass cold enough for condensation to freeze.

    My first tech job (in Edmonton) we had thick layers of ice form on the window frames. Turns out the company hired a Toronto architect who didn't understand (or bother to learn about) Edmonton's climate, so we had things like dehumidifiers installed but no humidifiers (dry air is hell on electronics, because of the static*) and uninsulated metal-framed windows.

    *It was so bad that walking across a tile floor was enough to build up a charge. We had to have grounding points everywhere, wear wrist straps, etc — and still had more problems than we should have.

    1400:

    So if you can't add additional energy, can you do something to reduce the amount of energy required?

    https://passivehouse.com

    You can, but the building industry resists it. Banks, too — getting a mortgage for a non-standard building takes more time and effort (and possibly connections).

    Where I live the problem is housing supply — population is increasing faster than new homes are being built — so the big push if for quick construction, which up here means timber frame buildings with a minimum of everything invisible (just enough to meet code) with all extra effort concentrated on things buyers can see.

    I think we need to get serious about energy standards for buildings, but that is probably a bigger and harder fight than anti-pollution standards for vehicles.

    1401:

    Well, if Russia really is planning a full-scale invasion and overthrow of the existing government, having a list of preferred replacements would be expected. Wouldn't even have to be puppets, just very Russia-friendly.

    https://www.reuters.com/world/who-is-yevhen-murayev-named-by-britain-kremlins-pick-lead-ukraine-2022-01-23/

    Britain's foreign ministry said Russia was considering the Ukrainian politician Yevhen Murayev to lead a new government, in comments that Russia has denied. Murayev also poured cold water on the claim in comments to the Observer newspaper.

    WHO IS YEVHEN MURAYEV?

    Born in the eastern city of Kharkiv near the Russian border in 1976, Murayev is part of a group of politicians in opposition to the pro-Western leadership that took power after the 2014 Maidan street protests.

    1402:

    The scooters in question are a licensed hire scheme, with number plates, a requirement that you have a valid driving licence

    I'm curious if we have another example of differing language?

    To me, a scooter is like a motorized skateboard with a handle. Picture here:

    https://rideone.ca/e-scooter-rentals/

    They are rented with an app, and (like bicycles) don't require a license to operate.

    A bit of googling seems to show that in England a scooter is a small motorbike where you sit with your legs in front of you rather than astride. Is this true? (We call that a moped.)

    1403:

    It's possible, depending on where the paragon of local transport is that Simon Farnsworth lives in, but the difference would be between there and the rest of the UK (and you). The picture you showed is PRECISELY what is being talked about by most of us, and I posted a link to the government regulations. Yes, a licence is needed here, but registration plates are NOT, and only selected locations have approved (i.e. legal) hire schemes - including Cambridge but not Glasgow.

    Yes, the other forms of motorised scooter exist, are essentially small urbanised motorbicycles, and are not a problem.

    1404:

    They’re both. A moped is basically a motorised bicycle with a 2-stroke engine and can be pedalled with effort. A scooter (adult) is a cross between a moped and a motorcycle; no pedals but has a fairing for the legs and you sit with your legs and feet to the front not straddling the body like a moped or motorcycle. Compared to a motorcycle, they are low power (<50cc?), and IIRC, speed limited (they’re banned on UK motorways).

    A scooter when I was a child basically a plank with a wheel at either end, the front wheel being steerable by means of a handlebar mounted on a stalk. They were propelled by having one foot on the board and using the other foot to push against the ground. When sufficient speed was obtained (or on a downslope), one coasted with both feet on the board.

    Modern scooters are similar in style to an old-style children’s scooters. They have a electric motor in the wheels so you no longer have to push propel them. These ones are a menace and are banned in the UK except as noted above.

    1405:

    I did a lot of research on "Passivhaus" before we built our house (in .dk) five years ago, and then I ignored them.

    The movement materialized in the OPEC oil-crisis, but have deep taproots in the late-60-ies hippie-culture.

    Back in that time it was pretty radical thinking that a house would not burn through several tons of oil every year, but unlike the rest of the world, they have not moved on.

    Today the margin between their measurable technical requirements for certifying a building, and the mandatory BR2020 building code in Denmark is immaterial, and not even always in their favor.

    However, they are still hung up on a some of the hippie-nonsense, including the very German concept of "electro-smog" and "biodynamism".

    If you want to build a good energy-efficient house, I would recommend you start from the Danish building code rather than Passivhaus, (not that the former is not without issues!)

    For reference: Our house is 280m² measured on the interior walls and our ground-circuit heat-pump uses approx 2800 kWh per year to make hot water (most of it from our own solar panels) and another 1400 kWh for the floor-heating during winter.

    1406:

    1405 - See 1395, para 1.

    1407 - Agreed; the big issue is the people who think "if you can buy it, it must be legal to use it in public".

    1407:

    "most of it from our own solar panels"

    Around 25 m^2, no?

    1408:

    Oh, well, of course. I mean, not showing up to work on time, they should be treated no differently than the way the rest of us are treated.

    Oh, and they must, of course, call in if they see they're going to be late... and too many of those starts them on probation.

    1409:

    Over the handlebars? That would be if you don't hit your rear breaks first, and hardest.

    1410:

    As opposed to the Western-supported current government, that was set up in '14?

    The West, now, "Oh, how dare they do the same thing we did!"

    1411:

    Then there's in the middle between a mo-ped and a motorcycle. The classic is a Vespa (and they're not allowed on Interstates, here).

    1412:

    "Somewhere way up thread there was an odd statement about how above a certain degree of latitude if you did not some form of heat during the night, you were going to "die". ...I kept expecting someone to contradict this strange notion, yet no-one has."

    Because it happens, every winter. Old people dying in low temperature excursion events because they haven't got the money for heating is nothing unusual. The government even ended up having to give them extra money for heating in such excursions, although it's fucking useless because you don't know you're going to get it until it turns up out of the blue some weeks after the weather's warmed up again, so you still have exactly the same problem.

    I too had ice on the inside of the bedroom windows when I was a kid, and that was not in Scotland but south of Birmingham and with central heating. Ditto ancestors who made it into the high tail of the lifespan distribution despite never having had any of this stuff. Neither of those points renders it untrue that old people often die of cold when they would have survived if they'd had heat.

    Two points that immediately spring to mind are (1) that more people are now able to survive long enough to get significantly far into that state of frailty and make it possible for lack of heating to be their ultimate cause of death, and (2) that even if they didn't have it when they were young their bodies now have been used to them being able to evade the cold for some decades, so finding themselves unable to is more of a strain.

    You could bleakly assume that eventually the current crop of old people will die off anyway and their successors will have had time to re-accustom their bodies to lower temperatures and/or died off sooner in any case from unavailability of medical care or food or somewhere to hide from the bombs (depending on how dystopian your vision gets), but I think most of us are making the unspoken assumption that relying on that is not an acceptable approach, and even if it was it's not where we're at now and it's not going to become like that in the kind of timescales we're considering, so as we currently are in the situation where people do find the curtain coming down early if the heat fails, that's what we think we need to cope with.

    1413:

    No. The g-limit (irrespective of how cleverly you brake) is the ration of the distance of the composite centre of gravity from the hub of the front wheel to the height of it above the ground. For almost all safety bicycles (i.e. not High Ordinaries), that's between 0.5 and 0.75.

    For one of those E-scooter abominations, it's probably less than 0.25.

    1414:

    gasdive (he, him, ia) @ 1385: In this case I'm certainly willing to accept that it's my parochial view of trees as death machines, just waiting to kill, that colours my view.

    However, that doesn't jell with the description of the local trees.

    Again, perhaps a link would be helpful, even a Wikipedia article ... or a note where "local" is and I'll google it for myself.

    1415:

    "but I think most of us are making the unspoken assumption that relying on that is not an acceptable approach"

    It's not an all-or-nothing approach. We keep our house pretty cool by modern standards, are in our 70s, do not handle cold well, and wear a fair amount of of clothing. There comes a point when that's not enough, but most houses are kept far hotter than they need to be. If we had a government, it should reinvigorate the British wool industry from hill sheep, which would have massive environmental and social benefits.

    On this matter, I am disgusted that I can't find any thick woollen long johns or trousers in the UK; I don't mind what wool, but synthetics will Not Do (*). I have some 250 gram long johns, but would like some 500 gram ones, and trousers heavier than modern cavalry twill. Any help appreciated!

    (*) For camping out, it is essential that they remain insulating when damp to wet.

    1416:

    so the big push if for quick construction, which up here means timber frame buildings with a minimum of everything invisible (just enough to meet code) with all extra effort concentrated on things buyers can see.

    This is just normal operations. In the US. And now I'm guessing Canada. Meet the code with what is invisible or you'll be pricing your house higher than the competition. And no one can "see" why. And 99.99% of the time the explanation doesn't matter to the buyers.

    Been this way since my youth with my father building houses one at a time as a side income. It was very hard to find people who cared about the invisibles.

    1417:

    Bill Arnold @ 1386: Sorry, that was a reference to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill championed by Priti Patel (and others).

    Yeah, the links didn't tell me much about the bill itself, but I was able to google it by its name.

    There certainly appear to be provisions that would not pass Constitutional muster here in the U.S.

    Does the U.K. have any court that can rule on the "constitutionality" of laws passed by Parliament? I know the U.K. has a "constitution" even if it's not all written down in one specific document. But is there any hope citizens (or subjects) might have that a court could try to protect them from rogue legislation such as this?

    1418:

    Not really. At present, the courts could reject it as incompatible with the Human Rights Act (and hence EU law), but the Brexiteers have promised to abolish that. Quantum of Nightmares is only partly fiction.

    1419:

    "old people often die of cold when they would have survived if they'd had heat."

    Which does kind of personalize the question of the long-term statistical behavior of your sources of heat. Not just on the timescale of minutes and hours, but days and weeks. In the case of wind+solar, existing data indicate there might be periods of a week to ten days every few years when they fall to less than 25% of demand. Where demand is not just current electric, but current electric + nonelectric heating.

    There's a study done on a large European dataset that addresses some of this. The statistics are a bit beyond my level of comfort, so perhaps EC could comment:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56286-1

    Wind Power Persistence Characterized by Superstatistics Published: 27 December 2019

    A variety of technical measures is currently being developed to cope with these fluctuations in the power system. Virtual inertia, batteries, or smart grid applications might balance the grid for seconds, minutes or a few hours. For time periods of many minutes or several hours, pumped hydro storage is capable of providing back-up power. However, it remains unclear how to act when low wind conditions persist for several days or weeks.

    In this article, we investigate the persistence (waiting time) statistics of low- and high-wind situations in Europe. We thus analyze the duration of periods where wind velocities v constantly stay below or above a certain limiting value. The study is carried out for various locations in Europe and complemented with an analysis of aggregated power generation for individual countries and a detailed synoptic analysis.

    Long periods characterized by a persistent and quasi-stationary blocking high pressure weather system (which may endure several weeks) lead to sustained low-wind velocities and thus constitute extreme weather events, posing a substantial challenge to the operation of highly renewable power systems. During these periods, the power demand must be entirely satisfied by other renewable generators, backup power plants or long-term electricity storage, which is not yet available at that scale. Not the average power output of wind farms, but the extreme event statistics is essential when dimensioning the necessary backup options. It is assumed that these extreme events without renewable generation occur rarely, but a clear quantitative understanding is missing.

    1420:

    EC
    This is why I have zero sympathy for either "side" in Ukraine ... I get the strong impression that each/both of them "don't get" democracy - they are both seeking to criminalise legal opposition, for instance.
    OTOH ... I can see, all too well, why "the Baltics" have joined NATO - & - apparently, even Finland is getting worried about Vladimir (?)

    Rbt Prior
    Problem: More than one type of scooter.
    We have the petrol-powered ones, yes, but also the type you linked to - it's the latter that are a dangerous menace. They may be "banned" but the buggers are everywhere!
    Mopeds are different again. { SEE ALSO: EC & MaddyE }

    pigeon
    I think that is starting to include me ... I'm starting to "feel the cold" much more than I used to. I'm taking active measures to try to stop my core temperature falling too far, as a result.

    JBS
    Yes.
    Our Supreme Court can strike legislation down ....... Needless to say, Bo Jon-Sun is trying to stop this.
    Not that it will do any good: We also have a long tradition of Juries "Refusing to Convict" - SEE ALSO - I regard this as relevant, because Bo J is emulating James II & VII in bluster & incompetence!

    1421:

    Greg Tingey @ 1391: JBS
    I still have 2 copies of the "Whole Earth Catalog" ( Next & Last, respectively )
    You are so right - we need a regular update ...

    I don't remember if I have the original "Whole Earth Catalog" or not, but I'm pretty sure I have the Next, Last, Epilogue and Millennium Whole Earth Catalog ... plus the first twenty years or so of Mother Earth News on CD-ROM.

    I still had all the magazines themselves up until my siblings came over during one of my deployments and decided they were going to clean up my house (and just threw away a whole bunch of my shit!) ... one of the reasons I'm barely on speaking terms with them

    ... and the primary reason I know that if I ever get to the point I can't live independently in my own home I'll get put into a nursing home to die.

    1422:

    Yes, but.... Hitting the front brakes first, or only, will cause the rear to come up, throwing you over the handlebars.

    1423:

    "old people often die of cold when they would have survived if they'd had heat."

    Which does kind of personalize the question of the long-term statistical behavior of your sources of heat. Not just on the timescale of minutes and hours, but days and weeks. In the case of wind+solar, existing data indicate there might be periods of a week to ten days every few years when they fall to less than 25% of demand. Where demand is not just current electric, but current electric + nonelectric heating.

    There's a study done on a large European dataset that addresses some of this. The statistics are a bit beyond my level of comfort, so perhaps EC could comment:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56286-1

    Wind Power Persistence Characterized by Superstatistics Published: 27 December 2019

    A variety of technical measures is currently being developed to cope with these fluctuations in the power system. Virtual inertia, batteries, or smart grid applications might balance the grid for seconds, minutes or a few hours. For time periods of many minutes or several hours, pumped hydro storage is capable of providing back-up power. However, it remains unclear how to act when low wind conditions persist for several days or weeks.

    In this article, we investigate the persistence (waiting time) statistics of low- and high-wind situations in Europe. We thus analyze the duration of periods where wind velocities v constantly stay below or above a certain limiting value. The study is carried out for various locations in Europe and complemented with an analysis of aggregated power generation for individual countries and a detailed synoptic analysis.

    Long periods characterized by a persistent and quasi-stationary blocking high pressure weather system (which may endure several weeks) lead to sustained low-wind velocities and thus constitute extreme weather events, posing a substantial challenge to the operation of highly renewable power systems. During these periods, the power demand must be entirely satisfied by other renewable generators, backup power plants or long-term electricity storage, which is not yet available at that scale. Not the average power output of wind farms, but the extreme event statistics is essential when dimensioning the necessary backup options. It is assumed that these extreme events without renewable generation occur rarely, but a clear quantitative understanding is missing.

    1424:

    Esp. since they moved all the clothing manufacturing to southeast Asia or India, they've been making cloth thinner and thinner. When I was a kid (US), dungarees, sorry, "jeans", were probably about 14 or 16 (I think that's threads/inch?), now you're lucky to get 9. About three years ago, I was looking for a new pair of cords, and after six stores (we're talking large store chains), I got the thinnest cords I've ever had, suitable for heteromeles to wear in the summer in southern California.

    1425:

    As for who benefits from war in Ukraine, Putin clearly thinks he will. In the west, as they will not put boots on the ground,much like in Russia it will be used as a distraction. In the U.K that would be from the governments own behaviour, in the U.S maybe from the country's division.

    EC, only 400g I'm afraid:

    https://www.thebushcraftstore.co.uk/woolpower-ullfrotte-long-johns----400-52581-p.asp

    As for trousers, I would suggest looking at modern outdoor trousers. They can be waterproof and insulated.

    On a postitive note(?):

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/10/protein-from-gorse-bushes-could-feed-millions-of-people-says-expert#:~:text=Gorse%20contains%2017%25%20protein%20and%20broom%20has%2021%25%20protein%2C,be%20used%20as%20animal%20food.

    Nom,nom.

    1426:

    Spoken like a man who low-sides regularly.

    1427:

    "Maybe you should ask why local authorities won't enforce the laws anymore?"

    It's surprisingly uncommon to even see a cop these days. Driving in their cars on main roads, OK, still quite a few. Driving in their cars on non-main roads, mostly not unless they're answering a call (usually not an emergency one). Wandering around doing foot patrols, well, yeah, sometimes, but it tends to make you wonder if they think something's going to happen, rather than being just an ordinary thing as it used to be.

    Language... commonly recognised meanings of "scooter" in Britain include:

    Little electrically-powered four-wheeled cart for people who have difficulty walking (technically illegal to use if you haven't). This is a "mobility scooter" but it's common not to bother saying the "mobility" bit.

    Small motorbike with step-through layout. Legally the same as any other kind of motorbike with the same size engine. Some of them have engines as big as ordinary bikes. Ones with engines under 50cc and speed limited to 30mph have less stringent driver's licence requirements. They are all called "scooters" because of their appearance, regardless of engine size.

    Plank with wheels and a handlebar stalk, a toy for kiddies propelled by scooting it along with one foot. So naturally it's a "scooter".

    Same thing but with batteries and a motor. These are what everyone is making a fuss about.

    Law: riding/driving anything on the pavement (pedestrian bit of the road) is illegal, no matter what it is or how it's propelled; if it makes sense to use those verbs of it then you're not allowed. (Wee kids included.) Enforcement, as near to zero as makes no difference and has been so for as long as I can remember; a bicycle isn't technically a go-anywhere vehicle in legal terms, but in practical terms it is.

    On the road bit of the road it's more or less the opposite: you can ride/drive anything if it hasn't got an engine (of any kind); if it has got an engine both it and you have to have the right bits of paper.

    Where it gets complicated is with small things whose engine is an electric motor. (I shall ignore mobility scooters because they are a special case and don't really affect anything else.) If a bicycle has an electric motor which fits certain power and speed limits, then the motor doesn't count as an engine and you can ride it without any bits of paper just the same as if it didn't have any kind of motor.

    This is a bodge tacked on to the previously-existing laws, but its bodgy nature wasn't a difficulty when it was applied because at the time fitting an electric motor and battery was of dubious practicality even for a bicycle (mostly because of the size and weight of lead-acid batteries). It became a difficulty when batteries and motors got small and light enough to make all sorts of strange things you could ride on that were of sub-bicycle size. There was a lot of fuss about Segways when they came out. It makes sense that if you can use an electric bicycle as freely as you can use an ordinary one, then you ought to be able to use an electric two-wheeled thing which is smaller and slower than a bicycle just as freely, and it is widely said that in countries whose legal system does not approach the matter by means of a bodge that is indeed the case, but it isn't here. It has to be a bicycle or you don't get the breaks.

    I anal and all that, but as I understand it either the law doesn't have a category for things like Segways at all, or they technically end up by default in some category which is ludicrously inappropriate. Either way, you can't use them on the road because not being a bicycle their electric motor counts as an engine, so you need all the right bits of paper, but the right bits of paper don't exist.

    You can't use them on the pavement either but that's because you can't use anything on the pavement anyway; it's nothing to do with them being electric or weird or not bicycles.

    Segways never really took off, though, partly because of this but mainly because they were too expensive and also not much use to most people. Planks with handlebar stalks and a motor are a different matter: they're a lot cheaper, and also lighter, very compact if you fold the handlebar stalks down, and make it much easier to deal with what you do with them when you're not riding them. Unlike a bicycle or a Segway, you can go to a shop or go to work on them and then compactify them and take them inside with you, so you don't have to worry about them getting stolen or vandalised while you're not around. And they're highly suited to dealing with the awkward end bits of journeys made mostly by other means: you can take them on trains, which you essentially can't do with bicycles any more, and they're less hassle than a bicycle was when you could. And you can put them in the boot of a car and then use them to get into the town centre instead of having to trog in on foot from the kind of distance town centre pedestrianisation and car park extortionists compel you to park at these days.

    I rather suspect you could make a legal argument that they get the same motor-doesn't-count-as-an-engine exemption for road use that electric bicycles do because they are a muscle-propelled vehicle with optional electric assistance, they don't exceed the bicycle power and speed limits, and they are a bicycle of sorts. I don't know if anyone's actually tried it yet. But they still wouldn't be legal to use on the pavement just as bicycles and kiddie scooters without motors aren't.

    1428:

    "As a result, there have been more collisions with car drivers over 60 (ignoring the other age groups) driving on the pavement to get round traffic since the scheme started than with the scooter scheme."

    Where on earth do you live that it has a problem with pensioners (never mind the other age groups) driving on the pavement to dodge the traffic?

    1429:

    Ok... I haven't the faintest idea what "low sides" means, nor do I find anything searching online.

    I will note that it's allegedly 38F, so, about 4C or so, and feels colder, and I just put out the recycling....

    1430:

    Robert Prior @ 1405:

    The scooters in question are a licensed hire scheme, with number plates, a requirement that you have a valid driving licence

    I'm curious if we have another example of differing language?

    To me, a scooter is like a motorized skateboard with a handle. Picture here:

    https://rideone.ca/e-scooter-rentals/

    They are rented with an app, and (like bicycles) don't require a license to operate.

    A bit of googling seems to show that in England a scooter is a small motorbike where you sit with your legs in front of you rather than astride. Is this true? (We call that a moped.)

    One word, multiple meanings. Here in Raleigh, a "scooter" could be:

    1.) An electric skateboard with a "steering wheel" that you can rent with an ap. Helmet suggested, no passengers.

    2.) A powered chair for a person with disabilities.

    3.) A small "almost a motorcycle" - not necessarily a moped because there aren't any pedals. It's all engine driven. Helmet required and if you have a passenger they are required to wear a helmet too.

    1431:

    Thanks for the Ullfrotte link. No, modern outdoor trousers will not do, because the 'waterproof' ones collect sweat on the inside and lose insulation. I need wool, and no nonsense.

    1432:

    Both Segways and E-scooters are non-type-approved motor vehicles, and thus illegal to use on UK roads and rights of way. Your argument in the last paragraph wouldn't fly for a second; I could post the link to the legislation if you want. You COULD apply for type approval, but good luck to you!

    1433:

    No joy. That's 400 g/m^2 (I think), the same as mine, and they will weigh about 250 grams.

    1434:

    "I think that is starting to include me ... I'm starting to "feel the cold" much more than I used to. I'm taking active measures to try to stop my core temperature falling too far, as a result."

    I used to quite happily go out all the time wearing just a short sleeved shirt regardless of sub-zero conditions, to the point where people thought I was odd for it, although I don't suppose anyone would have noticed if I'd been in Newcastle.

    These days I find it unpleasantly cold from about October to March and go out entirely wrapped in insulation apart from a bit of my face, and usually with at least some sort of jacket on at other times.

    I also find it very noticeable how my perception of the temperature in the room changes when I eat something. What felt a bit chilly before can turn into excessively hot as my metabolism gets stuck into the fresh dose of fuel. This in turn leads me to wonder how the environmental impact per kWh compares between energy sources for internal and external use. I suspect it's probably not that great.

    1435:

    3.) A small "almost a motorcycle" - not necessarily a moped because there aren't any pedals. It's all engine driven.

    Up here those are almost non-existent — I haven't seen one in decades, anyway.

    We have a lot of e-bikes that are mopeds — there are pedals, but they are awkward-to-painful to use and not very effective — they are there so that legally the vehicle is a bicycle rather than a motorbike, so bicycle laws apply rather than vehicular laws. (Things like insurance, licensing, etc are much looser for bikes.)

    Mopeds are a problem when they drive at half the speed of traffic along a main road*, which causes huge traffic jams, but are also a problem on the sidewalk (to pedestrians). I've seen them both places, and they don't fit either.

    Electric skateboards with handles are mostly used on the sidewalk (and bike lanes, where available) "because it's safer" (to their riders, not pedestrians). Enforcement is pretty much non-existent.

    It's a summer problem up here — few are dedicated enough to ride an exposed vehicle in sub-zero weather. Not to mention ice is more of a problem when you're on two wheels with not much between you and the pavement. And salt isn't good for your gears.

    *Taking the lane, because it's safer and they have a right to…

    1436:

    My point is that a competent cyclist can stop from 15 MPH in ten yards or less, but an E-scooter rider can't in less than 16 yards (and probably not in less than 20). That's a big difference.

    1437:

    I see what you mean! It indicates that wind power has far longer 'off' periods than existing studies allow for, and storage is a BIG problem for it. I am not sure if I could extract actual figures of the probability of X days of 'off' time from it; I would have to run it through TeX and study it carefully to say more. My guess is that they didn't do so for the reason in the next paragraph.

    What I did notice was that it analysed by country, because that's the data they had, and that is definitely misleading. No, I don't believe that Eire is very different from Northern Ireland and the west of the UK (see figures 6 and 2). On the other hand, the low central and eastern sections of the UK ARE very different from the west and the high ground.

    1438:

    The one time I was advised about what clothing to bring on long backpacking trip, several decades ago, they strongly asked for wool trousers and suggested finding a used clothing store. I recall buying wool suit pants. Of course, I brought jeans as well, which literally started disintegrating from grit in the cloth plus mechanical action, after a couple of days of hiking (in the Colorado Rockies). The wool pants lasted the rest of the trip.

    1439:

    It's when the back wheel skids and goes out from underneath you, so you fall down on the opposite side to the side it skids out. If this happens when you're going round a bend, which is where the term is usually applied, the wheel of course skids to the outside of the bend, and you fall down on your side which is leaning lower to the ground. Overuse of the rear brake in a bend (when you shouldn't be braking anyway) has this effect.

    Rear wheel skids are often recoverable because they take effect slowly enough to react to (front wheel skids fuck you in an eyeblink and are almost never recoverable). But if you then don't react quickly enough at the moment the tyre regains grip and the response to control inputs suddenly reverts to normal, quite likely with the bike heading in an undesirable direction, you can end up getting flicked off the other side instead. That is one cause of the kind of off known as a high-side.

    Motorcycle braking is mostly done using the front brake, the more so the higher performance the bike. The C of G is low enough and the brake controllable enough that going over the handlebars is rarely a concern, but it's still easy to take enough weight off the back wheel that the rear brake is basically useless. The same redistribution of vertical forces gives you more grip from the front wheel, so unless the surface conditions are bad the front wheel does not skid under braking.

    What does happen is that the bike tries to stand up and go in a straight line, while the road is still going round a bend. This is not helpful, and constitutes another of the reasons for not braking while cornering.

    1440:

    1430 para the last - Find me an e-bike that can legally do 50mph; some e-scooters can physically go that fast.

    1432 - Low side - From motorcycling, falling off the inner (low) side of the vehicle whilst cornering, usually by apply the rear brake too hard.

    1433 - All those definitions (and potentially others) of "scooter" can apply. In this case, see my references to "e-scooter" (for electric).

    1439 - Your point agreed, but I suspect that's partly because e-scoots have rubbish brake systems.

    1442 - Mostly agreed, with the note that I have occasionally low sided on a pushbike, but never high sided on one. (BTW I can balance well enough (or could back in the day) to back a pushbike into a corner)

    1441:

    "I could post the link to the legislation if you want."

    Yes, please.

    1442:

    "Find me an e-bike that can legally do 50mph; some e-scooters can physically go that fast."

    I've done it on an ordinary pedal bike without any motor, or any e. Very conscious of being no more than a twitch away from redecorating the tarmac. I'd have thought doing it on something with titchy wheels that you stand up on would be next thing to certain death.

    (Never actually tried doing it with e, but the boggo version of the molecule without the MD or the M works quite well, as you'd expect; LSD seems to be good for intermittent extreme output for very brief periods; but for sustained boost along with minimum perception of knackerage, plain old ethanol seems to be the most effective.)

    Pedal cycle low sides, I managed an epic one on that same bicycle: turned too sharply at 30mph, slid down the road supported on the three points of the end of the handlebars, the end of the pedal, and the end of the rear axle. Somehow my body remained suspended above the plane of these three points in more or less a normal riding position and didn't touch the road at all. The interaction of physics and physiology in such situations can take some remarkable forms.

    1443:

    Pigeon @ 1431:

    "As a result, there have been more collisions with car drivers over 60 (ignoring the other age groups) driving on the pavement to get round traffic since the scheme started than with the scooter scheme."

    Where on earth do you live that it has a problem with pensioners (never mind the other age groups) driving on the pavement to dodge the traffic?

    Kind of a side note, but what y'all call the "pavement" in the U.K would be called a sidewalk here in the U.S. (because it runs along side a road or a street). Generally here in the U.S. (or at least the small corner of it I inhabit) "pavement" is the material used to PAVE streets & roads ... so BOTH the street & the sidewalk are "pavement".

    So, "driving on the pavement to get round traffic" doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. If you mean they're driving their automobiles up on the sidewalks to avoid traffic, that ought to be against the law anyway.

    Or do you mean rogue senior citizen skateboarders? I thought that only happened in California?

    1444:

    assumption is a delusion or a straw man

    I made it more as a wry observation of some of the views expressed here. Like the "none of us have children we care about" one. The serious part is "if it's true that 'we' can't live north of 50 degrees without copious use of fossil fuels, then presumably those areas were not inhabited prior to fossil fuel use". Which is sort of an exaggeration for effect, but also the obvious result of the claim being true. Said claim having been made repeatedly and emphatically by some in this discussion.

    I think there's a whole lot of things we can do, and I try to do at least the more practical ones. But I get a bit overwhelmed by the people here who are adamant that the only thing we can do is to keep making things worse until everyone dies.

    1445:

    Kardashev
    Which is why I keep saying .. we need "nuclear" AS WELL AS all the renewables, just to be sure.
    During these periods, the power demand must be entirely satisfied by other renewable generators, backup power plants or long-term electricity storage, which is not yet available at that scale.
    Quite.

    EC @ 1439
    YES

    1446:

    Find me an e-bike that can legally do 50mph; some e-scooters can physically go that fast.

    TriSled used to just refuse to fit e-assist to their velomobiles because of the speed problem. Their top end one was designed to do 50kph/30mph with 200W of rider input, and since that's the legal limit for e-assist here it wasn't really a huge problem. The power input scales non-linearly, by 80kph even I was struggling to push that hard for long. Mostly because our roads are often gravel+tar so the surface is quite rough. On a track, especially a wooden velodrome, 80kph is quite manageable. For "world speed record" sense of manageable anyway.

    With a legal e-assist of 1kW or more those velomobiles wouldn't need pedal power at all to sit at 50mph on the flat with a decent road surface.

    One legislative hiccup is that in some places "bicycles" are not allowed to have seat belts. Which means hitting anything at 50mph is going to be unnecessarily exciting. I've seen riders hit stuff at that speed on ... in the vicinity of... a track and walk away unscathed, but that's largely because of the seat belt and roll cage.

    But yeah, upright bike you'd need more than 1kW of power assist to hit 50mph anywhere other than a steep downhill.

    1447:

    Ok, so, things to note:

    1) We totally nailed the Tonga thing (see MF thread for scientists going "whew" to which we add "...so like them to doubt us, fuckers testing nukes like it was a fucking brothel and can't even run the numbers when to jolt a fault for a nice clean underground kurffler, fucking amateurs", and yes: apparently three people (it's closer to ten) died, but in a strike that large (~90k peeps, and two of those are out of boundaries) that's pretty fucking good, compared to say, we don't know, the 90% miss rate on USA drone strikes hitting innocents. Or put it another way: they lucked out to the tune of 0.1%.

    Ho.Ho.Ho.

    And no, probabilities bitch, you're shit at them.

    2) The "HUR-HUR, ASSASSIN'S CREED IS REAL" and "WE GET IT, YOU'RE A MICROPHONE" brigade (they're all USA 'leftists' / podcasters) missed the joke. As a smart red panda above noted, Denmark - UK elec cable. As the UK House of Parliament noted (cough slightly later cough) arms shipments to Ukraine, going over Denmark and missing Germany.

    Yes, we're obscenely good at this.

    3) No, you missed the point. Ok, sooooo...... FEMINIST READING OF HELLBOY II AND CONSEQUENCES THEREOF:

    Liz (Hellboy's partner) is pregnant and ditches him because he's a glory-seeking hound Nuala (Elf Princess) is a tripartite holder of Power and legs it when her brother turns up to protect her own kind

    Liz does ultimate sacrifice to resurrect Hellboy even though Angel of Death (HAI) states it means the prophecy to end all Men comes true Nuala (psychically linked to her brother for a 1:1 damage ration), kills herself rather than let him win (and no, this is Feminist, not .mil crap, sooo, unpack: she kills herself to save her own kind from becoming the most worst of things: Humans, who kill without remorse).

    You're welcome.

    4) The Matrix stuff, whelp, check Host's twitter for E. Mausques greatest trick yet. Yes, yes, it's the story-line to Assassin's Creed, thanks for playing.

    5) Now, this is the interesting bit.

    grep Rammstein "mein herz brennt" (2015 or so: we used it elsewhere beforehand, but hey). Then note the arrangement used: it's the piano / non-metal version. Has a totally different video

    grep Progidy "Invisible Sun"[1] and note discussions about sitting on chairs and Black-Hole treatments.

    Now then: This Mind had (until approx 10 minutes ago) viewed the original of Rammstein's Song[2]

    Now shove this in your Matrix: https://youtu.be/WXv31OmnKqQ?t=271

    https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/28124436/f0254420-black_hole_web.jpg?width=800

    Yes.... it's a beating heart and a House burning Down.

    There are 13 Houses / Tribes (we're not Abrahamic, they stole it from other sources, fyi). There's been a shit load of drama about who is burning whose House down. And, of course, we had a recent answer from one who was bullied / terrorised / falsely councilled / raped into denial of Love.

    Then, you through in the names: Reternals (HELIOS), Eternals and Infernals (DOMINION'S DAUGHTER?)

    And you get... well. You won't be able to parse it, but it's a "fuck you" that can be spotted from the fucking SUN.

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO6Zo1PBtuk

    [2] IF you're like Elon or [redacted], one of those actually has the tech to check. Hint: it's not the one with hair plugs.

    1448:

    Ooh.

    Missing words there: "Never" and "Posted about Loki and Chairs before Progidy made their music".

    [redacted] Heart Eaten / Taken - House Burning Down. Flips Script Chances are, six year lead in, it ain't ours or hers or our Houses.

    COMBO TEMPORAL STRIKE

    "You have no idea who you are talking to"

    "I cannot Know, I do not Know[1]"

    ~

    But... he who did this, who demanded Murder: burn his House down, the Mirror Works.

    [1] It's a version of: NAME RANK SERVICE NUMBER

    1449:

    "Through"... Er. Throw. You'd imagine we'd not even make that mistake even used drugged up puppets from the streets, eh?

    Damn, impressive software breakers there. Sadly everyone now knows about the "Mental Illness Slippage" package installs via software.

    It means: we will take your tools, blunt them and then laugh at you.

    DONE

    ~

    And yeah: BABYLON. Piping in the old Ruskie is a bit weird and a bit of a fail mode. HEART OF THE HOUSE JUST BURNT DOWN, you're playing with playdo compared to that.

    1451:

    The serious part is "if it's true that 'we' can't live north of 50 degrees without copious use of fossil fuels, then presumably those areas were not inhabited prior to fossil fuel use". Which is sort of an exaggeration for effect, but also the obvious result of the claim being true. Said claim having been made repeatedly and emphatically by some in this discussion.

    It sort of depends on what you mean by "abandoned". Most people would consider the hot zones of Fukushima and Chernobyl to be "abandoned" and images of rusty ferris wheels and trees growing out of houses plays well with that. However if you go there, lots of people still live there.

    The population of what is now GB was estimated at about 6 million in 1750 (the first proper census wasn't until 1801). At that point there was significant use of biomass from woodland, that's not really available now. Farming used horses for the majority of plowing and harvesting, increasing the per person yield significantly. Yet still, almost the whole population was directly involved in food production. Those people were well educated in food production, had the horses, and equipment needed, and yet there were still famines from time to time. That would not apply to an urban population forced back to the land with little more than hand tools to work the land. I believe a couple of large 20th century experiments with just that situation proved pretty conclusively that all you get is a lot of dead people.

    By 1801 the population had reached 10 million, and food imports were necessary to sustain the population.

    So at first blush, it looks like 6 million is a reasonable carrying capacity. Even that number is a 90% fall in population from today. That mostly fits the idea of "abandoned" by the Fukushima standard.

    To work the land to a 1750 level you need about a million heavy horses. The current population is about 3000.

    (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/KXC6r1yBm3Rjcn5gL6ytlQ/gentle-giants-could-the-shire-horse-be-extinct-in-10-years)

    While horses can be bred, it's not an instant process. Horses foal about once per year, but only the female horses between 2 and 20 years. Shire horses breed slightly slower, with longer gestation. I couldn't find any figures for lifetime output for shires. Obviously only the females produce foals, so assuming the horses never die and can breed at 1 year old instead of 2 years old, that's a 50% population increase per year. Fifteen years before there are sufficient horses to work the land.

    Much of the farmland of 1750 is now buried under cities. That's not going to be returned to farming without a lot of work. Work that's not really practical without earthmoving machines. So even to start farming at a 1750 level isn't possible because a lot of the 1750 farmland is gone.

    It's also not correct to assume that there was no use of fossil fuels prior to 1750.

    The demand for coal steadily increased in Britain during the 15th century, but it was still mainly being used in the mining districts, in coastal towns or being exported to continental Europe.  However, by the middle of the 16th century supplies of wood were beginning to fail in Britain and the use of coal as a domestic fuel rapidly expanded. (Galloway 1882)

    So we can see that even by the mid 1500's, two centuries earlier than the 1750 date, wood was not sufficient for the growing population and England/Scotland/Wales was already dependent on Fossil Fuel. Rickman put the population at the end of the 16th century at under 5 million. That implies that the maximum population is significantly less than 5 million.

    (https://1841census.co.uk/1570-1750-estimated-population/)

    So all up, if we take the 'pre fossil fuel' era as a guide, we're probably looking at greater than 90% of the population will have to leave (abandon) the UK, assuming that the 20th century examples of returning an urban population to an agrarian lifestyle are not instructive. If we can rely on the results of experiments in forcing millions to farm using hand tools, the maximum number is much much less. How much less would be a guess.

    1452:

    Re: 'I can't find any thick woollen long johns or trousers in the UK; ...'

    Stanfield's in Canada probably would ship to the UK. Patagonia also has some pretty good products.

    Someone commented on fabric weight. Yes, fabric weight is important but so is fiber length. Quite a lot of 'fast fashion' uses thread made of fiber that's so chopped up that the fabric disintegrates. I forget who told me this but if you're specifically looking for long fiber cloth/garments, bring some scotch tape with you and apply to the garment/cloth - underside preferably where it's been creased (weakened). If it's good quality cloth (long fiber), the scotch tape will be clean. 'Finishing' (a type of chemical bath) on threads/fabrics is/was used to prevent obvious signs of the thread/fabric disintegrating. This process/the chemicals used might have changed since I last tried this - I stick to labels I know - so try the scotch tape test at home first with your current clothes, linens, etc. - from best to worst fibers/cloth.

    One of my other interesting student summer jobs was working at an Italian clothing store* that had its own imported Italian tailor. He'd obsess over and analyze/lecture about the fabric swatches that the textile sales reps dropped off. Yeah - after that summer, I sorta understood why the old school European system of long apprenticeships in its trades hasn't changed much - it works!

    *Head-office was in Milan, the store I worked at was a toe into the NA market. Closed after about 10-15 years.

    1455:

    Which is why I keep saying .. we need "nuclear" AS WELL AS all the renewables, just to be sure.

    The problem is that when you reach a certain level of self entitlement, you can't recognise that "we need" is different to "someone can supply".

    They are not the same. Your need for 10,000 one GW reactors does not imply the rest of the world is either able or willing to give them to you. You don't have an empire that can be forced to cough up whatever you think you need the moment you think you need it.

    1456:

    If we can rely on the results of experiments in forcing millions to farm using hand tools

    I'm guessing that a fair chunk of them would rather die. In the Cohen the Barbarian sense of the phrase.

    But I also agree with you that a lot of them would rather kill billions of savages and primitives than die themselves, they just haven't realised that they probably can't do that at all, and they definitely can't do it without a similar toll being exacted on them and theirs.

    Mind you, only 90% fewer people is still looking optimistic, just based on food production. We will need a "red revolution" in high-temperature farming to follow the green one.

    1457:

    https://www.microcovid.org/

    Amusing approach using a micromort-like estimation to show you how risky various activities are wrt catching covid. With the usual conclusion that driving is something to be very concerned about and going for a walk in the park not so much (assuming you take relevant precautions in each case)

    1460:

    Mind you, only 90% fewer people is still looking optimistic

    I'm nothing if not a hopeless optimist.

    1461:

    Lawyer sends email: FFS, YOU CANNOT OUT THAT UK CITIZEN LIKE THAT

    Actual laugh out loud.

    1462:

    1450, 1451, 1452, 1453, 1456, 1457, 1461, 1462 { First para of first post is plainly dangerously insane, incidentally }

    gasdive @ 1458
    Irrelevant, off-topic bollocks.

    1463:

    1445 para 1 - Likewise, at least downhill. My understanding is that with legal batteries and (250W) motor, an e-bike can't do more than about 15 mph using the e part.
    para 3 - Similarly, except that I did get a mild friction burn on the low forearm. Still, our main point is that using the rear brake too hard is a good way of falling off and/or wearing out the rear tyre, yes?

    1446 - I think you've transliterated correctly; "pavement (UK)" normally means footway and/or "sidewalk (US)". Having said which, we do distinguish in normal usage between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobblestone , concrete, packed gravel and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarmacadam as road surfaces.
    Thus I live on a town street where both the footways and the roadway are paved with tarmacadam!

    1449 - I don't dispute that you are correct as a matter of plain physics and human capability (see para 1 of this post). Now note the UK legal limit on the power of an e-bike.

    1464:

    Around near Oxford Brookes University. During peak congestion hours (which coincide with when I'm taking my primary age child to school), drivers see the pavements as a way to get past vehicles that are going straight on in order to get to their left turn ahead.

    It's not a huge problem - but it's a more significant problem than any form of human powered or low powered electric vehicle.

    And, contrary to Elderly Cynic's snide remarks, it's not a paragon of public transport - the public transport here is good enough that drivers could stop at the Park & Rides and take the bus for the in-town component of their journey, or take the bus the full distance if starting inside the Ring Road, but that's not something drivers do (for many reasons, including cost).

    But, like all of the UK, we have this ridiculous issue that the council has to (a) reduce pollution on roads due to a central government mandate, (b) has to turn a profit on the Park & Rides and on the bus services, and (c) has very limited powers to enforce the law on misbehaving motorists. Thames Valley Police won't enforce a lot of dangerous driving offences unless an officer witnesses them (and like all UK police forces, they're short on officers), and the result is a bad situation for all of us.

    Add in local councillors who are terrified that if they so much as threaten to restrict motorists, they'll be out on their ear, and it's a mess. We could do better at a local level - but we don't, because of the strength of the motor lobby.

    The worst thing about it is that whenever we can get local councillors to act, the so-called "silent majority of drivers" isn't actually keen on the idea that motorists get to do what they want. Most drivers are as unhappy about drivers driving on the pavement outside the primary school (to get out of the bus lane, which is enforced by cameras on the buses) as the rest of us, for example, but trying to get local councillors to put in a more permanent solution (barriers, CCTV that the police will accept as evidence) comes straight against the "but we can't be seen to be fighting a war on motorists" pressure.

    Plus, there have been huge mistakes made by the council in the past that make things worse; the Westgate development was permitted to expand its car park and opt-out of the parking price minimum. The result has been that people attempt to drive to the Westgate even when its car park is full - in turn, causing congestion on the roads in and out of town, which in turn encourages the minority of drivers who are willing to drive dangerously to take risks. And because TVP isn't cracking down on dangerous driving absent KSI statistics, the result is that the dangerous get incentivised to take more risks.

    Finally, there's a tendency for people to set things up as an "engineering problem" where the existing state of play is ignored; if you were starting from scratch, you wouldn't build Oxford the way it's been built, nor would you have allowed it to evolve the way it has. One of the problems with this setup is that invariably, the people setting things up that way take the city as a whole as the "unit" to fix, which is an incredibly tough problem, rather than looking to see what can be done now.

    1465:

    https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1983/1168/contents/made

    https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2015/24/contents/made

    https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1983/1176/contents/made

    https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2015/474/contents/made

    Plus a zillion relevant rules in more general highway and vehicle legislation.

    To paws4thot (#1443). No, not at all, any more than for a bicycle. The limit I am referring to is imposed by basic physics, and applies even with perfect braking.

    1466:

    "You're also not taking into account where I live - there is good public transport running 24/7" (#1287)

    By UK standards, that IS a paragon!

    And there are several likely reasons why the fact that few incidents with E-scooters have been reported may not be representative of reality. But let's skip the statistics. The most important is that the highly regulated VOI hire scheme is NOT representative of what will happen if they are permitted generally. That is a fairly common government trick to make a trial show that something dangerous is actually safe - it's what was done for 'smart' motorways.

    1467:

    paws
    Correct. My newish e-bike's assistance cuts out between 15 & 16 mph.

    EC
    Yeah ... electric small "scooters" are a real menace, everywhere, to everybody, including their riders.

    1468:

    Feeding ourseleves?
    As I've said before, the only "veg" I usually buy are Onions. Though I suspect I'm doing something wrong, since enough onions are grown commercially about 80 mile NNE of me - so I'll keep trying different approaches.
    My total supposed growing area is a "plot-&-a-half" ... i.e. Approx 375 m2

    1469:

    Lemurs of MU @ 1450: 1451: 1452: 1453:

    I had a nightmare this morning. I was in great pain, having to decipher one of your comments to discover the 3 riddles of the Spinx.

    Turned out I just needed to wake up so I could go to the bathroom.

    1470:

    SFReader @ 1455:

    Re: 'I can't find any thick woollen long johns or trousers in the UK; ...'

    Stanfield's in Canada probably would ship to the UK. Patagonia also has some pretty good products.

    If someone can overcome his Anti-American prejudice, I can strongly recommend the US Army ECWCS Gen III "silkweight" long underwear as a base layer and for a mid layer the ECWCS Level II polypro bottoms & tops.

    The "silkweights" are AMAZING. They're better & more comfortable than the old pure silk base layer I used to wear before the Army came out with them. Plus, they're more durable. And the polypro Level II underwear has served me better than the old 100% wool drawers I used to wear.

    I just checked "Big River dot CO dot UK" and you can get the "genuine issue silkweights" from them in the U.K. I'm pretty sure they're one of those issue items that are common to all NATO militaries so they're probably available from other local suppliers as well.

    1471:

    Greg, don't forget the gorse from my previous comment:

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/10/protein-from-gorse-bushes-could-feed-millions-of-people-says-expert#:~:text=Gorse%20contains%2017%25%20protein%20and%20broom%20has%2021%25%20protein%2C,be%20used%20as%20animal%20food.

    Also, my partner's dad has no problem with growing onions. He has an excess he gives away to the family. This is in the south-west. And I think even I could grow gorse! Processing it on the other hand, I don't know.

    EC JBS is right, you need to move into the modern era. Modern outdoors gear is made for the job, no one is going up Everest in gabardine or some such.

    1472:

    Thank you and JBS, but you don't understand the problems. Where and how I travel, my clothing WILL get wet; the basic weather, physics and physiology are such that there is simply no way to stay dry. Worse, I am seriously prone to hypothermia, so cannot provide the body heat to dry it out or to make 'wicking' fabrics work; people who don't have the problem very, very rarely understand the consequences.

    I have tried modern outdoors stuff, and use quite a lot of it, where it works better (or, at least, as well). But I am not going to make the mistake of relying on 'modern' insulation again, following experiences in the past. Also, most of the soldiers (sic) that I know of who are accustomed to such conditions and know the problems also swear by wool; it is the only material that maintains insulation when wet.

    1473:

    Icebreaker merino https://www.icebreaker.com/ may have something that suits. You can filter the items by weight and they're warmer than they look.

    1474:

    She also gave a lot of talks recently saying that she's a survivor of one of those troubled teen torture camps (usually religious) run in USA flyover country, WWASP or similar.

    1475:

    Thank you. I see it does specifically state "fitted with pedals", and the later ones don't appear to alter that, unless I've missed it. (The only one of those items that I was sure of reading fully was the one that was presented as a PDF of a scanned original document; the way the site splits the others up into individual pages many of which only have a couple of lines on keeps making me think there ought to be many more lines on those pages which it isn't showing for some stupid reason, since that is expected behaviour for websites in general these days.)

    The need for a "moped" to have actual pedals went out ages ago, so I guess I was expecting the electric-bike stuff to work in the same sort of way, ie. specifying overall characteristics of the vehicle without depending on the presence or absence of some particular defined feature, because otherwise people play SBs with the definitions (as for example with those "sidewinder" technically-a-sidecar things). "Fitted with pedals by means of which it is capable of being propelled" does not after all exclude pedals that you indeed can use to propel it but you really wouldn't want to (which is what happened with mopeds), nor does it exclude pedals that you can fold out of the way when you're not using them, or other kinds of silly games; and I didn't spot anything specifying a brake force ratio that would be geometrically unattainable for a plank-on-wheels scooter, so I reckon it still is possible, if a bit more awkward, to make an electric scooter that does technically meet those regulations but is practically little different from the current practice. But it seems nobody has bothered because nobody cares anyway.

    1476:

    Thanks, but they're hopeless. I have some of them, and they're excellent for a small amount of extra warmth, but no more. Even the Canadian store doesn't go above mediumweight, and the UK and New Zealand ones don't go above lightweight. My current ones would be classified as heavyweight - I need doubleplus extra heavyweight.

    1477:

    Yes. There are a whole lot of damn-fool regulations that are universally ignored, mostly to do with the details of lighting and reflectors, but that pedal one is taken seriously (as is the need to be able to brake two wheels). You can get the whole document using one of the options in the left panel.

    1478:

    "Likewise, at least downhill. My understanding is that with legal batteries and (250W) motor, an e-bike can't do more than about 15 mph using the e part."

    Yes, confirmed in the links EC posted; the motor (200W for a "normal" bicycle) has to stop propelling it if it goes over 15mph.

    Given that there is that speed limit, having the power limit as well does seem a bit daft, since all it ends up achieving is preventing you accelerating to 15mph with pointless and eventually impractical rapidity. But it does also cane the usefulness of the electric motor in the situation where you need it most - steep adverse gradients. You're not allowed enough power to get up the kinds of hills that some areas are made out of with enough speed to balance easily (I dare say you could, and I once came so last in a "slow race" that I got told to hurry up a bit, but I think those are rather points in the high tail). Lithium batteries have now solved the capacity vs. weight limit problem that made it inescapably impractical to supply such a motor in lead-acid-only days, so I reckon it's high time the power limit came off.

    Similar problem with mobility scooters - lower speed limit, but the same power limit, and greater overall weight; balance obviously doesn't come into it, but they just stop. So it's not just difficult to use them as in the bicycle case, you can't use them at all. Mine does fine round here because there aren't any such steep roads, but there still are bits of gradient that make it struggle - mostly on "accessibility features", too, ie. things like ramps to let people on wheels use footbridges without being blocked by steps, which is particularly silly.

    "Still, our main point is that using the rear brake too hard is a good way of falling off and/or wearing out the rear tyre, yes?"

    Exactly.

    1479:

    Toby
    I'm beginning to suspect that it's the birdies that are pulling my onions up!
    I have to put thin metal grids over my garlic cloves until they are well-visible, & I'm going to have to devise "side-nets" to prevent the effing SQUIRRELS eating my peas, this year, too.
    Just today sowed a trayful of onion seed in my greenhouse, for planting out in a couple of month's time, I hope.

    1480:

    Actually 250 watts and 15.5 MPH, as from the 2015 amendment. The power limit is particularly daft, because it is the maximum sustained power (in some unspecified sense), not the peak power. Also, it's nothing like enough for hilly locations, as it will not push most riders fast enough uphill for them to balance safely! 250 watts, 125 Kg all-up, and a mere 15% is c. 3 MPH. But the DaFTies have no intention of legalising the OTHER half of the EU rules that allow 750 watts (other limits unchanged) if the bicycles are type-approved.

    1481:

    "Around near Oxford Brookes University."

    Well, that is not an answer I was expecting...

    The deficient enforcement thing seems to be much the same everywhere - if there hasn't been an actual accident the police don't bother trying to follow people home, so unless they happen to be passing at the time you don't get nicked. But the council being too terrified of screaming motorists to put up bollards is something of a new one on me. As you say, most other drivers also disapprove of the ones who do things like driving on pavements, and in urban settings the screaming pedestrians are a lot louder than the screaming motorists, so the notion that the handful of drivers who scream about not being able to drive on pavements to near-universal disapproval can nevertheless be loud enough to affect a significant amount of voting in their favour sounds very strange. Are the council constituencies particularly marginal in some way, or something?

    It strikes me also that a council ought to be well able to put all sorts of things on the edge of pavements that aren't bollards and aren't subject to bollards' dependency on a pure car-control argument to justify them, but nevertheless do stop people driving on the pavement. Lamp posts, sign posts, rubbish bins, trees... the council seem to be a bit dim. That at least is not remotely unexpected...

    1482:

    I can't grow them because of whiterot, and have a fraction of your space, anyway.

    1483:

    1474 - Establishing whins may or may not be an issue. Not being a greenkeeper I've never tried to establish them. Keeping them once they are established is not an issue though.

    1483 - Wouldn't allowing 750w type-approved require you to actually have (and hence first develop) type approval regulations?

    1484:

    That is what I said, yes. But they're not complicated.

    1485:

    Re: 'I need doubleplus extra heavyweight.'

    Or a dry suit?

    Layering is the usual answer for maintaining body temp esp. in cold, damp conditions. The trick is figuring out how many layers of different types of clothing you can wear and still move comfortably.

    And if you can't get sufficiently warm long johns maybe you'll have to shift some of that temp/dampness-control role onto the outerwear, e.g., medium weight woolen long johns plus waterproofed, insulated ski pants. Haven't skied in years but ski pants were often discounted 50%+ by February.

    1486:

    I already do. What I want (ideally) is some 800 gsm loose long johns that will layer over my 400 gsm tight ones and go under my woolen cavalry trill trousers. As I said, things like ski pants will NOT do, because I would overheat, sweat like a pig, and get everything wet when walking or cycling. The killer is the range of fheat generation I have to allow for (skiing is less energetic). Separate clothing for stopped and moving is infeasible, though (in warmish weather) I do put on my long johns only after I have put the tent up. And then I often put waterproof trousers on top of everything.

    1487:

    ebikes in Australia have a slightly odd grandfather clause in them. We can have the new EU-style 250W/30kph motors, or we can have 200W and no speed limit.

    For anyone buying the common Chinese-made controllers all this stuff is set in software. And if you buy from North America it is often the same, with the tweak that some US states have very open regulations so you can probably buy a "1kW, no speed limiting" motor and controller with the software set to "250W/16mph" and then you go into "admin" mode using the 000000 PIN and change it to suit yourself.

    Mind you, round here the main problem is people not even bothering, they just buy completely not even trying to be road legal "electric mountain bikes" and ride them on the road. The difference between those and "electric trail bikes" is that the mountain bikes have pedals so that if for some weird reason the operator wants to give the illusion of exercise they can. I guess it's like having an exercise bike in your car...

    1488:

    I briefly worked for an electric mountain bike company startup. One of the many things I learned was that the legal environment for electric bikes is a complete patchwork.

    Some states and provinces forbid bikes over a certain wattage on the roads at all. Others require licensing like other motorbikes, but don't allow licensed motorbikes on non-motor trails. Still others have no rules at all.

    The upshot is that each jurisdiction is different, largely depending on whether a local lawmaker actually noticed the issue and when.

    The other thing I learned is that a charismatic startup leader will take you for everything you've got it you let him (I didn't), but that's another story. Get it in writing.

    1489:

    If you chase through all of the other relevant UK legislation (e.g. the relationship to number of wheels, and where you are allowed to use them), it is a complete dog's dinner, and includes the prolix and archaic Highways Act 1835.

    1490:

    Two things - I saw a home video recently shot from a car doing 45mph or so in the UK behind a mad guy on an e-scooter. I wonder how long the battery lasted, he was on dual carriageway.

    On wool, ElderlyCynic, if you want 800gsm, that's almost impossible to find. Most re-enactment heavy stuff is more like 600, down to 200 or so, it always varies and manufacturers don't always give decent info. Either way, if yo uwant leggings that thick you might be better making them yourself from blankets or getting someone else to make them. I can suggest a variety of places to buy thick wool from.

    1491:

    plus waterproofed, insulated ski pants

    Which won't keep you dry in wet conditions when you're exercising. Been there, done that. If eventual leaks don't get you condensation does.

    1492:

    Ah, EC, you and me have both had the dubious pleasure of dealing with jobsworthies who don't know what they don't know, but they're certain we must be doing something wrong.

    I used to carry a laminated printout of a bunch of relevant clauses, with references, so that when cops wanted a chat I could discuss the rules with them and have a very slightly greater chance of success. Mostly because having a big pile of furniture on a large bike trailer when a cop says "you can't have that on the road" can lead you into a world of lost stuff (getting arrested and making it their problem is not a great solution, but it beats leaving everything on the side of the road for a few hours while you buy access to a motor vehicle).

    1493:

    The people who had my allotment before me were and still are much better vegetable growers than I am. But they always had problems with onions. They always used seeds. I used sets and had no problems. I got even better results with heat treated sets. Another possibility. They always use horse or donkey manure. I cheat and use compost + blood fish and bone. Most others on the allotment site use pig manure and have no onion problems.

    1494:

    We're having a wet summer in Sydney and my garden is enjoying it a great deal.

    I have about two litres of silverbeet and rainbow chard seeds collected, so I've just pulled the rest of the plants out and composted them. They get about 2m tall then fall over and the rest of the garden eats them, so stripping the seeds is a challenge. Seeds fall off if the stalk is moved too vigorously. Which is also why I am not collecting seeds for myself, there's enough in the soil already. I spread compost over a low spot on the lawn and out of that grew tomatoes, silverbeet, spinach and chocolate mint. I'm mowing around them :)

    One amusing thing is that my dwarf lemon tree is being used as a climbing frame... it has cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and pumpkins on it (the fruit as well as the plants) and I had to weed quite a lot of grass out of it. Despite that there are lemons there too.

    1495:

    Actually, anyone have experience with electric mowers? I have a 36V Ryobi that's about 10 years old and starting to worry me with how battered the plastic skirt etc are. A friends video of a plastic Ryobi that tore the motor out of the frame is slightly disturbing. Plus the plastic handles have largely disintegrated and I have adjusted the workings of the safety switches so I can still use the mower.

    I can't find a decent mains powered mower, the manufacturers seem to have decided that cords are for toy lawns so the mowers are mostly ~30cm wide and priced like toys (except Bosch, who make a toy mower but ask real money). A 2kW brushless mains powered mower seems like a really good solution to me but "the market" apparently disagrees. I guess they wouldn't sell many batteries that way.

    The battery ones get expensive fast. Ryobi and Makita both make 36V mowers in a range of configurations (2x18V power tool batteries, Ryobi also do "yard tool" 36V batteries which is what I currently have. But that battery is a bit sad so it's not much of a consideration. I have a string trimmer that uses that battery so losing the mower but keeping the battery works for me).

    I already have a bunch of 18V Makita tools and batteries, so a mower would work for me - $AU550 the bare mower, or $699 with two 5Ah batteries plus charger ($75/battery is very cheap here).

    But there are a pile of options if I'm willing to spend $1000 or so, and I have no real idea whether any of them are worth the extra. Husqvarna 41cm with a 4AH battery is ~$AU850 but my experience with the Ryobi and a 5AH battery makes me fear that 4AH would be a bad idea, and with their 9.4Ah battery instead the price goes over $1000.

    1496:

    Re: 'Been there, done that. If eventual leaks don't get you condensation does.'

    After I posted my last reply to EC I wondered what the Sherpa guides wore. Turns out they're increasingly switching to Western synthetics.

    Btw - congratulations on your Outstanding Canadian Award!

    OOC ... and because even though you've officially retired, you're still involved in teacher resources/info ...

    When you were teaching did you ever use sites like David Butler's 'How Far Away Is It' [below]? I just watched his 2021 review and found out that he's now got downloadable pdf books of all of his series. Very useful for the classroom at the high school to intro undergrad level. Take a look and maybe pass it along to your former colleagues.

    https://howfarawayisit.com/

    Here's his YT channel:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kax28aV8IAA&ab_channel=DavidButler

    1497:

    My experience FYI: I changed from a corded electric mower - to a battery mower (Bosch Rotak 43LI) about 4 years ago. Main reason for the change to a battery mower was that the corded mower was "tethered" to the mains. But having to then drag around a 20 metre extension power cord - and also dragging the extension cord around over freshly cut grass meant it got mucky and needed cleaning - definitely a convenience factor. (Also the corded mower had developed a vibration problem after loaning it an friend who I think tried to use it as a scrub cutter and as a result needed replacing).

    The cutting width is 43cm (hence the model name) which is one reason I selected it - and definitely not a toy, I have a NZ 1/4 acre (approx 1000 sq m) section which is over one third lawn and needs cutting every week or so for about 8 months of the year. Mowing all my lawns takes me about 45 minutes which I get on a single charge out of the 36v battery - unless the grass is particularly long or wet.

    The following site gives a good summary and generally matches my experience: https://lawnmowerguru.com/bosch-rotak-43-li-ergoflex-review/

    And as a bonus the charger will also charge the Bosch Blue (professional range) 18v batteries which I also use for power tools - useful when you need multiple batteries on charge when undertaking a project.

    There is definitely a wider range of "serious" battery mowers around now - some of which use 48v or 56v batteries - than when I bought it, but it still does the job I bought it to.

    1498:

    When you were teaching did you ever use sites like David Butler's 'How Far Away Is It'?

    I didn't, because I didn't know about it. Thanks. I'm passing it along to colleagues right now.

    1499:

    A 2 kW corded mower would indeed be very nice, however.... The USA is a big enough market that everything is built for them. Even the 240V gear is sized for their electrical limits. USA rules allow 120V 15A, which, though weak would work. However they don't allow more than 12A continuous, so everything is limited to about 1200 W to stay clear of the 12A limit. (My motorcycle draws 1300 W while charging and the Americans on the forum constantly complain about melting outlets.)

    I used to have a quite nice corded mower from Bunnings, but my partner seemed to make it her mission in life to run over the cord every time she mowed. Like literally every time. I explained that you just put the cord at one end and then zig zag mow away and you'll never have any issues, but nothing could stop her mowing in circles.

    So she bought a petrol Victa from Bunnings that self destructed in 2 years. The steel deck fatigued through and the motor fell off.

    Next on the list is the 46cm 36v system Ryobi which we both love. The kit comes with a single 5 Ah 36v nominal pack, a very fast 6 A charger and the 46 cm cut brushless motored mower. Its light, the engineering plastic is strong. Not many height settings, at 5, but it's OK. The blades come right out to the sides, so you can mow close to borders. In the 4 years I've had it the only thing I've done is run a file over the blades and tut tut about some rust on a decorative metal bit (it has never been cleaned). I never charge it more that 3/4 or discharge below 1/4 and it does our suburban block without a mid cut charge. It's also much quieter than either the corded or petrol mowers. There was/is a 12 Ah pack if you have hours of mowing to do, but Bunnings Australia no longer carries it. (along with a lot of the 36v range that's been dropped, sadly including the very tempting 300W pure sine wave inverter that clipped to the top of the pack)

    (https://www.bunnings.com.au/ryobi-lithium-36v-5-0ah-18-brushless-lawn-mower-kit_p0088131)

    Given that Bunnings doesn't seem committed to the 36v Ryobi ecosystem you may want to look at AEG or similar if you think you might want to add other tools, but I haven't tried them personally.

    1500:

    Interesting, thanks. Sadly I can only get the corded version (second hand), unless I import it. Weirdly Choice magazine has reviewed it, but I don't want to pay them just to find out where they got it (equiv of NZ Consumer mag). Plus it doesn't have a mulch mode and that matters a lot more to me than the roller.

    I'm also skeptical of products that are only available via ozbargain, ebay and amazon. It makes me think "no warranty".

    https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1302562

    Local forum says it was a bit gutless back in 2012. And brought in by a hardware chain that has since vanished. That might be why Choice had it and I can't find it now.

    1501:

    PS, the ryobi has a mulch mode that I use for the front, and catch, that I use for the rear (as per instructions from the boss). Both work well, though if you dive into thick wet grass at a fast walk while in mulch, it will stall.

    Also Ryobi quality (and price) seems higher than it was a decade ago.

    1502:

    Yeah, I'm pretty happy with my existing Ryobi mower, and the mulch mode works really well. I did miss out on the 12Ah pack, but the price of that was off-putting. OTOH I can get a 7AH pack from a third-party manufacturer for $190 and that's much more reasonable than the $300 Bunnings wanted for a replacement 5AH one (but I got a discount for one with damaged packaging)

    My reason for looking at the Makita mowers is partly that I currently have five of their 5Ah/18V batteries, and the mower plus two more is a bargain in that sense. Having batteries that I can also use with my pile of battery tools would be handy (or more accurately, the batteries from those tools go in the mower).

    Makita also have metal skirts and possibly motor mount, and Ryobi has kind of put me off plastic for those bits. I'm a bit torn between thinking 10 years is a reasonable life expectancy for a mower and being grumpy that 90% of it is still fine (I can't see any cracks in the plastic chassis, but neither could Macca before the whole thing broke free)

    One thing that is missing is anyone making a 4x18V mower, either via parallel 2x18V drives (because you cannot connect lithium batteries in parallel in a consumer product like this, someone will inevitably put a full one next to an empty one and then the fireworks start), or just as a ~70V tool.

    The Ryobi 36V setup can drain a 5AH battery in 10 minutes either mowing or using the power head + edger attachment. Which is an awesome setup, BTW, if you are looking at stuff like that. We/I have the string trimmer and the edger with one quick-swap power head, and they share the mower battery.

    1503:

    Not sure that (today) it would be my first choice due to range available now - I would need to do more research, but I would definitely go battery rather than corded for the reasons I gave. Serious battery models much more common now.

    (I also use mine - upon occasion - to mulch selected weeds with no problems, but it is not a proper mulch setting).

    I recall that my mower purchase cost around NZ$799 - incl 1 battery & charger - from Mitre-10 chain in NZ but I haven't seem them there recently. Given your investment in Matika 18v power tools, a 2x18v "bare bones" Makita mower with a good cutting width could make sense.

    As regards that review - not sure what country it was for (I think UK) but I noticed two differences to mine - it came with a single 36v 4AH battery (still going strong), and no rear roller.

    1504:

    Oh, both Ryobi and Makita are $699 with battery and charger. So for me the question is another Ryobi or switch to Makita. I'm not really keen on going to yet another battery platform unless there are big advantages (like, say, a 70V/5AH+ mower platform that deals better with long grass. Because experience suggests I will have 20+cm long grass on a regular basis)

    Interestingly Makita also do a "power head" available in everything from four stroke petrol to the more useful 2x18V brushless, with both string trimmer/brushcutter and metal blade edger options. BUT they also sell plastic and metal blades to make the brushcutter version more useful.

    I should also play with the Ryobi one to see whether it can accept blades.

    1505:

    One thing that is missing is anyone making a 4x18V mower, either via parallel 2x18V drives (because you cannot connect lithium batteries in parallel in a consumer product like this, someone will inevitably put a full one next to an empty one and then the fireworks start), or just as a ~70V tool.

    Ryobi makes a 2x18 and a 2x36 mower.

    2x36

    https://youtu.be/CurvdVXQMUY

    It seems to have a smart battery management system that allows 2 different states of charge.

    1506:

    That looks exciting. But sadly Bunnings 404's me and the rest of the hits are porn sites :) I did see that on the Ryobi page but didn't think to RTFM because I couldn't find the actual mower on Bunnings page so I assumed it was vapourware. But it's the same $699 as the other options.

    https://www.ryobi.com.au/products/details/36v-46cm-hp-brushless-lawn-mower-r36xlmw16

    I really like the idea of having more power available, mostly just because the Ryobi batteries get pretty hot in normal use (2C discharge) and anything to drop that a bit seems like a good idea.

    Am still mildly bemused that Makita fast chargers have fans to cool the batteries but the mowers don't (as far as I can tell). Ryobi definitely haven't caught on to that trick, at all, as far as I can tell.

    The other obvious question is whether it will run off the combo of the 6AH battery it comes with plus my existing 5AH battery, or indeed off the new battery and a 7AH third party battery. If Bunnings have it the easy answer is to buy one then return it if I don't like it. My existing mower is a warranty replacement after the plastic battery mount in the first one broke. So the battery went in, it mowed just fine, but there was no battery retention clip so mowing uphill the battery tended to slide out and everything stopped.

    1507:

    Greg Tingey wrote on January 24, 2022 at 08:17

    1450, 1451, 1452, 1453, 1456, 1457, 1461, 1462 { First para of first post is plainly dangerously insane, incidentally }

    Hear, hear!

    1508:

    Moz asked on January 25, 2022 00:32 in 1498:

    Actually, anyone have experience with electric mowers? I live in the USA, and used the predecessor of this Black and Decker corded mower for over a decade on a city, then a suburban, lot, with good results.

    1510:

    That does look like exactly the sort of thing I'm after!

    But I'm not even sure they bring those into Australia. Their (broken) local website just says "WE'RE SORRY We couldn't find any online sellers for this product." (and same for local). None of the B&D sellers near me seem to stock electric mowers, but a couple of big box hardware shops stock the brand, and the battery mowers are available here.

    The replacement model(?) LM2000-QS seems to be more widely available... in Europe. One French seller even offers free shipping but it's out of stock (A$370 Free shipping from France, 5 – 10 days). The B&D AU site doesn't even admit that model exists.

    Oooh, I can get one via ebay for only $600... plus $300 shipping from Italy. I wonder if I can do a deal through work with our Italian supplier. I wonder if that would even be a sane thing to do.

    1511:

    Then there's this, if a corded machine is what you want (I've never seen it in the flesh, so no idea of the quality). 40cm cut and 1800W

    (https://www.mitre10.com.au/yard-force-1800w-electric-lawn-mower-6599575)

    Not brushless sadly, but much more powerful than the usual 1200.

    The makita 53cm 18x2 battery skin only machine looks awesome if you have a lot of mākita batteries.

    (https://www.mitre10.com.au/makita-36v-18vx2-brushless-lawn-mower-skin-534mm-21)

    There's also a self propelled one for 999

    1512:

    Mike Collins
    I use horse manure & seeds - I might have to go back to setts, if the seeds don't work this year.

    P.S. I don't think we are "Exchange & Mart" for electric garden equipment - or, alternatively, I can give you the ongoing saga of our allotment's strimmers & mowers ... ( maybe not? )

    1513:

    Yes, but the conditions are very different. I am fairly happy with synthetics in seriously cold conditions (yes, I have experience), because they are DRY. And I'll bet the Sherpas aren't hypothermia-prone! The killer is the range -3 to 10 Celsius, continual wet (including 100% humidity), wind, and incipient or actual mild hypothermia. That's the norm in the Highlands, except for the last, which is me.

    1514:

    Yeah, I want not to have self-propelled, it's just a waste of battery power. And I found that feature annoying when I was a child following a petrol mower around the lawn.

    But I am leaning towards the Makita just for the batteries. I have a dual slot fast charger, getting a second one and having 6 batteries would mean I should be able to mow pretty much continuously :)

    I saw the Yard Force thing but reviews are hard to find and their UK reviews on TrustPilot suggest terrible customer service. It's less the $170 to try one, and more that I can't even look at one before buying, and it is at the "cheap toy" end of the price spectrum. I might hassle Mitre10 and see if it's possible to get a demo unit.

    Also, the more I look for mowers the more frustrated I get with search functions on shop websites, where there is almost never a "show only mains powered" option, just "petrol" and "battery". Not even an "other".

    1515:

    Black and Decker used to be good, but now are cheap and nasty, and fail very quickly. I use Hayter, but Bosch also make good kit.

    1516:

    I've been considering the Makita for a couple of years, recognising that it's mostly about buying into the battery system. My current mower is nominally Victa, but was rebranded "Envriomower" back when battery electric mowers were unusual a bit over 10 years ago. It's 24V and runs on a bespoke assembly packed with 2 x 12V9 SLAs. I've repacked it maybe 5 times, and each time it means I want another couple of years out of it at least. Only fairly recently realised the problem was actually its fuse holder, which is supposed to be soldered to the main board but one of the feet has come loose. I'm (so far) too lazy to take it apart to get to the main board to resolder it, and I've resorted to dropping a small washer into the socket (where it's held in place by the foot attached to the fuse assembly and seems to complete the circuit well enough). Occasionally that comes loose and gets lost inside, so I drop another one in. But I'm increasingly frustrated with a corded line trimmer, and the idea of replacing both that and the mower with Makitas, and then leveraging the battery system for other bits and pieces as needed, is tempting.

    1517:

    1493 Para 1 - I'm not surprised. This is the sort of "vehicle" that I want explicitly banned.

    1496 - In which context, I've never grown onions, but my dad did, in heavy clay soil. He always used sets.

    1498 - The last time I went to make a mower purchase, the specification ordered was "light, electric". The version I bought was light enough that I could straight arm it left-handed, with the cord, and hold it for 30 elephants.
    The one thing I can definitely say about battery mowers is that lead-acid versions are not fit for purpose.

    1518:

    This is one of the things we've been working on as a local pressure group - teaching councillors basic techniques for ensuring that they don't get captured by a lobby group (including our own).

    Core to this is plain, old-fashioned door-stepping by the councillor. If you actually go to the residents who are contacting you with complaints and discuss them, you rapidly discover that a huge number of the e-mails and letters you get in support of a lobby group weren't actually written by the people whose name and address is on them, and weren't necessarily understood by them, either.

    So you get people writing to their councillors opposed to (e.g.) bollards at a street junction who when you talk to them thought they were saying that they wanted the bollards because nobody should be driving on the pavement anyway.

    Similar applies to listening to the loudest voices; pressure groups are loud, but non-representative. The council's "standard model" for surveys assumes that the response it gets is representative; we managed to push the council into a new survey platform that does not order answers to a multiple-choice question in a predictable fashion, and that alone was enough to significantly shift typical results; many of the survey answers were being filled in by people who had been told "choose first answer to first question, 5th answer to second" etc and who didn't understand what they were filling in as a result.

    Finally, by getting the council to change how it notifies people of surveys (one-use codes in e-mail and written invites, and an account system verified against council records), we got the council to discover that the surveys it had been running were stuffed by people lying to them. Some pressure groups had set things up so that survey invites were being sent out to mailing lists of people all over the world who were willing to fill the survey in as directed by the group; the change in systems has massively shifted apparent opinion, simply by changing who fills in surveys.

    A lot of this comes down to the old setup being built on the notion that people who get involved with political projects will behave in an honourable and trustworthy fashion; over time, that notion has been proven false, but no-one has revisited the underlying assumptions.

    1519:

    grandfather clause

    Point to take note of: "grandfather clause" has some rather nasty racist baggage attached to it.

    It's a coinage from the post-reconstruction Deep South, restricting the right to vote to (a) men whose grandfathers were legally able to vote, and (b) who could pass a literacy test.

    Note that it had been illegal to teach slaves to read, and the literacy tests were deliberately rigged to exclude black people: and of course, freed slaves' grandfathers didn't vote, either.

    I'm not going to declare the term definitively offensive, but it's worth being aware of.

    The electric MTB pedals: I can see them being an ass-saver if you accidentally run the battery right down, but that's about all.

    1520:

    Been using a lead-acid battery mower for over a decade, it still beats every petrol mower I've owned. There was a bit of a fad for plug-in mowers that were also small hovercraft for a while over here back in the 90s, you could lift one of those left handed pretty easily. Could kind of double as a somewhat unwieldy hedge trimmer...

    1521:

    Thanks. 600 gsm would do, if it fitted on top of what I have; I will search for reenactment. Some decades back, I jumbled my father's suit (late 1940s), and it was at least twice the thickness of anything you can get today. It's a standard moan by UK people who cycle or walk to and for work, in the former because of the wear rate, and in both cases being comfortable at below 5 Celsius with a 20 MPH wind for half an hour. This, of course, links in to the topic of getting away from driving in a juggernaut from one overheated building to another ....

    1522:

    Charlie @ 1522
    "Grandfather rights" is extensively used in the railway industry - old kit is allowed to carry on, but new kit has to follow the new regulations - a lot of the time it specifically refers to safety - think of the "hazards" present on a steam locomotive footplate, for instance.

    1523:

    Perhaps I am being cynical, but this stinks to me of Number 10 having seen a draft of the report, panicked, and got Dick to start an enquiry, so that the report can be delayed until the whole matter has been forgotten.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-60123850

    1524:

    Yes: it's a useful coinage. Just noting that where it came from is problematic, so there are some situations (not railway-law-related!) in which it shouldn't be used -- notably anything to do with voting rights.

    1525:

    Yup.

    Coming next: Clownshoes Churchill will cling on until Russia invades the Ukraine, then announce that he can't possibly resign as PM in the middle of losing a war because of a fascist invasion. (Obviously. Following Neville Chamberlain's example is totally wrong for his image.)

    1526:

    It's useful to know of the odious origin of "grandfather clause" but it's come to be in general use in other situations by people who, I'm sure, have no idea that it might be offensive.

    Google

    "grandfather clause" site:.gov

    for numerous examples of more or less official usage of the term in the US.

    1527:

    EC & Charlie
    Bo Jon-Sun will have to be physically dragged from No 10. Preferably by NICE MEN in White Coats!
    Actually, right now is the time for: "This House has No Confidence in Boris Johnson &/or his government".
    The tories can then vote for him & are then STUCK WITH HIM, or let the motion carry - which means a General Election.

    And, don't you mean ... IF Ru invades the Ukraine. It's actually in Putin's interests to keep the situation as it is & do nothing, just monstering everybody ......

    1528:

    See the last paragraph of #553 and #1041. NATO, the USA and UK are all arming and inciting Ukraine to launch an attack, and the signs are that Ukraine is accepting the bait, which will be SPUN as "Russia invades Ukraine". If they include Crimea, and the USA/NATO provides 'peacekeeping' support for that, we are facing WW III.

    1529:

    Your comment was probably a reference to the nice men in white coats appearing in the linked song.

    For any who missed the reference, it's a funny novelty song. Which has been covered by a surprising number of artists.

    1530:

    The expression is at least 30 years older than the song.

    1531:

    I stand corrected!

    Still a funny song though.

    1532:

    EC
    Maybe - I think not.
    Ukraine would lose out big-time & have a full-scale war all over its own territory. I agree that "the west" has fucked-up its' response, badly, but Putin has bad form for doing to his neighbours what the USA used to do in Central America. I'm of the opinion that Putin is worse than "the west" - but not by a lot. Agree that it is very worrying.

    "Nice men in white coats" - IIRC the expression is actually pre-war ( WWI, that is ) - along with "visiting the funny farm"

    1533:

    Just noting that where it came from is problematic, so there are some situations (not railway-law-related!) in which it shouldn't be used

    I've seen it used in two circumstances.

    In contractual negotiations, it seemed to refer to things that were retained unchanged from previous contracts, for people who were under those contracts, but not necessarily available to newer hires. (There were probably subtleties I missed — I was more concerned with how the terms applied to me than how they were arrived at.)

    In health and safety matters, it was used as a reason our fume hoods weren't up to spec — according to buildings and ops they were 'grandfathered', which apparently meant that newer regulations didn't apply to them. (Fume hoods and volatile storage venting turned off centrally at 4PM and on at 8AM, because they were wired into the general ventilation system.) I was going to file a provincial workplace safety complaint the year I retired (because I knew that there would be retaliation) but that didn't happen because I retired suddenly (and remotely) because of Covid.

    1534:

    Charlie: I believe it was you who introduced me to the coinage in the first place (I'm not a native English speaker), by using a phrase like "[something] was grandfathered in" on this very blog.

    1535:

    It's used in getting on dor a hundred items of UK legislation, too.

    1536:

    EC @ 1526: [Gray report likely to be delayed by police investigation]

    Yeah, my first thought was "Boris just found a new way to block publication".

    But, according to "Whitehall sources" quoted in The Times, the Met have just said that no, there is no need to hold up publication on their account.

    1537:

    This is one of the things we've been working on as a local pressure group - teaching councillors basic techniques for ensuring that they don't get captured by a lobby group (including our own).

    I know someone who was on the local planning commission and actually headed it for a couple of years. Totally insane work load dealing with all kinds of people who wanted to say "NO" to all kinds of things.

    He said something that stuck with me. Any time you say "no" to something you're implicitly saying "yes" to something else. Maybe a lot of something else. Most folks don't think it past the initial "no".

    1538:

    I've been considering the Makita for a couple of years, recognising that it's mostly about buying into the battery system.

    Totally.

    I got into Ryobi as they seemed to be the cheapest decent option about 30 years ago. They had just started with Home Depot (1 of 2 dominant home improvement chains in the US). I've stuck with them and it was a good pick. I still own virtually all of the tools I've bought over that time. (Anyone need a 5" circular saw?) Periodically the batteries go bad and I buy more. Mostly on pre-Christmas sales where you get 2 batteries and a tool or two for the price of the batteries. And I gave my son-in-law and son Ryobi tool sets so all three of us are in the 18V Ryobi infrastructure and can easily trade tools and batteries. Personally I have two 1.5AH and four 4AH 18V batteries. And I invested in a 6 position smart charger. It charges them one at a time and you don't have to think about it.

    Anyway, to mowers. My son-in-law has a Ryobi 16" dual 18V mower. It works well for his 1/7 acre (before subtracting for the house and driveway) lot. He can do it most days with a single pair of 4AH batteries. Maybe a pair and a half if he waited too long or things are wet. For a summer I would use it (I messed up the carb on my gas mower) on my 1/3 acre lot. It would take about 3 1/2 charges of dual 4AM batteries. But since between us we had 8 it worked.

    Two years ago I bought a 40V 21" Ryobi. Which bounced me out of the 18V ecosystem. But I also have a leaf blower that is 40V. So I have a 4AH and 6AH battery. The 6 will normally do my yard but if I'm doing the entire thing I'll start with the 4 then switch to the 6 when the 4 runs out. I think toss the 4 on the charger so it is available if needed before I finish.

    Black and Decker got squeezed out of the market in the US when Sears started to fall apart and Home Depot and Lowes took over the pro-sumer tool markets. And B&D wasn't a lead supplier in either chain. So they went through a bankruptcy or two and now sell low end tools and kitchen appliances through Wal-Mart and similar. I consider what they sell to be disposable.

    On a related note, someone "in the biz" said that small gas fired yard equipment was designed for around 50 starts. Low end chain saws, blowers, string trimmers, etc... The thought process is the warranty is for one or two seasons which means maybe 15 to 20 days of use per seasons. So they get through the warranty period before they start to wear out. This person said the way you know a hand carried gas fired something is low end is if the pull cord is aligned with the shaft spin. This is cheaper to implement than a "butt" pull but it puts extra stress on the shaft bearings and wears them out faster.

    1539:

    Yes, "grandfathering" has gone a lot further than the origin of the term.

    I normally see it as the notion that the law only applies from the time it's enacted, not retroactively. Obviously retroactive could be used, but with normal linguistic creep, "grandfathered in" has become a normal substitute. Even a rule of thumb, as it were.

    One big reason for grandfathering in shit is as a compromise to get regulations passed. People will allow stuff to happen going forward, but not if they have to deal with the unpleasant costs of correcting past mistakes. This is the way climate change is being dealt with, for the most part.

    The goofball in me believes that, if the economy is unsustainable as built, and if the cost of retrofitting the economy to make up for past errors in judgement (slavery, fossil fuels, genocide, etc) is politically ruinous, then perhaps we're running our economy...backwards? Mistaking profits for costs and vice versa? It sounds stupid until you realize this is another way of saying tax the wealthy and help the desperate.

    1540:

    I know someone who was on the local planning commission and actually headed it for a couple of years. Totally insane work load dealing with all kinds of people who wanted to say "NO" to all kinds of things.

    He's better than most of the ones I've met, if that's what he actually did. Around here, they tend to listen to all the screaming--which is admittedly hard, and I'm one of the screamers--then either do what they want (especially if they're developers) or what they're paid to do (if they're in the development industry). It's superficial democracy where rules are followed and decisions are made, and the threshold for where they'll actually listen to you is when you can come up with $200k to sue them if they don't listen.

    I get why they do this, of course. I just wish they had the filters to distinguish when a group's trying to work with them to solve a problem, and when a group just wants a handout. Most of them don't struggle with that. And that, in turn, is one of the things that makes living here so expensive. Oh well.

    1541:

    I have never seen it with that meaning. It's normally used to mean that someone who has certain rights (e.g. on a driving licence, or the road-legality of a vehicle) doesn't lose them when the law is changed to tighten up the licensing.

    1542:

    Let's see whether Boris still uses that as an excuse; I suspect that he will. That's happened before.

    1543:

    I suspect that all the dual battery units are always in series to give a larger voltage to the motor. Which allows motors to be made with smaller wiring. Which leads to less weight and costs.

    When the total voltage drops below value "X" the mower stops. Ryobi (and others I suspect) seems to have made a lot of their low end mowers use dual 18V to capitalize on the huge installed base of 18V tool users. It got me to buy one for my son in law.

    And it appears that Ryobi decided to go with a larger voltage battery when they wanted to step up from dual 18V. So they picked 40V.

    Then you have these: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Outdoors-Outdoor-Power-Equipment-Riding-Lawn-Mowers/RYOBI/N-5yc1vZc5axZm5d 48V riding battery lawn mowers.

    Which all seem to cost more than the first cars we bought for our kids 15 years ago.

    1544:

    It's superficial democracy where rules are followed and decisions are made, and the threshold for where they'll actually listen to you is when you can come up with $200k to sue them if they don't listen

    Or donate to their campaign fund…

    Readers in Ontario will know about the 413 affair — building a highway through ecologically sensitive lands, dodging around golf courses owned by relatives of the minister while ignoring people who actually live there, supposedly to save a few minutes in commuting time but actually benefiting a few developers who are significant supporters of the party in power…

    1545:

    That's what he wrote, at least as I read it. There's a law or regulation that applies to everything going forward, but things that were already in existence (or happening) aren't subject to the law or regulation.

    Without the grandfathering, they would be subject to the law/regulation.

    1546:

    In building codes in much of the US there is "grandfathering". It means in somewhat vague terms that absent an imminent life and safety danger existing buildings don't have to be retrofitted to new building codes. But anything other than emergency repairs can trigger a required upgrade.

    My house is one of those. If I pull a permit to do most anything I'll have to replace my electrical wiring though out the house. It is not unsafe. But it is now where near code compliant.

    Similar rules apply to things like building setbacks from lot lines, side walk requirements, etc...

    1547:

    About your partner cutting... Circles? I've only seen that done in videos with someone sitting in a lawn chair, and a self-propelled mower tied to a rope to a pole in the middle.

    And neither of you put the cord over your shoulder, the way I always have?

    1548:

    Start at the edges and work your way in. Circular in general.

    Everyone I've known who had a corded electrical mower has had a roll of electrical tape nearby.

    As to current in the US. Yes, we use 120V for normal electrical things. Which leads to higher powered outside equipment needing larger cords. Which leads to my wife always complaining about the weight of my 100' 12A rated outdoor extension cord. I have it on a roll up wheel but still. Which is why I had to get a battery blower for her a few years ago. (Her arthritis can't candle the raking of the leaves from our somewhat large oak tree.)

    1549:

    That, if it's corded, is the clone of the one sitting in my shed. I got it from the hardware store when Home Despot didn't have a corded Ryobi, after my old mower died after 10 years. It's lighter, easier to pick up with the handle, and the handle is longer than the old one, meaning I don't curse that they made the handles on the old one for no one over 5'9".

    Had one season - this past summer - and we'll see how it lasts.

    1550:

    After my last cordless battery mower died off I went back to corded. It just isn't that hard to avoid the cord and it will likely last many years longer.

    In the next 5 years I intend to eliminate most or all of my grass anyway. The kids have outgrown yard play, so now it's just a chore. More importantly, it is wasted growing space.

    The front is already about 60% vegetable garden, with a further 35% being flowering bushes and shrubs. The back is slowly being converted to berry bushes, fruit trees, grape vines and the like.

    I've never cared much for having a 'lawn'. It has always felt like wasted fertile land - perhaps because my parents were committed gardeners. Recent developments in our back yard mean that my timeline has to move up dramatically, and I intend to do a lot of the conversion this spring.

    1551:

    Or donate to their campaign fund…

    Oh, that happens too, says the campaign donor.

    Thing is, planning boards and commissions are appointed or voted in by their colleagues, not elected. They often don't draw pay, either.

    I actually admire the people who are willing to do the annoying work of low-level democracy, even if I also often dislike their politics. Those who are willing to do the scut-work of keeping things running are worth giving some credit to. That said, as usual, those in power (here, the developers) have already figured out where they need their people to make their visions become reality. And so it goes.

    1552:

    EC @ 1544
    Yes. My driving licence, which I have to renew with lots of extra hoops to jump thorough ( Because the Land-Rover is a "Bus" - 11-12 seats ) allows me to drive up to an either 8 or 10 tonne vehicle + lots of things that a 2022 Driving Test would not. But, because I passed my test in 1963, I'm allowed all sorts of interesting vehicles (!)

    1553:

    Um, er, there are other uses of it. For example, when I got into high school. My high school, Central, was (is?) the crown jewel of the Philly public school system. When I went, there were only two ways to get in: an IQ test (yes, really) or if you father or grandfather went there. I got in on both....

    Btw, about 80% of the kids went on to college, and it had its own telescope (with dome), and one club had built a cyclotron....

    1554:

    Exactly what I've been saying - Putin has every possible interest in playing games near the border, and never going in, while watching the West spend money and have fits.

    And moving his troops around in-country, and into Belarus, I understand, are lovely war games, while the West spends a lot of money.

    1555:

    It's very different from no retrospective legislation, which is a much older concept. It is allowing people, organisations or things exemption from some aspects of the law.

    1556:

    I was allowed that until my last renewal, when I decided the hoops were not worth it, because I had never driven such a vehicle and wasn't going to start doing so at over 73. And, yes, the hoops were RIDICULOUS - it was disgraceful that I could not download an application form to print but had to go to a main post office to get one.

    1557:

    Speaking of renewals, thanks for reminding me. I see I've got until December to renew my passport, otherwise, lots of games and long time waiting.

    And we're so looking forward to Glasgow in '24.

    1558:

    With the added fun that a lot of people, especially once they've got a bit of experience in the lobbying game, will set up your decision so that the "NO" is obviously correct, while the "hidden yes" is what they want.

    There's an art to doing this, such that all that's left after the "NO"s are done is the (often bad) thing that the group wants, which has been given the "hidden yes".

    You can see a similar trick being pulled with Elderly Cynic's justification for the UK not adding more solar power - if the choice is solar or nothing, then the added energy from solar in the UK does not pay back sensibly on a full lifecycle analysis. However, that's not the real choice on offer - the choice is solar or fossil fuel, and as a way to reduce fossil fuel use in the UK, solar has its place.

    1559:

    "This person said the way you know a hand carried gas fired something is low end is if the pull cord is aligned with the shaft spin. This is cheaper to implement than a "butt" pull but it puts extra stress on the shaft bearings and wears them out faster."

    I'm not entirely clear about the distinction being made here (to me "butt pull" = how politicians get figures to make their arguments look better) but it sounds like arse either way.

    All pull cord mechanisms are some variant on the idea of a big pulley with a capacious enough groove to wrap several turns of the cord round it. This gives a rotary output from a tangential pull. If you just leave it at that it's as reliable as anything ever can be, but these days there are additional bits to keep the cord as part of the machine and make it wind itself back in, instead of it coming off after every pull and you winding it on yourself.

    This means the pulley must be a separate item, supported by its own "bearing" (if something usually so crude deserves so dignified a term) on some fixed anchor point which also anchors the fixed end of the return spring, and has some equivalent of a ratchet to engage it with the crankshaft when you pull.

    The simplest implementations of this have the pulley coaxial with the crankshaft and the cord coming out tangentially. Usually the housing and mounting of the mechanism is all part of the crankshaft end cover and the whole lot lifts off together when the cover is unbolted. Being the simplest these are also the most reliable.

    Slightly less simple implementations run the cord round a friction sheave to change the direction of the pull. These are less reliable because the sheave wears the cord out.

    Then you have complicated versions where the pulley is not coaxial with the crankshaft, but is mounted wherever it needs to be for the tangential cord entry to end up pointing the direction you want the pull to be in. Then some kind of angle gearing with disengagement mechanism is used both to transfer the drive through an angle to the crankshaft, and to provide the ratchet function. These are least reliable because they have all the same basic components as the simple version but with extra complication to go wrong on top.

    Machines intended for industrial use tend to use the simple version because there are fewer ways for it to break.

    Failure modes include: - The cord is too short, ie. shorter than the maximum possible movement of someone's arm pulling it, so big blokes go at the thing like gorillas and yank it hard up against the limit on every stroke until something breaks. (If you try and work around this by fitting a longer cord in cases where there is room to, you then find that the return spring can't handle the range of movement and different things break.) - The cord just breaks anyway after long enough. - The cord frays/kinks so it gets stuck. - The return spring breaks. - The return spring goes feeble, so the cord retracts slowly and then stops with half a metre still hanging out. - That last one plus someone then yanks at it without bothering to take up the slack first, and breaks things with the force peak when the cord pulls tight. - Muck/grit gets into the mechanism and interferes with the retraction similarly to the spring going feeble, or stops the ratchet parts moving freely so it fails to engage when you pull on the cord. - Some small and shitty plastic item breaks from some combination of age embrittlement, stress concentrations caused by thoughtless design of the moulding, and simply being inadequate in the first place.

    Lateral load on the crankshaft bearing simply doesn't come into it. Both simple and complicated types of chord mechanism do produce some; with ideal mechanisms the simple type would actually produce zero, but with the complicated type it inherently can't be; with real mechanisms there probably isn't much in it; either way it's insignificant compared to the effect of dynamic lateral loads when the engine is running.

    And in any case crankshaft end bearings failing just doesn't happen. They fail from lack of lubrication (usually on two-stroke machines, from people not putting oil in the petrol); they fail on cutoff saws used to cut brick/concrete/etc because of the immense amounts of fine abrasive dust produced which gets in everything; sometimes on rotary mowers the one at the other end fails because of the blade being out of balance and/or clouting things. Very occasionally the flywheel end bearing fails from the flywheel coming loose on the shaft. But failures due to the force from the starting cord just do not happen, even on the old machines with detachable cords and the pulley bolted straight to the flywheel.

    1560:

    If that were the choice, I would agree with you, but it isn't. The choice is between solar and energy usage reduction strategies.

    1561:

    Solar is orthogonal to energy use reduction strategies - we can apply, and are applying, those strategies regardless of where the energy comes from.

    The trouble is that we have a engineering issue; energy reduction is unacceptable where it comes with a significant fall in quality of life. To actually reduce energy use to a sustainable level without solar requires people to accept a significant reduction in luxuries - and as a practical matter, that isn't going to happen. Thus, we either accept increased fossil fuel use so that (e.g.) people can continue to heat their whole house to a temperature that's comfortable without proper winter clothing, or we need something to replace that energy use.

    And just saying "but people should have proper winter clothing" or equivalents isn't going to cut it as a solution - even people who do own it heat their house to the point where it's not needed, so that my house feels "cold" to a lot of my friends, especially those older than me, because I heat the hallways to 15 °C, and the rooms in use at a given time (Honeywell Evohome system to do this) to 18 °C, where they heat their entire house to 20 °C and wear fewer layers.

    1562:

    Oh, really? Even technically, that's not entirely true, because both money and effort is needed for either, and politically (which is the real problem) it's just plain false. You (like the government) have decided to take the politically easy 'solution' so that the more technically practical one can be ignored. Or even suppressed :-( I side with Insulation Rebellion on this.

    1563:

    1521 - Like it.

    "Grandfather rights", comment numbers vary. IME it's normally/usually used in situations where people are allowed to retain a qualification that is removed from others who gain a more basic qualification after a certain law is enacted. For example, Charlie, Greg and I are all allowed to drive 7.5t trucks, but my sister who gained her driver's licence in 1999 is not allowed to drive a truck over 3.5t without taking an additional test.

    1564:

    Yes, really. It's not about the long term outcome, where more insulation does indeed fix the problem forever; it's about the time it will take to insulate everywhere.

    We didn't need both as little as 10 years ago - arguably, even in 2015, we could have just about done it by focusing flat out on energy reduction schemes like insulating houses - but we chose to fanny about with distractions like Brexit instead. That's eaten into the time, and unless you assume that the IPCC is lying about best-case/worst-case scenarios, we've no longer got the time we need to do without solar as a stepping stone.

    We need both - we need solar to cover our backsides because we didn't get going fast enough, and we need energy reduction to cover our backsides for the long term.

    And this is all because our politicians in power (both parties who've had power in the last 50 years) have kicked the can down the road. We could have done it on insulation alone if we'd started in the 1990s; we'd have needed a bit of consideration of transport energy costs if we'd started in 2012.

    1565:

    Yes, I agree that we need both, but we aren't going to GET both, for the reasons you say. This push for solar is simply kicking the can further down the road, leaving us with the 5% benefit in the medium term (i.e. until every collapses). It's not just heating I am referring to, anyway, it's also transport.

    1566:

    Speak for yourself; I did not vote for WrecksIt.

    1567:

    "Grandfather rights", comment numbers vary. IME it's normally/usually used in situations where people are allowed to retain a qualification that is removed from others who gain a more basic qualification after a certain law is enacted. For example, Charlie, Greg and I are all allowed to drive 7.5t trucks, but my sister who gained her driver's licence in 1999 is not allowed to drive a truck over 3.5t without taking an additional test.

    It looks like we have at least a bifurcation in the use of "grandfathering" between US/Canadian use and UK use. In the US, it gets used as a synonym for "not retroactive" apparently more than it does in the UK. So long as we realize that the two usages are overlapping but not entirely congruent, that's fine and normal.

    That said, I agree with Charlie that the origin of grandfathering is problematic. Since NIMBYism, bountiful fount of American grandfathering that it is, is another racist offshoot by people trying to keep THEM out of their pure neighborhoods, for, erm, property values, I think there's a tie to American racism that people like me shouldn't ignore when we talk about grandfather clauses in governance.

    1568:

    Great. Nothing new I didn't know.

    I'll word it differently. Someone who was in the business of such small engine devices told me that if the starter rope was such that it was the cheapest possible alignment it was a big indicator that the devices wasn't designed for long term or heavy use. If the starter pull was "out the back" where there had to be at least one 90 degree pulley involved then this was an indicator that extra engineering and higher quality parts were put into the device design and build. Such that it would likely last for years of heavy use. Instead of a year or few of light use.

    Fudge statements all around.

    But things like roller bearings instead of sleeved.

    And I've also had discussions with folks "who know" who say if you want a 20 year purchase find a company that aims at golf courses. They need to buy lots of such things and expect them to last. And the word gets around quickly if a company's stuff doesn't last.

    1569:

    I didn't encounter it being used in that way, of regulations applying to people, until after I was already well familiar with it being used in reference to regulations applying to things - specifically, railway things. For instance BR Mk 1 coaches do not meet current safety standards, so if you build a new one you're not allowed to use it on the national railway system, but you are still allowed to use the >60-year-old ones that are still hanging around. (Which leads to some bloody daft situations with things like reopening closed stations being fearfully expensive because you're not allowed to just put things back the way they were before, while the next station along which had an identical design but never closed can carry on indefinitely like that and it's not a problem.) I always thought the origin was in this concept being expressed as "you can still use your grandfather's stuff" or similar, and its application to people was derived from its application to things. The kind of origin Charlie says it has never crossed my mind.

    1570:

    Point to take note of: "grandfather clause" has some rather nasty racist baggage attached to it.

    I'm not disagreeing with you, and being told that Australia's legal system is racist would hardly be a surprise, but that term is the one the legal system here uses. I'd never heard of the USA version before now.

    https://lawpath.com.au/blog/grandfather-clauses-everything-you-need-to-know

    1571:

    I forgot to say that 550 km^2 of solar isn't going to be any quicker than a comparable saving in energy usage. Both are sizable jobs.

    1572:

    "I think there's a tie to American racism that people like me shouldn't ignore when we talk about grandfather clauses in governance."

    I see the point, but how do you do that in a venue where nobody has a clue about the racist roots of the term and just know it as a standard phrase? It isn't obviously racist(*) and is in common and official use.

    (*) Decades ago, I saw someone who used "Jew them down" as a standard phrase get firmly slapped down.

    1573:

    1571 Para 2 - I had a petrol mower with a direct line pull cord starter. Based on the copyright date on the user/service guide, it was 30 years old when bought, gave me 10 years service, and was then sold to a dealer for twice what it was bought for privately.

    1572 - Well, I first encountered the term in respect of driver's licences, and later in respect of railways.

    1574:

    That's what I'm disagreeing with. The "cheapest possible alignment" is also the simplest and most reliable, so it is what is mostly used on machines for industrial use where you do care about it not going wrong but don't care about it looking flash. The ones which mess about changing the direction of the pull don't do anything useful - indeed the changed direction is as often as not more awkward than a straight pull would be - but they do waste more of your effort in extra friction, and they do add extra bits to break and go wrong.

    I don't regard them as indicators of good engineering because the decision to include them at all is not a good engineering decision, and on top of this the extra parts are often conspicuously not well engineered. I regard them as indicators that the designers were more concerned with adding faddy crap because they think it looks more space-age or something than with the reliability of the machine.

    My perspective is of plant hire, where you want things to last as long as possible in the hands of people who don't take care of them; they batter the crap out of them because that's their basic approach to things to begin with, they are often startlingly clueless ("I didn't know what it was so I hit it with me shovel", where "it" was the unexploded WW2 bomb he'd just plonked on the site agent's desk), and it's not theirs and they're not paying for it so they don't care anyway. Hence "building site worker proof" as a qualification of robustness (higher levels on the same scale being "farmer proof" and "squaddie proof").

    1575:

    It's 24V and runs on a bespoke assembly packed with 2 x 12V9 SLAs.

    You might be able to put a 24V lithium in there instead, those are fairly widely available and if you buy based on size (ie, to fit the existing slot in the mower) you should get a decent boost in battery capacity as well as a lighter battery. There are many, many sites selling those so while it might be tedious to find one that's exactly 235mm x 126mm or whatever, it can probably be done. Or just find one that more or less fits. Oh, and is rated for a one hour discharge.

    1576:

    meaning I don't curse that they made the handles on the old one for no one over 5'9".

    One of the great things about Australia is the tradition of leaving unwanted junk on the nature strip. Ok, another great tradition is the provision of a strip of grass outside properties separating them from the street. Often bisected by a strip of gravel or concrete as a footpath. But generally wide enough to have small trees in them (a metre or so).

    But anyway, as a result of keeping my eyes open I have an extra section of rigid pipe for my vacuum cleaner and thus can use the thing without bending over uncomfortably. It's not the same brand as the vacuum, but it fits and that what I care about. And it's just as good as the $50 "spare part" from the official supplier. Well better, because free.

    Sadly when I tried to add an extra section of handle to my mower I discovered that the whole setup was very flimsy and having two joints instead of one made it unusable. I'd need to weld then repaint some ~.8mm steel tube if I wanted that, and I'm not sure the metal is even weldable, and that discovery process could be ugly.

    1577:

    Australian extension cords are fun. The standard is a 10m, 10A, 1.5mm2 cable that really cannot have 10A run through it without external cooling (and definitely can't be used while partly wound onto a drum).

    But we also get 2.5mm2 flex, and if you look (and are willing to pay) that's usually an option. Even in 10m extension cords.

    The real win is "caravan cords" which are officially rated at 15A and tend to have more copper in them. They come with AU 15A plugs, which are very similar to 10A ones but with a wider earth pin to discourage people from plugging them in to 10A outlets. A couple of seconds filing changes that, and gives you (in my case) a 15m long extension cord with minimal voltage drop even at high power.

    I'd like a 4mm2, 25m long extension cord but that's over $100 and I'm not made of money. It would also weigh 10kg, so at least it would be annoying to steal borrow.

    1578:

    At this point, I own 4 BD corded electric mowers, in various states of repair: 1) Bought it at K-Mart, low end model (this was ~20 years ago) 2) Got it from my Uncle when he moved out of his house (~15 years ago) (higher end model, with a flipping handle) 3) Got it from a guy on Craigslist who trash picked mowers & restored them. 4) Got it from the same guy, because the first one broke (and then just me gave the the first one, because...)

    I had problems with #1, because the switch burned out (I have gone through at least a half a dozen switches over the years). #2 had a damaged motor, but was a higher end model. Figured out that BD only used one type of motor (despite what the marketing said) and moved the motor to #2. I don't remember the exact sequence at this point, but I have replaced switches, swapped motors, motor brushes, handles, blades and wiring between the four and I have one functioning mower (I think I could get another one going, but need to find a round tuit for that). I have learned that the BD mowers, whatever model, all used 95% of the same parts. Sometimes the chassis is different or the handle, but everything else is interchangeable.

    Unfortunately, as somebody noted, BD went and got sold and they changed the design of their mowers. They also stopped making replacement parts for the older (more reliable!) design, so too bad if it breaks. If you have a broken one, you could probably make quite a bit of money selling it for parts :)

    1579:

    30 years

    I thought I was clear but I guess not. I was referring to those carry around type of devices. String trimmer type of things.

    1580:

    Having lived in Canada and Russia on occasion I understand some concern around the need to provide central heat at some point during the day, but it is not essential to life.

    The necessity is to maintain a minimum livable temperature where you are. How it is done is immaterial. Central heat is irrelevant---nice but not relevant.

    Long time Canadian.

    1581:

    Whatever. You're arguing theory against a reality of such things in a country you're not in and I think have never been in. And you know you're right and I'm wrong. So be it.

    1582:

    But generally wide enough to have small trees in them (a metre or so).

    We have the same. Of course the trees over time have issues with the confinement to 20"-30" of concrete and either grow into strange configuration or move the concrete or both. And around here the sidewalk installed by the city and trees owned by them is your problem if it needs work. Mostly. Sort of. Kind of. But for the property owner these trees front, even trimming these trees, much less cutting one down, requires a site visit with a determination to be made later.

    Then add to this if the trees are under utility lines they gradually become wishbone shaped as the utilities cut out the limbs against the lines.

    Ain't being green grand?

    Anyway, I periodically put things out with a "free" sign on them. 80% of the time I don't have to deal with it after a day.

    1583:

    "I think there's a tie to American racism that people like me shouldn't ignore when we talk about grandfather clauses in governance." I see the point, but how do you do that in a venue where nobody has a clue about the racist roots of the term and just know it as a standard phrase? It isn't obviously racist() and is in common and official use.() Decades ago, I saw someone who used "Jew them down" as a standard phrase get firmly slapped down.

    I think the key is not to think about synonyms, but to use a different phrase to convey the same information. "Grandfathered in" is both imprecise and used in specific circumstances. Basically, you're saying that something isn't covered because it's too old. So you can say how old it is (my house was built to 70s code instead of saying the wiring system's grandfathered in). Or you can say what systems it has. Or you can call it an antique. Or you can say someone's the third generation of their family to blah de blah.

    Probably you use it more than I do, because now that I think about it, I don't remember the last time I used "grandfathered in."

    The other obnoxious thing you can do is deliberately use "Grandfathered" in a sense where its racist origins are relevant. Then, if someone superciliously calls you on it, you can calmly explain that you know that history, and that's precisely why you used the term. Then watch them think it through and either get really annoyed or start laughing.

    1584:

    They come with AU 15A plugs, which are very similar to 10A ones but with a wider earth pin to discourage people from plugging them in to 10A outlets.

    Hey, look at what we get to deal with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEMA_connector#Nomenclature

    1585:

    Charlie ...
    Going back a bit ...
    Bo Jon-Sun is empathically NOT "Churchill clownshoes" ...
    He's a nasty vicious little shit, who remembers every insult & slight & deliberately builds traps for those who come after ... as in idiot wanker Khan falling into said traps, oops.
    As you may gather, I've no time for Khan, but BoZo is another league of serious unpleasantness altogether!

    You may, all of you, consider this as a warning.

    On another subject.
    "Ukraine" - if it is just Putin posing & monstering, ok ...unless ...
    Some idiot with itchy trigger fingers overdoes it... - -
    Not that they are the only ones, of course
    The only difference, as far as I can see, is that the latter admitted it, & the former refuse to acknowledge anything.

    But, now - "Itchy trigger fingers" could be a real disaster, yes?

    1586:

    Haha, I always knew the US was special but that's just beyond sanity.

    We have a smaller variety of plugs, mostly because single phase stuff is limited and getting more limited by the decade. As in, there's a 10A plug, and a 15A plug and then you shouldn't be plugging it in. The regulations are getting more emphatic about hard-wiring bigger draws all the time.

    With three phase kinda similar but they're IEC standard ones so most countries use them (guess which one is the major exception 😜)

    https://eectech.com.au/5\_Pin\_Australian\_Standard\_Industrial_Plugs

    Some of the lower-current plugs will go into higher-current outlets, but not always. The other way round will not work.

    That site also has a guide to extension cord lengths which is handy, but FWIW you're not going to find those cords for sale at the usual big box outlets. But you can get them... for a nominal price. If you really, really need one. 4mm2 flex is expensive regardless, though.

    [[ markup fix - mod ]]

    1587:

    Everyone I've known who had a corded electrical mower has had a roll of electrical tape nearby.

    I have a corded mower. I have no electrical tape at all, and am using a 20-year-old extension cord with no damage.

    I'm careful. I also start mowing near the plug and work outwards — it may not be the most efficient path, but it's the safest and I value safety over speed.

    1588:

    It's very different from no retrospective legislation, which is a much older concept. It is allowing people, organisations or things exemption from some aspects of the law.

    Grandfathering is an exemption, true, but it's an exemption based on something already being in existence. That looks a lot like a law not being retrospective to me. Maybe there are subtle legal distinctions I'm missing?

    Suppose the government updated the building code to require buildings have much better insulation and energy efficiency. Over here such a change would generally grandfather in existing buildings, so they would not be required to do (expensive) upgrades*. I don't see how that's not an example of "no retrospective legislation". What am I missing?

    *With a limit for renovations, to eliminated the grandfather's axe situation :-)

    1589:

    Moz @ 1497: One amusing thing is that my dwarf lemon tree is being used as a climbing frame... it has cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and pumpkins on it (the fruit as well as the plants) and I had to weed quite a lot of grass out of it. Despite that there are lemons there too.

    Guy around the corner from me has banana trees. I don't think he's ever gonna' get any bananas (this is 35°N after all), but he's got the trees in his side garden. I talked to him one time - thought my eyes might be deceiving me - but he said that's what they are; remind him of home.

    He seems to get a good crop of pumpkins, watermelons, squash, tomatoes & peppers.

    I had someone come today and cut down the damn mimosa tree in my front yard. I had him leave the wood so I can cut it up myself for the wood stove or chip it up to go in my compost bin.

    I don't know if I'll ever have a garden, but I got some good compost ... 40+ years accumulation of "grass" clippings & chipped up yard waste. If I liked fishing I know exactly where to find some BIG earthworms. I don't really have much "grass" in my yard. It's all green weeds of some sort, but as long as I run the mower over it every couple weeks in the summer I don't get complaints from the city.

    1590:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1531: See the last paragraph of #553 and #1041. NATO, the USA and UK are all arming and inciting Ukraine to launch an attack, and the signs are that Ukraine is accepting the bait, which will be SPUN as "Russia invades Ukraine". If they include Crimea, and the USA/NATO provides 'peacekeeping' support for that, we are facing WW III.

    Tankie hogwash. The U.S., U.K. & NATO have no more interest in having Ukraine invade Russia than they have in Russia invading Ukraine. As my grandmother used to say, "You're full of sawdust and slough water!"

    1591:

    Haha, I always knew the US was special but that's just beyond sanity.

    To be honest in most personal living space situations you see 98% or more of the 5-15. With 5-20s taking up most of the remaining space in outdoor or garage situations. For a stove or dryer you'll see the others. Plus a similar in a garage for those of us who ask for it. Useful for EV cars or welders.

    For decades the 1-15 was the standard in houses. But was being phased out by the 60s as the codes all went to grounded everywhere. You have to be careful when in an old building and you notice a mix of grounded and ungrounded. You want to make sure the grounded outlets are really grounded and not put in as a replacement because that what some idiot had in his hand.

    When I ask businesses to put in a 30A for a UPS I get either a 5-30 or L5-30. If you get rid of the old ungrounded stuff you'll notice the chart is a LOT simpler. Lots of dryer and stove outlets get replaced (for $$$$) when the consumer buys the delivery service with the unit and the guys show up and say "we aren't allowed to sell you an adapter" or plug it in with one.

    1592:

    Greg Tingey @ 1530: EC & Charlie

    [...] don't you mean ... IF Ru invades the Ukraine. It's actually in Putin's interests to keep the situation as it is & do nothing, just monstering everybody ......

    That's been my assessment. He's not "bluffing" so much as he's doing a bit of saber rattling in hopes of winning concessions. But I think it will all remain "deniable"; threatening military exercises along the borders and ominous troop build-ups.

    There's too much risk that NATO would directly support Ukraine against an outright invasion. But he'll take any concessions he can squeeze out of Ukraine & the west just from the looming threat.

    Also, a Russian invasion of Ukraine might be just enough to give those in Sweden & Finland who want their countries to join NATO a convincing argument for doing so. I don't think Putin wants that, and I don't think he's unaware of the possible unintended consequences.

    https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/05/finland-sweden-nato-russia-putin/

    1593:

    JReynolds @ 1532: Your comment was probably a reference to the nice men in white coats appearing in the linked song.

    For any who missed the reference, it's a funny novelty song. Which has been covered by a surprising number of artists.

    ... with lyrics perhaps strangely appropriate to Putin's current concerns with Ukraine:

    Remember when you ran away
    And I got on my knees
    And begged you not to leave
    Because I'd go berserk

    Well, you left me anyhow
    And then the days got worse and worse
    And now you see I've gone
    Completely out of my mind

    1594:

    I imagine it's relatively simple, otherwise people would really struggle with needing a row of 8 different outlets in every location for that one thing that has a curly plug on it.

    One of the interesting differences between Australia and Aotearoa is that the former has a lot more DIY electrical wiring. I'm not used to that, coz in NZ it's basically unheard of. But half the houses I've lived in in Australia have had "interesting" wiring obviously done by someone barely qualified to tie shoelaces.

    1595:

    whitroth @ 1556: Um, er, there are other uses of it. For example, when I got into high school. My high school, Central, was (is?) the crown jewel of the Philly public school system. When I went, there were only two ways to get in: an IQ test (yes, really) or if you father or grandfather went there. I got in on both....

    That's actually exactly the original usage ... as well as including a "literacy test" to keep out the riff-raff.

    Probably unlawful after passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but most people don't understand that Jim Crow was NATION WIDE in the U.S. ... South AND NORTH; East and west.

    Maybe worse in the South where it was "de jure", but nonetheless "de facto" throughout the rest of the country.

    1596:

    paws4thot @ 1566:h "Grandfather rights", comment numbers vary. IME it's normally/usually used in situations where people are allowed to retain a qualification that is removed from others who gain a more basic qualification after a certain law is enacted. For example, Charlie, Greg and I are all allowed to drive 7.5t trucks, but my sister who gained her driver's licence in 1999 is not allowed to drive a truck over 3.5t without taking an additional test.

    That's how it's used today almost everywhere in the world, but I think it helps to be mindful of where the phrase came from and what it was originally about.

    1597:

    neither of you put the cord over your shoulder...

    I can't remember exactly how I did it. Don't forget, I spent several years managing an umbilical. Making sure that the umbilical was not going to foul on anything should the boat/barge suddenly go walkabout. So it's as second nature as changing gears in a car. I think I held it in the hand closest to the "origin" where I had flaked out the cord. So that swapped at each end of the run as I turned to go back.

    1598:

    One of the interesting differences between Australia and Aotearoa is that the former has a lot more DIY electrical wiring. I'm not used to that, coz in NZ it's basically unheard of. But half the houses I've lived in in Australia have had "interesting" wiring obviously done by someone barely qualified to tie shoelaces.

    In most of the US it is legal to do your OWN wiring. But if you might even think about selling or renting the place in the next year it is a really big no no. To the extent that a later fire or death can lead to you being tracked down and pay the penalty.

    Not quite shoelace class but I've found some interesting and no where near code even when built things. One thing I fixed in the first year was that 3 bedrooms and 2 baths were all on a single 120v15a breaker. Lights and all. I quickly moved to individual breakers for the bedrooms and baths. Plus GFCI in the baths. Which was not required in 61.

    1599:

    Guy around the corner from me has banana trees. I don't think he's ever gonna' get any bananas (this is 35°N after all), but he's got the trees in his side garden.

    You can grow banana in Vancouver (49°) and the Gulf Islands, with the right microclimates. There was a chap on Bowen Island who grew bananas a couple of decades ago. (Don't know if he still does.)

    There's someone in Courtney on Vancouver Island (49.6°) who has a nice tree:

    https://forums.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/threads/bananas-in-deer-country.45663/

    1600:

    Kardashev @ 1575:

    "I think there's a tie to American racism that people like me shouldn't ignore when we talk about grandfather clauses in governance."

    I see the point, but how do you do that in a venue where nobody has a clue about the racist roots of the term and just know it as a standard phrase? It isn't obviously racist(*) and is in common and official use.

    Now you know, so you can be mindful of the booby traps buried in the English language.

    (*) Decades ago, I saw someone who used "Jew them down" as a standard phrase get firmly slapped down.

    ... and might still be acceptable if the holocaust (and holocaust deniers) had never happened. But it did happen and there are deniers out there, so we have to watch our language.

    Some words and phrases have become hurtful to others; particularly language that denies the humanity of others. So we don't use those words & phrases out of deference to those who might be harmed by them.

    1601:

    jrkrideau @ 1583:

    Having lived in Canada and Russia on occasion I understand some concern around the need to provide central heat at some point during the day, but it is not essential to life.

    The necessity is to maintain a minimum livable temperature where you are. How it is done is immaterial. Central heat is irrelevant---nice but not relevant.

    Long time Canadian.

    Ain't just Canada, Russia or Scotland. I don't have central heat. What I used to have was an inadequate, inefficient and just too expensive to use Gravity furnace with a single stage oil burner inserted in it and around 1980 or so I just had to shut it down and stop using it (and over the years since I stopped using it most of the equipment has been removed).

    Temperatures around here have been more or less between 0°C and -12°C (minus twelve) for the last couple of weeks and that's fairly common for a couple of months most winters.

    1602:

    Amusingly, looking at your chart, the deprecated NEMA 10-50 connector (with two active pins and no earth pin) superficially resembles the normal domestic 240V 10A version of the AS/NZS 3112 connector, which has active and neutral on the two angled pins and earth in the centre. This would have potentially exciting outcomes in case of a mismatch either way. Plugging the US appliance into Australian mains would result in an unpredictable active-neutral short circuit inside the appliance (or the plug I guess, but I'm guessing an appliance that can draw up to 50A would have the two actives wired into separate terminals). Plugging an Australian appliance (and to be clear, pretty much every Australian consumer appliance that consumes 240VAC has this type of connector, would have the chassis earth connected to supply neutral, and both the active and neutral circuits connected to supply active. That might do nothing I guess, but it also might kill the first person to touch it. I guess it's only going to be 120V, but still... I guess the orientation is upside down from each perspective, so you'd expect the punter to think twice. But I wonder whether in the last 50-100 years anyone has died from that.

    Oddly, it's never occurred to me to file down the earth pin on a 15A extension lead. Might do that one day (I have a 15A lead that I don't have much use for in this house at the moment).

    1603:

    Greg Tingey @ 1588: On another subject.
    "Ukraine" - if it is just Putin posing & monstering, ok ...unless ...
    Some idiot with itchy trigger fingers overdoes it... - -
    Not that they are the only ones, of course
    The only difference, as far as I can see, is that the latter admitted it, & the former refuse to acknowledge anything.

    But, now - "Itchy trigger fingers" could be a real disaster, yes?

    It's not like those are the only times anyone fucked up, although I believe the Soviets took some time before finally coming to terms with theirs ... OTOH, Iran does seem to have been relatively forthright fairly quickly regarding Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752

    I'm pretty sure Russia took the weapon used by the Ukrainian separatists (?) to shoot down MH17 away from them and moved it back to Russia, so maybe there's some hope there won't be a repeat.

    1604:

    So we don't use those words & phrases out of deference to those who might be harmed by them.

    thirty years ago or so some uk local government person trying to be helpful intoned that "brainstorm" might be hurtful to epileptics, and u can still find people in the british education system talking about "mind showers" as a result

    1605:

    Sort of relevant to the OP:

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/26/out-of-control-spacex-rocket-on-track-to-collide-with-the-moon

    TL;DR: The second stage booster of the rocket that launched DSCOVR to Sun-Earth L1 back in 2015 is expected to impact on the far side of the moon on March 4. It's allegedly the first "unintentional" space junk to impact the moon.

    1606:

    I have a 15A lead that I don't have much use for in this house at the moment

    One of the directors at work saw a pile of them in a sale bin once so we have about ten, 10m 15A extension cords. Which I suppose might be useful if we wanted to move the one 15A device we have (a UPS) from the server room to the meeting room or something. They won't plug in to a 10A outlet so I don't know why he bought them.

    But last I looked at least two of them had been corrected so they'd go into a 10A socket.

    1607:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS/NZS\_3112

    According to the history section there

    While this socket-outlet never became a NEMA standard design, the 50 A NEMA 10-50R, has a similar pin configuration in a larger form.[21])

    Suggests that while it's the same shape it's a different size so you'd probably need a large universal adapter to make the two fit together.

    1608:

    That sort of thing is pretty much impossible in any of my last several orkplaces. Basically any sort of procurement at all means at least three people get involved, even if one is a director. I’ve just been dragged into a procurement panel despite having no idea what the machine in question does, though it feels a bit like lifting the rock to see what other things are there given some of the ICT touch points so it could be a bit timely.

    1609:

    I prefer to work for small companies, ideally where I can talk to the owner(s) directly when I want to. I just don't have the political skills to pull strings even two levels above me to get what I want.

    Which does mean I get some really, really random acts of management at times. When someone* put a random box down on top of a directors spare Markita drill battery** he went slightly mental tearing the place apart looking for it and yelling that if anyone had stolen it he would tear their head off. The person who actually found it decided not to get involved and just took the box and walked away.

    But the flip side is that I also have access to whatever the company has. Sadly the 'workshop' is very spare by my standards, but when I wanted to put conformal coating and stuff into the controller for my ebike I went in and when I asked the technician where the stuff was they said "what are you trying to do" then decided that it would be easier to do it properly themselves. Mind you, said tech has been known to fall asleep in front of youtube at work, so they're not exactly rushed off their feet 24/7 :)

    • we all know it was Mr "my precious, precious drill battery" because he was the one using it there and moving stuff around.

    ** one of the 1.5Ah or 2Ah MVPs they throw in with their really cheap drills. No, I wouldn't accept one if it was free.

    1610:

    JBS
    And - the two most "fun" vehicles I have ever driven:
    One of these ...
    AND
    One of these

    Electrical Power outlets ...
    All of this is utterly bonkers-to-demented.
    Hate to say it, but the UK domestic system is so much simpler & consistent.
    Big "square" chunky plug-&-socket, which is always, always grounded, almost always in a "ring" circuit { Exceptions for things like single power line for (say) immersion heater - which must have a double-throw switch }
    Lower power items have a lower current fuse in the plug. { Typically: - 2 / 5 / 10 / 15 Amps }

    1611:

    Hate to say it, but the UK domestic system is so much simpler & consistent. Big "square" chunky plug-&-socket, which is always, always grounded,

    Did you miss my percentages? The 5-15 is in virtually all homes built in the last 60 or so years. And in any up fit work (done to code). And the 5-20 which accounts for almost all the rest accepts a plug designed for 5-15. You go buy most anything you use in a home and it just plugs in. And is grounded.

    1612:

    And - the two most "fun" vehicles I have ever driven:

    I spent my teens earning spending money driving a close cousin. The Ford 8N.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford\_N-series_tractor#Ferguson\_and\_Ford\_part\_ways

    Flat head 4. I even changed the head gasket in a field once.

    It taught me to wear work gloves. After the 3rd or 4th time you got your thumb jambed from hitting something hidden and the steering wheel spinning leather work gloves made a LOT more sense to even a hard headed 14 year old.

    [[ markup fix - mod ]]

    1613:

    Topic drift: China promised, after SARS, to honestly and promptly report on epidemics. They lied. Here's how: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets/

    1614:

    1579 - Well, IME "most" metals (not some castings) can be at least one of Araldited, brazed and welded.

    1582 - Well, I read you to be discussing an actual lawn mower, not a strimmer. I would question a ~7kg electric strimmer design.

    1614 - BS549 (1950) is technically still extant, but has effectively been superseded by BS 1963 (1947), mostly by periodic re-wiring of older properties.

    1616:

    Yes, there are. This is also a reply to Heteromeles (#1586).

    The situation is when some entity is licensed, and the licensing rules change. Not just for new entities, but for EVERY entity. In order to avoid hassle, there is a specific exemption added to the law that entities that were licensed before a certain date are exempt from some of the new rules. This applies even if the licences are for a fixed period, and the old entity needs a NEW licence.

    There is no synonym that I know of, and it is NOT the same as something being old. In particular, mere age does NOT enable grandfathering privilege. Yes, there ARE some age-specific legal exemptions, too, such as for firearms in the UK, but they are different.

    1617:

    Many plants will grow in conditions that they won't flower, or flower in conditions they won't fruit.

    1618:

    The current episode of Freeffall has an executive villain outing hisself. [Freefall 26 January] (http://freefall.purrsia.com/) Making a career from exploitation seems so obviously ethically questionable, and those who do seem so much at risk of drifting into worse things. (BTW, nonprogrammer person, hope I didn't "Intercourse" the link.)

    1619:

    As in "Alexander Bozo Freeffal Johnson"? ;-)

    1620:

    Re: 'Also, a Russian invasion of Ukraine might be just enough to give those in Sweden & Finland who want their countries to join NATO a convincing argument for doing so.'

    There's more than one border/country at stake. Russia's also messing around along its southeastern borders - former SSR member states that (still) have a lot of energy reserves and probably at least a few old regime/Soviet sympathizers.

    There was a huge power outage in three of them just a day or two ago. Unfortunately only one news source popped up in my GoogleNews feed though so I'm not sure how accurate/thorough the reporting. One consequence of this power outage was the impact on cryptomining. Wow! that's a helluva lot of power being siphoned off for a make-believe asset. (Wonder whether crypto is part of why Putin was so eager to send in troops - not because of civil protests/uprisings but because of economic impact.) If anyone has better (more reliable/verifiable) news sources, I'd be interested learning what exactly is going on there. Thanks!

    https://www.wionews.com/videos/power-began-trickling-back-in-kazakhstan-kyrgyzstan-and-uzbekistan-after-biggest-ever-blackout-447615

    https://www.fxempire.com/news/article/kazakhstan-cuts-power-to-crypto-miners-877700

    'According to Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, Kazakhstan’s average monthly hashrate share was 18.10% in August 2021, so the country was second only to U.S. in mining Bitcoin.'

    BTW - Kazakhstan recently opened a large solar panel electricity generation project despite having large oil deposits. Most of its oil is currently being sold to China which is also heavily investing in solar. Interesting.

    1621:

    I did not vote for Brexit, either, because it's at best a bloody stupid idea built on middle-class English fantasies about what the British Empire was actually like to live under, and at worst it's based on the ideals of people who think that Adolf Hitler was a bit of a wishy-washy anti-racist woke do-gooder and far too nice to the intended victims of the Holocaust (aka the ideals of people who earn a punch in the face every time they talk).

    Unfortunately, it has taken up a significant amount of political room and thus absorbed our ability to do unpopular but necessary things; you can see it in the Westminster COVID-19 response, which has been dominated by a desire to do the popular thing, not the thing needed to keep us all alive together, and it also affects our ability to deal with climate change, because that is again going to involve unpopular changes.

    1622:

    That's the underlying trouble that's going to kill off civilization in the UK in the next 100 years; we are (currently) incapable of doing any form of large project, and we need to do at least 3 (minimise overheads in transport, remove greenhouse gas emissions from energy provision, reduce energy demand for heating and cooling via insulation) in order to survive.

    Overheads in transportation is an especially painful one to fix; we've set the country up so that the "typical" way of getting around is 1,000 kg of overhead (a private car) for 100 kg of payload (a single human being), and further we are unwilling to insist on multi-modal transport if one of the modes involved is a private car. So instead of saying "you can drive to the Park & Ride and then take the bus", we build town centre parking in congested areas. While the overhead on a bus is bigger (the double-decker coach I take to work is 12,000 kg), it's also spread across much more payload (with COVID, the coach is typically running at 30 people on board, so 400 kg overhead per person, not 1,000 kg). But comfort and convenience get in the way of accepting that as a necessity.

    Removing greenhouse gas emissions from energy provision is another hard one, and we're backsliding there; on the one hand, solar is a politically cheap way to reduce the emissions as is wind, on the other we're replacing nuclear and net zero carbon biomass-capable coal plant with combined cycle gas turbine, and keeping what coal plants we still have running on imported biomass (again, carbon-intensive). And we're combining that with political issues (Brexit!) which mean that instead of growing our links to the European grid and thus becoming able to use their grids as a stabilizer for our renewables, we're struggling to repair the existing links.

    We've compounded that with a failure to think through smart metering, and thus the SMETS systems (both 1 and 2) are focused solely on what the energy retailers need to reduce their cost of doing business, instead of focusing on providing information to the consumer about the relative cost of their consumption. Thus, where we could have set standards on how to move intermittent loads like refrigeration compressors to points of low demand, and been on the leading edge of appliances capable of splitting their run into parts over a longer time period (washing machines, dishwashers etc) based on grid load, we're instead getting remote reading of meters.

    And then we need some major investment in housing stock to reduce the heating and cooling demand. Instead, we're sticking to the cheap and easy solutions, which results in people preferentially installing air conditioning (so that they can inefficiently cool and heat their home over the year) to insulating the house to not need it. This isn't helped by the fact that a lot of people rent their home - so insulating it isn't in their grasp, but buying a portable aircon and running a duct out of an open window is.

    Then, on top of all this, politicians find no shortage of "experts" who are willing to tell them that what they're doing is the wrong thing to do (even though the reports they can see show that it's a component of the right thing), and end up deciding that the right thing to do is to ignore the experts and instead just do the easy bits. What we need is people saying "that's a start, but what's needed is this unpopular thing as well", what we get is people saying "nope, that's a waste of time, do this unpopular thing instead". The result is politicians who recognise that doing the right thing is going to get them under attack from all sides, doing the easy thing is going to win them plaudits from those who don't pay much attention, and doing nothing is going to leave them under attack. So they do the thing that wins some plaudits, rather than the thing we need them to do.

    1623:

    a Russian invasion of Ukraine might be just enough to give those in Sweden & Finland who want their countries to join NATO a convincing argument for doing so

    Sweden and Finland are traditionally neutrals -- in Sweden's case going back to 1812, in Finland's case, to 1955. Both of them punch significantly above their weight per capita in military terms: pushing them into NATO's arms would be an own goal for Russia.

    I don't think there's any Machiavellian world-spanning plan behind Russia/Ukraine: it's just left-over business from the Russian empire (the Russian nationalists are butt-hurt over losing their oldest and richest subject territory outside Russia itself). A short victorious war is always a good way to rally nationalist support for a government with sagging popularity (as a result of Western sanctions). It's also a showcase for the shiny new Russian weapons available for sale to any dictator who can be easily impressed, and it grabs Russia a chunk of prime agricultural land and natural resources: the Donbas used to be the grain basket of the USSR. And there may be some "fire sale -- get it while it's available" sense that the USA, which kneecapped its foreign policy under Trump, might not be incapable of recovering its global hegemonic status if Biden is followed by a younger, more dynamic leader.

    Obviously there's also some ideological guff -- Russia is deeply socially and politically reactionary: Communism was just a drop-in quasi-religious replacement for Tsarism and the Orthodox church, and its ideological grip evaporated like the morning dew after 1991 -- so it's no surprise that Putin sees eye to eye with the likes of Steve Bannon or Nigel Farage, but that on its own isn't enough to motivate a war.

    1624:

    And then we need some major investment in housing stock to reduce the heating and cooling demand.

    That's the root of the problem, frankly. Our housing stock is 75 years old on average, and prices are sky-high thanks to successive governments since Thatcher inflating a housing-driven credit bubble to maintain a subjective sense of prosperity (and compensate for dismal pension savings and investment in making stuff, rather than shuffling funds between offshore accounts).

    The government could tackle it by a massive campaign of council house construction, replacing Council Tax with a direct property tax, and demolishing older and non-noteworthy properties to make way for the cheap council houses ... but that'd crash the property market (ideally it needs to deflate by 80%), and while popular with the kids, they don't outvote the pensioners and plutocrats.

    To grasp the nettle -- you could nationalize the entire housing fleet. Tell the current owners "you will receive a pension fund seeded with the final market value of your home: thereafter, if you want to move home it's state-owned property only, equivalent to your current dwelling, and if you want more rooms you can pay a standard top-up per unit area: there will be a waiting list for desirable locations, first-come, first-served". Very Soviet and you'll be able to hear the screaming from low Mars orbit, but afterwards it would at least be possible to begin to fix the shortages and inefficiencies.

    1625:

    The essential problem for Putin is that there are a lot of countries on his border who don't want to be Russian-affiliated, and they'd be happy to teach Putin a lesson about respecting borders if (and this is a big if) they have the full backing of the U.S. and Western Europe.

    Exactly how it plays out is subject to any number of factors I can't predict, but I think the key to having Putin stand down is making sure Ukraine, Poland, Finland, etc., all are appropriately assured that the U.S. and EU have their backs.

    1626:

    The essential problem for Putin is that there are a lot of countries on his border who don't want to be Russian-affiliated, and they'd be happy to teach Putin a lesson about respecting borders

    Yes. This is always the messy end to empire; your old imperial possessions unaccountably don't seem to see your rule as being beneficent, and can't wait to get rid of you. Once they come out and say it you have two choices: repression or acceptance. Repression is never cost effective in the long run, so that just leaves acceptance.

    One of the striking things about the 2013 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine were the number of EU flags being waved. Demonstrators don't generally wave the flag of a foreign polity.

    Charlie @ 1627: Russia is deeply socially and politically reactionary: Communism was just a drop-in quasi-religious replacement for Tsarism and the Orthodox church

    A persistent theme in anti-EU propaganda in the ex-communist states is homophobia. E.g. from the linked article:

    This 'alternative narrative' was on display last Friday, when Yanukovich supporters staged their own demonstration in Kiev. One participant claimed that their rally was in favour of "unity with our brothers in Russia and Belarus". "We are against the Euro Sodom", maintained another. Still another opposed the "the expansion of European values that destroy the family". A particularly odd feature of this counter-protest was the claim that greater EU influence in Ukraine would bring with it increased homosexuality. Evidently, this agenda does not hold much appeal for the 'EuroMaidan' demonstrators.

    1627:

    Hmm. While I agree that we need to close down the housing Ponzi scheme, crashing it would destroy our economy, too. Also, I remember the 1960s - the council house corruption was very USSR in scale and type, too.

    But we don't NEED to do demolish everything - I can witness how much can be done in older housing (in my case, 1930) to reduce heat loss and, better, this can be done by our large number of local builders, not a small number of specialised companies. I agree that much of the more cheaply built (often modern, especially 1950s) is beyond redemption. The sad thing is that we WERE doing some of that, as well as doing some road traffic reduction, until the recent new approaches took over and we have now bet the farm on (unplanned) green energy - and nothing else.

    We know that the government would be happy to abolish green belts and planning controls, and could easily be persuaded to sling money at the usual culprits for solar power generation. But increasing capacity by a factor of over ten in a short period would both take up all available money and have a huge environmental cost.

    1628:

    Charlie @ 1627: ... since Thatcher inflating a housing-driven credit bubble to maintain a subjective sense of prosperity ...

    I agree its a bubble. But the "prosperity" isn't subjective, just very one-sided. It's a transfer of wealth from the young to the old. Young people wanting a house have to pay inflated prices. These high prices are realised as actual money at the other end by older people trading down from their inflated 3 or 4 bed houses to smaller properties and/or "equity release" schemes.

    The trouble with asset bubbles is that you can't deflate them in a nice slow controlled manner. Once people realise that the underlying asset isn't going to carry on appreciating like magic forever the whole bubble dynamic collapses, and whoever wielded the pin gets the blame.

    1629:

    If only it were that simple.

    To be clear, I quite agree that housing is one of the principal problems of most or all western, developed countries.

    Nationalize it? Talk with some former Soviets about how much fun those massive apartment blocks are. So generic that your flat key opens doors in buildings a mile away? Or look into what goes on in China's (former?) ghost cities.

    What to rebuild it with? We've got a global shortage of building sand for concrete and cement (which is not, repeat not, normal desert sand or the stuff on the bottom of the ocean). The tl;dr is that we don't have a good basic system for 21st century building, meaning the systems are affordable, will deal with climate change, and use materials that are plentiful, appropriate, and renewable. I'll pitch earthships out there just to hear the Grand Snark-Organ crank up (with good reason: Earthships are a thing, but Earthship arcologies on the scale of cruise liners are not, and that's what we need). Snark aside, at least that crew's trying to build with an abundant, growing resource: Trash. That's a hell of a lot better than the most of us are doing.

    I'd also point out that perpetual argument on this blog over what to power civilization with should be a serious warning that it's not just a technical issue. It's a social issue (how many people up-stream have said some version of "I'd rather die than live with/without technology X? That's a social problem). It's also a political issue, because whatever you do, you're going to mess up some billionaires' spare change (remembering that this is the self-entitled crew who thinks all taxation is theft and don't pay their share of the load), rework a good chunk of various and scheming bureaucracies (who probably know their systems better than you do), and put another metric butt-tonne of politicians out of work, including most of your friends--whatever your political affiliation.

    Note that I've got exactly the same problem here, and I'm quite sure that Moz will chime in saying it's the same in his part of Australia. It's a global problem, and we're all getting stuck face-first against the grinding wheel trying to deal with it.

    So perhaps you conjure Yog-Sothoth to help you make the connections you'll need to run for office?

    On the flip side, you might as well start putting your version of the near future in a SF story. As Harold Page more-or-less said, the best way to get your readers to enjoy your meticulously detailed arcology is to have the building janitors foil the snipers on the roof by redirecting the solar concentration system onto them.

    1630:

    What we need is people saying "that's a start, but what's needed is this unpopular thing as well", what we get is people saying "nope, that's a waste of time, do this unpopular thing instead".

    Interesting essay. And with a few minor word replacements it would apply to the USA.

    But in our current environment in the USA way too many people don't believe in what you say needs to be done. And I suspect the same is true in the UK and Europe on general and to be honest on most of the planet.

    And much of our (and your) current political top management has come to the conclusion that they'd rather be in power by going along with "things could be great" if we ignore these crazy doom sayers than to speak much truth.

    1631:

    Doing your own wiring - trust me, not a problem I have. The former owner's handyman... I think I'm up to three pages long on my list of why he'd never set foot in this house again.

    And people in hardware stores look at me funny, when I make comments to the effect that I want any wiring I do to meet Philly or Chicago code (significantly above what suburbs do).

    1632:

    sigh

    Of course, one of the other issues that everyone's ignoring is that pretty much all of the FSSR countries are run by corrupt, nasty dictators.

    And on occasion, I read about one or the other of them, with half-empty store shelves, and std. expensive ruler palaces."But it's all the fault of them...."

    1633:

    Interesting thought. One problem would be "I OWN MY LAND", esp. in the US. And who's responsible for maintenance - the people whose home it is, the state, or both?

    Maybe the state for big things (like the wire to the house, and no more of what I have to deal with, the "sewer line to the county sewer is your responsibility", etc.

    1634:

    Not to say the CO2 used in producing the concrete. In the UK, however, brick is still used for a great deal of housing, works well, and we have plenty of clay. Yes, it still needs energy to make.

    1635:

    Robert Prior @ 1602:

    Guy around the corner from me has banana trees. I don't think he's ever gonna' get any bananas (this is 35°N after all), but he's got the trees in his side garden.

    You can grow banana in Vancouver (49°) and the Gulf Islands, with the right microclimates. There was a chap on Bowen Island who grew bananas a couple of decades ago. (Don't know if he still does.)

    There's someone in Courtney on Vancouver Island (49.6°) who has a nice tree:

    https://forums.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/threads/bananas-in-deer-country.45663/

    Can you get FRUIT from them.

    I was responding to the word "amusing" in Moz's comment. This guy has banana trees in a garden where he's growing vegetables, but I don't think he expects those trees to produce fruit. Per the conversation we had when I asked him if those were really banana trees, the trees are just there to provide a reminder of home.

    That amused me.

    1636:

    Charlie Stross @ 1626:

    a Russian invasion of Ukraine might be just enough to give those in Sweden & Finland who want their countries to join NATO a convincing argument for doing so

    Sweden and Finland are traditionally neutrals -- in Sweden's case going back to 1812, in Finland's case, to 1955. Both of them punch significantly above their weight per capita in military terms: pushing them into NATO's arms would be an own goal for Russia.

    Exactly. That's one of the reasons I don't think Putin will pull an outright invasion of Ukraine. But that doesn't mean he won't continue to try bullying Ukraine (and other now independent former Soviet Republics).

    And I do expect he will continue to use the tactics underlying ongoing war in Donbas.

    I don't think there's any Machiavellian world-spanning plan behind Russia/Ukraine: it's just left-over business from the Russian empire (the Russian nationalists are butt-hurt over losing their oldest and richest subject territory outside Russia itself). A short victorious war is always a good way to rally nationalist support for a government with sagging popularity (as a result of Western sanctions). It's also a showcase for the shiny new Russian weapons available for sale to any dictator who can be easily impressed, and it grabs Russia a chunk of prime agricultural land and natural resources: the Donbas used to be the grain basket of the USSR. And there may be some "fire sale -- get it while it's available" sense that the USA, which kneecapped its foreign policy under Trump, might not be incapable of recovering its global hegemonic status if Biden is followed by a younger, more dynamic leader.

    Obviously there's also some ideological guff -- Russia is deeply socially and politically reactionary: Communism was just a drop-in quasi-religious replacement for Tsarism and the Orthodox church, and its ideological grip evaporated like the morning dew after 1991 -- so it's no surprise that Putin sees eye to eye with the likes of Steve Bannon or Nigel Farage, but that on its own isn't enough to motivate a war.

    I think bullying Ukraine may have a secondary message for OTHER former Soviet Republics that gained independence from the break-up of the Soviet Union. And for some disaffected parts of "Russia" that did not manage to obtain independence from the break-up.

    I had a thought last night about Putin's affinity for Trump. It's not just the hold the Russians had over Trump because of how much money he owes them. They're both men burdened with a "dream" they can never achieve.

    Trump wants the approval of his father. He ain't ever going to get it, but it is the driver behind all of his behavior. He's got do everything he can to prove he's not just as good as his father, but BETTER ... surpassing him in every way.

    Putin wants to be a Hero of the Soviet Union. How does he accomplish that if he can't reassemble the Soviet Union (without the soviets of course, but technically what's the difference between a fascist oligarchic dictatorship and a "communist" oligarchic dictatorship?)

    Maybe the fascists are cutting out more of the middlemen from the looting? It's more top down than the consensus building within the Politburo?

    1637:

    And are they Musa bajoo or Musa × paradisiaca, or what?

    1638:

    "But that doesn't mean he won't continue to try bullying Ukraine (and other now independent former Soviet Republics)."

    Yeah. I'd believe that Putin would like to reassemble the Soviet Union/Russian Empire/Hegemony in some form. And, for many of the former Union Republics, it might not that hard to do. Bullying might not be necessary in many cases, note Belarus and the 'stans. Kazakhstan kind of surprised me recently, but it's certainly something to consider.

    1639:

    But in our current environment in the USA way too many people don't believe in what you say needs to be done. And I suspect the same is true in the UK and Europe on general and to be honest on most of the planet.

    And much of our (and your) current political top management has come to the conclusion that they'd rather be in power by going along with "things could be great" if we ignore these crazy doom sayers than to speak much truth.

    The problem is that if they (politicians) speak too much truth they end up not in power and have no ability to do anything*.

    A secondary problem being that they need to raise money to get/stay in power (more so in the US than UK) so are beholden to donors more than electors:

    https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

    *Pierre Trudeau learned that a couple of generations ago when he admitted that taxes would need to be increased to fund everything the government did — the opposition insisted that taxes didn't need to increase, got elected, then promptly raised them more than Trudeau planned to.

    1640:

    Can you get FRUIT from them.

    I was told the chap growing bananas on Bowen Island got little ones. I didn't see them myself, and have no idea how to verify if indeed he did.

    1641:

    Alt-History Question for the hive mind here:

    Assume that a communist revolution breaks out in WWI Germany. This is a WWI that has an extraordinarily different start than what actually happened, so do not worry about the course of the real war. I'm assuming something vaguely akin to what happened in Russian in 1918 also happens in Germany somewhat before that.

    My question: who would be the likely communist leaders in that revolution? I assume it would involve the SPD. Would Friedrich Ebert likely be the leader of it? Or someone else? This is primarily a background question for an alt-history story I'm working on. I realized both that I'm abysmally clueless, and that other people here might not be.

    Feel free to pitch in if this is your kind of brew. Thanks in advance.

    1642:

    https://www.mitre10.com.au/yard-force-1800w-electric-lawn-mower-6599575

    Went and had a look at one. I decided that it didn't look completely terrible and for $170 I'm willing to give it a try. If it survives but I don't like it I expect my gf will take it as an upgrade to one of her Ozito mowers :)

    1643:

    On the crisis in Ukraine: a UChicago professor talking about why the crisis is the West's fault... and yeah, it's from '15, and nothing has changed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4

    1644:

    comfort and convenience get in the way

    It took a great deal of advertising to get people to accept that, though. And it's only very recently that cars have been advertised based on their typical use cases rather than something completely unrealistic. We're seeing a bit of "better for sitting stationary in traffic" and "you can wake up after snoozing on the motorway" which is a refreshing changed from "if you have enough money you can rent a scenic public road and drive however you like".

    Personally the "comfort and convenience" of not having to support a car is much more freeing than the knowledge that whenever I like I can jump in a stinking box and go admire some exhaust pipes while I drive around looking for cheap petrol.

    1645:

    Banananas are herbs, you can't get fruit from them. Berries yes, fruits no.

    1646:

    Better: the US does not come into WWI, and the already-happening soldiers' revolts succeed.

    https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-17-3-a-the-french-army-mutinies-of-world-war-i, and the German revolution, and let the Germans not wind up with Weimar.

    1647:

    Funny you should mention Earthship arcologies, I had an idea about that. My thinking was to replace concrete with a powder that could be various things such as dried earth,sand,flyash,biochar or powdered tyres or old plastic etc. This would be combined with a binder, I had in mind vinyl acetate ethylene, this would be in powder form and mixed with the previous powder and water. It could be shaped into blocks or used as concrete. Basically neo-adobe. My thinking was that the VAE would be produced in an environmentally friendly manner, ethylene can be produced from carbon dioxide,water and intermittent sunlight.

    https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.7b02110

    I experimented with PVA as a stand in for VAE that I hand to hand and dried earth. This was strong and waterproof in itself but VAE is a better option but only available in bulk. I presented to this to some people via Innocentive who were looking for something like this, bizarrely they rejected it as not waterproof despite VAE being used in waterproofing, not to mention my basic experiments. I never did anything else with it as I had already come down with ME, I feel some materials testing would be good but I don't have the energy or resources.

    As for arcologies, I had an idea based on bee hives and termite mounds. Particularly some kind of cell system to make up for the presumably weaker strength of the material and the cooling of and maybe shape of a termite mound. Perhaps shaped as a ziggurat as they were made of mud bricks. I don't if anyone has any thoughts on the workability of this idea, I am quite far from an expert.

    1649:

    I know of no context in which berries are not fruits, and can't find one in the OED.

    1650:

    There's quite a lot of work being done on different eco-concrete options, but a lot of them rely on fly ash from coal plants as the pozzolitic ingredient. Ideally that wouldn't be available either :)

    The more traditional pozzolites are volcanic, ideally fairly fresh, which is one reason why Roman concrete was so cool.

    Sustainable building is a bit of a balancing act between things that are easy to recycle/reuse and things that are easy to biodegrade.

    Rock and mud is readily available, for example, but not very insulating unless you put a lot of energy in (pumice and rockwool, baked clay bricks). Straw is brilliant, structural and insulating, but also a tasty snack for a whole range of things so you need to keep both water and creatures out of it... and it's not very insulating or structural compared to things that only do one of those, so walls tend to be quite thick. But it is very biodegradeable and production can be very sustainable.

    With big structures made of low-grade materials you need to look at the infill ratio - how much of the total volume is usable space, and how much is whatever it's made of. Pyramids are a classic case of "90% rock"... which means you need an awful lot of rock to make one dwelling, taking a lot of energy as well as a lot of land. Steel and concrete skyscrapers are more like 10% including foundations (which make excellent bunkers, BTW). Termites don't really care if their infill ratio is under 50%, there's lots of dirt and not a lot of termites.

    1651:

    According to Wikipedia, Marx and Engels were both actually German.

    1652:

    Banananas are herbs, you can't get fruit from them. Berries yes, fruits no.

    Yes, bananas are herbs.

    Yes, you can get fruit from them. A berry, botanically, is "a simple fruit with seeds and pulp produced from the ovary of a single flower." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry#Botanical_definition). That's a banana. Plenty of Musa species have seeds. The ones we're used to in cultivation have been bred to not produce seeds (as with navel oranges), but that doesn't make them not berries. The reason is that plenty of plants will form fruit even if the embryo (aka the seed) is non-viable, because the fruit is maternal tissue, not embryonic tissue.

    EC's absolutely right on this.

    1653:

    But in our current environment in the USA way too many people don't believe in what you say needs to be done.

    Even those who argue that the tough choices need to be made don't really get what the "need" is all about. Even in this thread, people who think they get it aren't really thinking that the continuation of civilisation hangs on the decisions made in the next ten years. They're really in their heart of hearts thinking that it's about having to rebuild some ports and change which country you're importing food from. That the tough decisions are about efficiency improvements and reducing carbon emissions to "acceptable" levels. Not zeroing them completely.

    1654:

    Better: the US does not come into WWI, and the already-happening soldiers' revolts succeed. https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-17-3-a-the-french-army-mutinies-of-world-war-i, and the German revolution, and let the Germans not wind up with Weimar.

    Could you repost the link? That one didn't work for some reason.

    Also, the process of Germany through Very Alt-WWI is unimportant to the story for reasons. The people who sit atop the rubble heap at the end are. That's what I'm trying to figure out.

    And, since this is 19-teens, Marx (1818-1883) and Engels (1820-1895) are out of the running. I'm trying to figure out who the communist leaders are in the 19-teens, which means they'd be in the 30-50 age range. Ebert's the obvious candidate, but I'm not clued in enough to know if he's the flotsam at the top of a wave or a serious player.

    1655:

    There's quite a lot of work being done on different eco-concrete options, but a lot of them rely on fly ash from coal plants as the pozzolitic ingredient. Ideally that wouldn't be available either :)

    The drywall industry is starting to have a slow building panic. Most (maybe just many) drywall plants world wide are next to coal plants with scrubbers. The output of the scrubbers is fed into the drywall plants.

    https://www.buildinggreen.com/primer/synthetic-gypsum

    Drywall = gypsum = gypboard = whatever it's called where you are.

    My son in law spent his first 5 years of his Chem E degree as a quality engineer in such a plant. They were starting to have issues with feed stock as the next door coal plant power plant was moving from continuous operation to more of an on demand setup. The coal plant recently bought themselves out of their commitment to the drywall plant.

    1657:

    I don't know if I can discuss another SF author on this site, but we have been talking about global warming.

    So has anybody else read KSR's "Ministry for the Future"?

    And is it possible to discuss without spoilers?

    1658:

    On second thought, discussion of major events in the story may get our host in hot water if someone were to mistake descriptions/discussions of theses actions for advocacy of these actions in the story.

    So let's forget about it.

    1660:

    Yeah, I'm sorry, I was just trying to use the "banananas are herbs" line.

    1661:

    Yeah, I'm sorry, I was just trying to use the "banananas are herbs" line.

    I think there's a bananana surprise out there somewhere.

    If you want to really wind up arborists, point out that banana plants are both herbs and trees. For the most part, they're not clued in enough to get it. And if you like this sort of thing, check out Musa ingens, which is the world's biggest bana(na...na) species.

    1662:

    Nah, OGH is pretty much already on all the available watch lists if you can get on them for posting ideas like that. We've had everything from discussing the utility of selectively killing powerful people right down to the nuts and bolts of how easy it is to make an automatic firearm.

    1663:

    A wind up arbourist does sound very useful, much easier than having to find a power point every time you need it working.

    1664:

    Yes, have read it. Optimistic (similar to Invisible Sun), in that it charts a hypothetical decent path forward. You mean the Children of Kali. As Moz says, many of us have opinions about such activities.

    1665:

    Thanks, that link works. (Reading about it) Oh Myyyy.

    1666:

    People who were of note and were mostly murdered during the chaos of the early Weimar republic days include Rosa Luxemburg, Kurt Eisner, and Ernst Toller. Information on the Bavarian Soviet Republic may also give you some ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian\_Soviet\_Republic .

    [[ markup fix - mod ]]

    1667:

    FWIW, that (which was originally or maybe also a piece in Foreign Affairs), has a response in Foreign Affairs, that I haven't managed to find unpaywalled yet: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/eastern-europe-caucasus/2014-10-17/faulty-powers

    It's also incorrect to say that nothing has changed in Ukraine (and in Russia) since then. (E.g. elections, with transfer of power, in 2019. Wikipedia has detailed articles on elections in Ukraine.)

    1668:

    Sigh. Make that 'all were murdered' and the link is Bavarian Soviet Republic (or Räterepublik in German).

    1669:

    Actually (3rd time correct) Ernst Toller survived, wrote a book, and committed suicide.

    1670:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1640: And are they Musa bajoo or Musa × paradisiaca, or what?

    They're "Musa whatever-it-is" trees that bananas grow on where ever he considers "home". He didn't volunteer where that was and I didn't ask.

    1671:

    Did you miss the movie? Of course you may not have been born in 1953.

    Dimple chin was the star. A French officer who was on the side of the refusing troops.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paths\_of\_Glory

    (I was only 3 when it came out. I saw it later on TV.)

    [[ markup fix - mod ]]

    1672:

    Kardashev @ 1641:

    "But that doesn't mean he won't continue to try bullying Ukraine (and other now independent former Soviet Republics)."

    Yeah. I'd believe that Putin would like to reassemble the Soviet Union/Russian Empire/Hegemony in some form. And, for many of the former Union Republics, it might not that hard to do. Bullying might not be necessary in many cases, note Belarus and the 'stans. Kazakhstan kind of surprised me recently, but it's certainly something to consider.

    I guess some people think they had it better in the old days. At least some of the "leaders" do.

    And if Belarus would welcome the return of the Soviet Union, what do you think Lithuania or Poland would think? What if Putin demanded an overland corridor to Kalingrad? After all, is access to the Baltic any less important than access to the Black Sea?

    1673:

    Heteromeles @ 1655:

    Banananas are herbs, you can't get fruit from them. Berries yes, fruits no.

    Yes, bananas are herbs.

    Yes, you can get fruit from them. A berry, botanically, is "a simple fruit with seeds and pulp produced from the ovary of a single flower." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry#Botanical_definition). That's a banana. Plenty of Musa species have seeds. The ones we're used to in cultivation have been bred to not produce seeds (as with navel oranges), but that doesn't make them not berries. The reason is that plenty of plants will form fruit even if the embryo (aka the seed) is non-viable, because the fruit is maternal tissue, not embryonic tissue.

    EC's absolutely right on this.

    Ok, so IF I'm a locavore with a hankering for banana splits, is Vancouver the place I should move to? ... or should I perhaps consider some other location?

    I for damn sure ain't gonna' satisfy my cravings with locally grown bananas from Raleigh.

    1674:

    Duffy @ 1660: I don't know if I can discuss another SF author on this site, but we have been talking about global warming.

    So has anybody else read KSR's "Ministry for the Future"?

    And is it possible to discuss without spoilers?

    Interesting. I got a recommendation for that book just this morning from another source.

    1675:

    IF I'm a locavore with a hankering for banana splits, is Vancouver...

    If you're willing to run a greenhouse year round to keep it alive you just need somewhere that has enough sun to power your solar concentrator.

    Put it this way, in Sydney banana-na-do-doo-de-doodo trees are a bit hit'n'miss. Some years banas, some years not. The years where we get a series of days over 40°C (180°F) and solid sunshine it's likely you'll get a decent crop, years like this where there's lots of rain and cloudy days you just have a pretty palm-like tree to look at.

    My recollection of Vancouver says you'd have to have a 5m+ tall (27') greenhouse and you'd want a couple of decent mirrors adding sunlight to it in the summer. Coz Vancouver at 40°C (230°F) just doesn't seem likely. Unless it's on fire!

    1676:

    Ok, so IF I'm a locavore with a hankering for banana splits, is Vancouver the place I should move to? ... or should I perhaps consider some other location?

    Vancouver has an excellent foodie scene, but you should consider elsewhere.

    For starters, it's right on the Ring of Fire and overdue for a big quake. Add in housing prices are outrageous, even if all you want is a shoebox-in-the-sky, so unless you have a lot of cash you're either not in Vancouver or living in considerably smaller digs than you're used to.

    And if banana trees fruit there (or elsewhere in BC) they aren't a major crop.

    Finally, Vancouver is pretty left-wing by Canadian standards. Sufficiently so that OSC would be a centrist-to-right politician there. I suspect Vancouver politics might not be good for your blood pressure. :-)

    (OTOH, BC public health does a pretty good job of looking after people, so you'd get treatment…)

    1677:

    IF I'm a locavore with a hankering for banana splits, is Vancouver the place I should move to?

    Florida might be a bit closer than Vancouver...

    1678:

    The years where we get a series of days over 40°C (180°F) and solid sunshine

    Impressive. I'm assuming the 40C is the correct number????

    1679:

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

    Worth going to the controversy section of the article. Apparently more than one European country got in a snit over it for years and/or decades. Plus the US military for while.

    1680:

    If you're willing to run a greenhouse year round to keep it alive you just need somewhere that has enough sun to power your solar concentrator.

    When I was a boy, the Civic Conservatory (attached to the Mendel Art Gallery) in Saskatoon had banana trees that had bananas growing on them, in the middle of a Prairie winter (so -30C nights, -20C days).

    1681:

    I also converted it to 230 Fahrenheits further down, so yes, Celcius values are original.

    1682:

    Wow! There are a few bananananana trees around that I see in my travels, but the people I've talked to who grow them have all said they fruit fairly randomly. Mind you, the guys who knew about it when we were digging the hole for one in the community food forest said they also like very fertile soil. So just dropping one in the ground and not adding compost might also be why some banana trees never berry. Fruit. Whatever :)

    OTOH I have ridden past banana farms (herberies? hatcheries?) and seen just masses and masses of trees all growing intermingled and since that's where Australia's banananana's* come from I assume it works** for them.

    • a greengrocer's apos'trophe becomes mandatory at some point ** also, uuhy can't uue replace a double-u with a double u?
    1683:

    A neighbour (I’m mid-Vancouver island) grows banananananas indoors. We’re talking ‘indoors ‘ as in an upstairs room where part of the roof is glazed with two layers of poly-tunnel plastic. So, not exactly high tech or high insulation grade. She got a good crop a couple of years ago.

    1684:

    Actually (3rd time correct) Ernst Toller survived, wrote a book, and committed suicide.

    Thank you! That's just what I wanted.

    1685:

    1666 - Yes, but is an arbourist an essential item or just a luxury anyway? ;-)

    1685 - Isn't that apo'strophe? ;-)

    Also some of us are not interested in bananananananananas, because too much electrolyte.

    1686:

    If you actually want to eat bananas, Florida will win over Vancouver, too :-)

    1687:

    Like a lot of other terms, grandfather clause has changed meaning. Please don't overdo "offensive" like a certain movement...

    1688:

    You can do what has been done in Britain for centuries, at least. Build a stone, brick or whatever house, put studding on the inside, cover it with cladding, possibly fill it, and it insulates well. A second layer would be possible. Traditionally, the cladding was lath and plaster, and any filling shoddy or straw, but nowadays it is plasterboard and glass fibre.

    1689:

    OK What, or who is next? .. {Fascism in Tennessee}

    1690:

    Straw is brilliant, structural and insulating, but also a tasty snack for a whole range of things so you need to keep both water and creatures out of it... and it's not very insulating or structural compared to things that only do one of those, so walls tend to be quite thick. But it is very biodegradeable and production can be very sustainable.

    We have straw for our internal walls, instead of plasterboard. It is indeed pretty good at heat and sound insulation. What the walls comprise are wooden frames, and between the joists highly compressed straw with a thin plaster skim over the top. The panels are basically the same size as the common plasterboard and frame types, but without the gypsum.

    They're also much nicer to nail stuff to.

    We only found this out, by the way, when trying to insert a new socket. The usual "drill a large hole, and then saw a rectangular hole" didn't work.

    1691:

    And yes, this, or variations for wood or "dry wall", is normal practice for positioning an extra socket in the UK.

    1692:

    And, since this is 19-teens, Marx (1818-1883) and Engels (1820-1895) are out of the running. I'm trying to figure out who the communist leaders are in the 19-teens, which means they'd be in the 30-50 age range. Ebert's the obvious candidate, but I'm not clued in enough to know if he's the flotsam at the top of a wave or a serious player.

    Obviously the leaders of the Berlin Commune will be Lenin and Trotsky. (Possibly with Fritz Lang as head of communications.)

    Consider that both Lenin and Trotsky were in exile in Vienna before WW1, having been chased out of Russia by the Okhrana. They were both internationalist revolutionaries, Trotsky more than Lenin -- we tend to forget this today because Stalin was very emphatically a Russia-first revolutionary and he overshadows them after 1926, but in this counterfactual we can kiss goodbye to the 1917 October Revolution.

    Remember also that it was the German high command who shipped Lenin to St Petersburg in a sealed wagon in 1917. He was in exile in the Central Powers during the war, right?

    Finally, the big split on the left in 1914 was between the Social Democrats, who put nation ahead of class solidarity, and the Socialists/Communists, who put worker solidarity ahead of nationalism. Lenin and Trotsky were certainly on the internationalist/socialist side of the chasm, along with Liebknecht and Luxemburg.

    So it's hard to see a German communist revolution circa 1916-1918 in which Lenin and Trotsky weren't directly involved.

    1693:

    The only use I personally make of any of the bizarrely lethal topics discussed on this blog is in fiction. And I'm pretty sure that if I'm ever investigated for "possessing information of use in the commission of terrorist acts" (yes, that's a crime in the UK) any competent lawyer will be able to make short shrift of the charges by pointing to my back catalog ... assuming the police don't roll their eyes and drop the investigation before it gets as far as a referral to the procurator fiscal.

    (Put it this way: you don't see the police prosecuting the writers on "Line of Duty", and the stuff they come up with is far more plausible than the Laundry Files.)

    1694:

    Unless TPTB decided the Laundry Files were getting too close to things that were Ultimately Secret, and decided to use the various anti-terrorist laws to try you and convict you in secret with a 'defence' lawyer of their choosing and 'evidence' that is not disclosed to you :-)

    If I remove my tinfoil hat for a moment, while that is technically possible at present, it isn't plausible. It's obscene that such powers exist, of course, let alone are used. As far as I know, the Westminster/Whitehall cabal has not yet attempted to use such powers in Scotland, ignoring Scottish law, which would lead to an 'interesting' legal conflict.

    1695:

    What if Putin demanded an overland corridor to Kalingrad? After all, is access to the Baltic any less important than access to the Black Sea?

    They already have a fine naval port at St. Petersburg1, they don't need one in Kalinigrad too

    1Well, on Kotlin Island, but you have to go past it if you're inbound by ship to St. Petersburg.

    1696:

    I was thinking about Lenin and Trotsky as well. These are excellent points!

    Aside from plotting issues (the biggest one being this is a background detail in a story set elsewhere), let's think about this.

    Many of you are more historically and politically sophisticated than I am. So if I wrote an alt-history wherein Chairman Trotsky (nee Bronstein) became the leader of the Vereinigte Räterepubliken Deutschland*, would you buy it? It has a certain Cohen the Revolutionary Conan the Barbarian as King of Aquilonia quality to it, which is good. On the tricky side, I'd be asking you to believe that a Ukrainian would be chosen to lead the land of Marx and Engels, that a Marxist state of permanent revolution would be a viable way to rebuild after a lost war, and (very sadly) that Germany could be purged of anti-Semitism so rapidly.

    Would it work? Or is someone like Karl Liebknecht more viable?

    *apologies to Runix and other German speakers! I am a clueless Google user!

    1697:

    Though a little research tells me that the Baltic Fleet may indeed be stationed at Kalinigrad. Which makes me think that the ships at Kotlin are a subsidiary force

    1698:

    Unless TPTB decided the Laundry Files were getting too close to things that were Ultimately Secret,

    https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/01/25/apples-airtag-uncovers-a-secret-german-intelligence-agency

    Is this one of those "everyone running with too few facts" or a real thing? Hard to tell from this distance. I figure the European news might make more sense.

    1699:

    Following up from my # 1692 Polish Government commits triple murder - I wonder what the Polish RC hierarchy's take is on this disgusting behaviour?
    I also wonder if "Private Prosecutions" are legal/available in Poland?

    1700:

    It's obscene that such powers exist, of course, let alone are used.

    See also: FISA courts in the USA. I'm pretty sure every nation-state of any size has such a mechanism in place for use in situations of extreme jeopardy (and not-so-extreme in the more corrupt despotisms).

    Our best defense is that unless you're already part of the secret state -- in which case, you're not supposed to be talking about this stuff in public -- using such powers would be a huge own goal: I mean, if novelists or journalists start disappearing, someone's going to kick up a fuss eventually and thereby draw attention to whatever's being covered up.

    1701:

    The Polish RC hierarchy are probably wincing: this is a picture-perfect re-run of the death of Salvita Halappanavar, which led directly to the constitutional amendment to legalize abortion in Ireland.

    Poland has a Tory-esque government at present who are trying to rig the courts and who passed a law banning all abortions -- but they're also getting grief from the EU, now: as I understand it, the only reason PiS are running the government is that the left opposition are split down the middle. PiS's electoral base are elderly and predominantly rural, younger Poles want nothing to do with this crap, so fixing it is probably just a matter of time.

    1702:

    This idea does not require flyash or any pozzolitic agent, it does not work like conventional cement ie with a chemical reaction, it is a higher tec adobe.

    I do not know about the biodegradability of this, another thing that needs testing. It could be recycled by just powdering it again and reusing.

    As for insulation I was wondering if it could be foamed with a foaming agent, to produce an equivalent to foamed concrete. I have not been able to test this.

    The question of how much is usable space and how much is building material is I suppose only a problem if the VAE is limited or expensive, because the rest is cheap. Also it was why I was looking at a cell structure to strengthen it. But ultimately building arcologies of it depends on material testing to ascertain its strength etc. I am pretty sure it can be used for smaller projects as adobe has been, but this is stronger and waterproof. For those projects the question is probably expense. I do not know how it would compare because I do not know how much VAE would be needed, though it is less than $2 per kilo wholesale. That is a lot more than cement, but I do not know enough about mixing ratios etc. Also I do not know the ratio of vinyl acetate to ethylene that will be needed. More testing needed.

    1703:

    They have already been used against (usually? always?) Muslims, to allow secret 'intelligence' to pass unchallenged in the courts, whether obtained by torture or even just plain invented. Yes, well-known journalists and novelists are safe at present, which is why I said it was implausible. I don't know how often it has been used so far, but have read about several cases. No, I shan't misquote Niemoeller, but he is very much in my mind.

    https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/secret-courts-8-nightmare-scenarios-now-possible-in-britain-0/

    https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/18/contents

    https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/1482/contents/made

    1704:

    Concrete, especially Roman unreinforced concrete, is good stuff, as demonstrated by the Pantheon. What people forget about the Pantheon is that it was built by an emperor-architect (so he got the highest quality materials available), it was built within a 200 year-plus tradition of building with concrete, and it was unreinforced.

    In contrast, our use of concrete is ca. 150 years old, so we're only now learning things the Romans learned well before they built their greatest structures. Roman concrete is largely a lost art that we are rediscovering, and our ignorance keeps biting us. Also, the Romans lucked out with Pozzolan because it's really good. Things like fly ash aren't so good, as we're now learning. And the Romans didn't reinforce their concrete. As it turns out, the interaction between the reinforcements and the concrete is what often shortens structural life.

    This wasn't a diversion, but a point about building materials. In our society, we tend to turn to the Hot New Thing, and for good reason. With novel building materials, that generally means we don't really understand how they'll hold up in the long run, or what all their failure modes are. While I agree that currently insoluble problems demand novel solutions, our track record to date suggests that novel solutions breed their own problems, and these are sometimes worse than the original problems they solved.

    This is also a reason why I pay attention to old materials. While they are generally quite limited (cf the lack of Roman skyscrapers), they do have the advantage of a track record that's on the scale of the lifespan we need out of what we're building now. And to me, at least, that's important.

    1705:

    “My question: who would be the likely communist leaders in that revolution? I assume it would involve the SPD. Would Friedrich Ebert likely be the leader of it? Or someone else?”

    Wiki Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, prominent Marxist theoreticians and leaders of the German Socialists, both died in the 1930s so time wise no conflict. Kautsky got branded as “the renegade” by Lenin for criticizing Bolshevik excesses. Bernstein was closer to British Fabian socialists in his emphasis on gradual str3ngthening of the workers themselves through social and political organization outside of party structure, lots of health education and welfare type focus.German socialism was influential in the U.S. via activists like Pulitzer in New York, Altgeld in Illinois and of course the Milwaukee “sewer” socialists who actually ran the city for decades.

    1706:

    FDR’s New Dealers also borrowed heavily from Milwaukee economic programs that were tried, developed and successfully adapted from German practice to local conditions, so that proof of concept was already worked out and ready for nationwide rollout when th3 necessity arose.

    1707:

    "he Baltic Fleet may indeed be stationed at Kalinigrad"

    Yes, at Baltiysk, formerly Pillau back when Kaliningrad was Königsberg. 54.64N 19.91E

    1708:

    Ah, but I just checked, and they shipped Lenin east in March of '17.

    Then, too, IIRC, Trotsky was very internationalist.

    I'm also remembering things my father said, and that I've read elsewhere, that the real reason the the US entered WWI when it did was that People Who Matter were terrified of the Russian Revolution, and had seen the troop mutinies, and were even more terrified that the tide of socialist revolution would spread across Europe.

    I see the Russian revolution proceeding with some changes (Trotsky in Germany, although possibly trying to help the Russian soviets.) Then there's the question of what happens in France, while all that's happening eastwards.

    He could have Rosa Luxemburg wind up as Director of Communications (no, she wouldn't change her name to Mrs. Burgeson.... )

    1709:

    Charlie @ 1704
    Precisely.
    However, by 2012, "Catholic Power" in Ireland was already waning, it only needed one really good push. I get the impression that, in Poland, the politicians are still pushing the old, reactionary, shit-on-women line, never mind what that church & the public think. However, IIRC their "ant-abortion law was pushed through against much opposition.
    Will the Polish semi-fascists double down or will they be forced to concede? They are (presently) considerably worse than our tories, especially on "social issues", though. Will the Tennessee actual fascists double down or will they be forced to concede?

    1710:

    You realize, of course, that the Real Laundry is counting on exactly that viewpoint?

    1711:

    You want them to last? But that's... that's... unAmerican! It all needs to be easily ripped down and replaced in 30 years....

    1712:

    Oh, I forgot to add, "won't anyone think of the children, er, I mean, profits?"

    1713:

    I see the Russian revolution proceeding with some changes (Trotsky in Germany, although possibly trying to help the Russian soviets.) Then there's the question of what happens in France, while all that's happening eastwards.

    Which Russian revolution?

    Lenin is on the record as having said that he had flu in October '17 and wouldn't have gone ahead with his coup without Trotsky's encouragement.

    The situation in St Petersburg in October 1917 was very fluid and unpredictable -- lots of factions in play as Kerensky's government collapsed. Without both Lenin and Trotsky the shape of the next government would have been very different, and probably not bolshevik/menshevik led.

    1714:

    Here's a transcript of that Tennessee (local town) school board meeting. It's raw Americana, no caricatures. McMinn County Board of Education Called Meeting, January 10, 2022, 5:30 p.m.

    At least some members appear (from the transcript) to be more concerned about preventing kids from learning "curse words" in school than about kids learning about genocide at an emotional level. (Maybe one or more are actual fascists using language concerns/etc as a cover; not clear from the transcript.)

    1715:

    Fascism in Tennessee

    For well over 100 years there has been a tension in the US over purely local control of schools and state and national standards.

    Which is one reason we have so many smallish school districts. It allows locals to feel more in control. (There are many but this is one.) Many home based churches have the same issue. They can never grow as the people involved have figured out THEY HAVE THE ONE TRUE ANSWER than the institutional church has lost sight of. But as they grow from a single or few families to a few more they discover a point of conflict and split.

    Your UK based news org picked up one of these stories and ran with it. There are likely 100 or more of these things going on at any one time in the US. Smallish school systems have board members who really don't know the state and federal laws and allow themselves or a parent to get all riled up about such things. And after a few news cycles it goes away. Typically the school library puts the book or books behind the counter for a while and a student has to ask for it. Then at some point it goes back on the shelves.

    1716:

    Bill Arnold
    I've seen an edited transcript. To me, at least ... all the "concerns" about the "poor little delicate children" are a smear-cover.
    It stinks.

    1717:

    Most all of these debates come down to "I/WE KNOW WHAT IS BEST FOR ALL KIDS, NOT JUST MINE". On all sides.

    I'll point to your utter disdain for team sports and calls for them to be abolished as an example.

    Human society is varied and complicated. And nobody has the single best way to raise kids from 0 to 20. But a lot of people think they do.

    Hint: People are not identical clones.

    1718:

    It depends how far you let the war drag on before we get to your point of divergence. The susceptibility of Germany to revolution increased as the war went on, as the population got hungrier and hungrier in pursuit of an end that seemed ever more pointless, got a significant boost from seeing Russia succeed in having a communist revolution, and reached a maximum at its actual point of termination. Actual defeat and the end of the state of war put the kybosh on what remained of the population's perception of the existing government's right to authority among all but the most immovably fanatical, and the insistence of the victors that the Kaiser had to go before the armistice could take place left them without the core of their structure. In the scramble to establish a replacement power structure Germany was closer to revolution than at any point during the war, and indeed it came within an inch of actually happening; if you are postulating major effects from a minimally different fall of the historical dice, then that's the point where the fall required is least different and the divergence most plausible.

    Whenever it happened it would pretty much have to be Liebknecht or one of the other Spartacists who would be the main player (depending whether Liebknecht himself was in prison at the chosen time or not). After all they were the established representatives of communism in German politics; they had the public recognition and they "knew the ropes". And they had a bloody good go as it was. It's rather less than plausible that the missing ingredient that denied them success should turn out to be the involvement of an outsider to German politics who we now see as an international megastar from what he did in Russia but who was not one back then; it sounds like the kind of thing Hollywood might come up with to suit a public who know the names of Lenin and Trotsky but have never heard of Liebknecht and don't know much more about the period than "WW1 and the Russian revolution happened".

    It's also kind of tough to imagine how they could have ended up getting involved. After all the Germans knew fine that Lenin was a bit of a live wire, which is why they inoculated him into Russia; if he had started involving himself at all noticeably with fomenting revolution in Germany he'd have been banged up before his feet could touch the ground (as happened to Liebknecht and other Spartacists, of course).

    Not directly relevant, but having the Spartacists pull off a revolution also gives you opportunities for female characters as major players which you don't otherwise get.

    1719:

    Thank you for the link about Ullfrotte - I have just bought some and they definitely ARE heavier than my previous ones, and should work better.

    1720:

    Why am I thinking of Franz Kafka? ;-)

    1721:

    This is an update to an old material, it's adobe plus. That's what made me think it was good idea!

    EC #1722: no problem, glad to help. I've spent about 20 years working outside, I know good gear helps. I would also recommend Sealskinz. I have waterproof hat,gloves and socks from them. All work well, but the socks and gloves wear out more quickly, the hat is still going strong.

    1722:

    "At least some members appear (from the transcript) to be more concerned about preventing kids from learning "curse words" in school"

    Some people really do seem to have a staggering lack of any kind of memory of their own childhood - either that or they spent the whole time in an isolation tank and emerged as fully formed adults.

    It would have to be a bloody odd school for anything in any of the official books to be anywhere near as rude as the kind of conversations kids have among themselves. We learnt all our rude words from other kids, and the only way to stop us learning them would have been to deprive us of all social contact. On the distinctly rare occasions when we did come across one in a book, it wasn't a learning experience, it was something to giggle at because we already knew the word.

    1723:

    It depends how far you let the war drag on before we get to your point of divergence.

    Since I already mentioned the notion, I'm working on a series of stories set in what I'm calling the Lincoln/Albert/Frederick Continuum. These three leaders (Abraham Lincoln, Prince Albert, and Emperor Frederick III) did not die untimely deaths in the late 19th Century, but lived full and all-too-active political lives. The timeline diverges in 1861-ish, and it is primarily focused on the 20th Century in an America where Lincoln and his successors pulled off Reconstruction.*

    What I'm thinking of as World War I doesn't start in July 1914 and doesn't end in November 1918. It does, however, involve issues I think contributed to the Great War: arrogant, colonial empires locking antlers to determine dominance, using weapons, tactics, and strategies whose ramifications they didn't fully understand, powered by technological advances (coal, oil, cheap nitrates) that made war considerably more powerful and explosive, and working from an ideology that saw "the common man" as cannon fodder for the elites.

    This version of the Great War does have revolutions that involve communists. It's possible, if I actually write enough in the saga I'm imagining, that the communists could become important later on, which is why I'd like a bit of detail to minimize my future workload. In the story I'm plotting now, they're details.

    *The more I read about the Reconstruction era, the more I see that the Right Wing is currently recycling quite a bit of the bullshit they used successfully back then. That's in case you want to understand the emotions that are driving this intellectual exercise. Imagine if we'd managed to deal with this mess when it first arose, not a century and more on....

    1724:

    David L
    My deep & utter loathing & fear ( Let's get this right, shall we? ) for "Team Spurts" does nothing to stop those who voluntarily want to do them, from doing them. They can do it all they want, just don't drag me into it.
    You, OTOH seem, or are actually to be approving of political censorship of books ... in an area known for primitivism & fascism.
    How nice.

    1725:

    I would strongly recommend reading The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman. It discusses, in expansive detail, what led up to the war.

    And if you do write it, and there is a Russian Revolution (that was coming, without a doubt)... could you maybe have a young Stalin as a martyr to the cause... and NEVER, EVER IN CONTROL?

    1726:

    It would have to be a bloody odd school for anything in any of the official books to be anywhere near as rude as the kind of conversations kids have among themselves.

    I remember when South Park started, and a lot of evangelicals got their knickers in a twist about the kids' language. At first I thought they had never been near a playground at recess, but I now wonder if they homeschooled (and controlled) their children such that they actually weren't exposed.

    (Although if that was the case, they should have been able to ban their kids watching South Park, so it was probably the high of something to be indignant about that motivated them.)

    1727:

    And if you do write it, and there is a Russian Revolution (that was coming, without a doubt)... could you maybe have a young Stalin as a martyr to the cause... and NEVER, EVER IN CONTROL?

    And Hitler goes on to a successful art career after an uneventful stint in the army. Yes.

    That's part of what I'm wrestling with here: do communist revolutions have to end up in authoritarian dictatorships or not? This does actually get into my thinking about how Restoration could have worked, and what this means for communism and socialism.

    The easy way out is to go with history, where communist states seem to have a really high probability of going dictatorial. But that would seem to imply that Reconstruction (and true integration of American society) is unachievable, which I don't buy. So it's worth thinking about.

    1728:

    Forgot to mention, I've read part of the Proud Tower, and I quite agree. There are a lot of good books out there, and I've got a lot of ignorance to fill. Fortunately(?) a fair amount of it seems relevant today.

    1729:

    This is an update to an old material, it's adobe plus. That's what made me think it was good idea!

    Yeah, it could be. Since earthships are ideally built with trash, including things like bottle walls for light and 400-pound tires filled with rammed earth, it's also worth looking at what they're doing. Again, it's important to realize that their results are limited both in time and in size scale. That said, I don't think anyone's figured out how big an earthship you can actually make using their materials. Rammed earth AFAIK can be used to build reasonably large pyramids, so I wonder what adding regular structures like tires to such walls does for physical properties and durability.

    1730:

    I strongly doubt that they always wind up that way. For one... we're talking about human beings. For another... remember, Marx expected it in places like Germany - industrialized countries with democratic traditions, not in 90% rural agricultural countries with dictatorial monarchies.

    1731:

    Hitler or Stalin could easily have fallen on the other side of history as well. People at the far ends of ideology more often switch between extremes than drift to the center.

    It would be a difficult thing to write, and fraught with hazard. But I can easily see Hitler getting sent to spy on some communists instead of some fascists, and getting swept up with their extremes. His anger would still have found an outlet, and even if he didn't end up as 'the leader' I could easily see him as a fanatical operator.

    Sadly, writing that would be utterly rife with landmines and all to close to the bogus 'Nazis were socialists' fud currently pumped out by the extreme right.

    1733:

    Quite large buildings (not just pyramids) can be made from mid brick and adobe, but they're quite high maintenance.

    https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190801-the-massive-mosque-built-once-a-year

    1734:
    and working from an ideology that saw "the common man" as cannon fodder for the elites.

    ... And yet, in the British Army, the highest casualty rate was amongst junior officers.

    There's a lovely stained glass window in my old Parish Church put up by the Bishop of Exeter in remembrance of all three of his sons dying.

    And then there's Kipling's son.

    The same problem occurred in WW2 where the heir to Chatsworth House died in Normandy in 1944.

    1735:

    To be very clear: my little part of this conversation does not deal with Hitler or Stalin.

    FWIW, I get what Spinrad's doing, but I take away the opposite lesson from history. A wide variety of (would-be) authoritarian leaders, including Hitler, Wilhelm II, Bojo, IQ-45, etc. are, by most standards, effing jokes in terms of leadership skills. They just inspire rabid, if transient, loyalty and destroy a lot of lives. I'm beginning to think the effing joke part is a feature, not an accident, especially when we're talking about someone who's shining most brightly in the fascist part of the authoritarian spectrum.

    That said, many people are similarly effing jokes who nonetheless don't get followers and don't become great monsters. I tend to think that the Hitlers and dyed blond idiots are basically Black Swans, random accidents of our particular history, so they can be written out of an alt-history without consequence.

    If so, perhaps an equally good takeaway is to sorrow at how much our history has been shaped by incompetent and monstrous black swans, and wonder what it would have been like if none of those particularly ugly ducklings had fledged.

    1736:

    and working from an ideology that saw "the common man" as cannon fodder for the elites.... And yet, in the British Army, the highest casualty rate was amongst junior officers.

    That's a perfectly fair response.

    What I was pointing to there was an underlying cause of communism, which is (to not use their language) that one of the big problems in society is that elites have all the power and most people do not. They want to do away with the elites.

    I happen to agree with your point, that the elites are human and suffer too. What we can argue about is whether the suffering of elites is what gives them the right to their power or not. That gets considerably more tricky, but it's a critical point.

    1737:

    Oh, agreed. The reason I was thinking of a pyramid was because earthships tend to have sun-facing walls for a greenhouse function. If you want to scale that up to an arcology, it's hard not to make it a pyramid of some sort, especially if you're using found materials and rammed earth.

    Oh, and by pyramid, I tend to think more of what the Maya did (step pyramids of various complexities), not the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

    1738:

    Robert Prior @ 1679:

    Ok, so IF I'm a locavore with a hankering for banana splits, is Vancouver the place I should move to? ... or should I perhaps consider some other location?

    Vancouver has an excellent foodie scene, but you should consider elsewhere.

    For starters, it's right on the Ring of Fire and overdue for a big quake. Add in housing prices are outrageous, even if all you want is a shoebox-in-the-sky, so unless you have a lot of cash you're either not in Vancouver or living in considerably smaller digs than you're used to.

    And if banana trees fruit there (or elsewhere in BC) they aren't a major crop.

    Finally, Vancouver is pretty left-wing by Canadian standards. Sufficiently so that OSC would be a centrist-to-right politician there. I suspect Vancouver politics might not be good for your blood pressure. :-)

    I'm not sure who "OSC" is, but I consider my politics to be somewhat leftish. Most on the right probably would consider me a flaming socialist, so if the MAGAts haven't given me a stroke yet, my blood pressure can probably stand anything the local lefties could throw at me.

    (OTOH, BC public health does a pretty good job of looking after people, so you'd get treatment…)

    OTOH, I'm one of the lucky few here in the U.S. who already has the benefit of socialized medicine ... from the VA.

    1739:

    Sorry, that's a nope. Hitler was not spy materiel. Let's ignore the fantasy of James Bond, real spies are someone you can't remember five minutes later. I am strongly given to understand he was a brilliant speaker (unlike no-speech-without-how-wonderful-I-am IQ45), and a leader type.

    1740:

    Actually, we're just being nice / fluffy. Here's a link to the Denmark stuff:

    https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/danske-boernehjemsboern-brugt-i-hemmelig-undersoegelse-stoettet-af-cia

    If you want a very simple USA translation, here: https://thedissenter.org/cia-funded-experiments-on-danish-orphans-for-decades/

    So, yeah: that was the public facing stuff. Why-oh-why (apart from the centralized Medical Data) they'd choose Denmark is a .... mystery.

    The interesting thing to note is that the stuff they piped into the Little Weens Brains is strikingly similar to modern "Paranoid Schizophrenia" delusions (Western, Anglo-sphere, but also wider EU).

    And those videos? 100% Genuine patients, the point of linking them was to show you just how damaged the people doing the testing were not the subjects.

    All we're saying is: this shit was modelled on 20th C Minds, it don't work on narly stuff like us.

    ~

    Oh, and a freebie: the people running the software that scrambles words and our reference to Arabic certainly caused a couple of Santa's Little Elves to come visit: "Anguish". Or perhaps you'd like the put-down: "I don't care if you fuck like werewolves as long as it's concentual / consensual" [Note: "Is it Acting?" is probably not something to ask when your knowledge of "What Maisie Knew"[1] is actually a meta-test of if you're actually as "English Speaking" as your Avatars are pretending (spoilers: old skool Ones, actually being allowed sex drew a genuine moment of emotion from the Crowd as they kissed, after an eternity). Aww, Heart of Glass stuff.]

    We've a lot more links from this week: the cut meta-meta-meta joke is, of course: 100,000 divided by 10 is not 0.01%, it's 0.0001% and your scientists really don't grokk quite what happened yet, as we're fucking with you:

    Tonga volcano eruption created puzzling ripples in Earth’s atmosphere

    “It’s really unique. We have never seen anything like this in the data before,” says Lars Hoffmann, an atmospheric scientist at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00127-1

    It means even your Models can't keep up.

    ~

    And as for Havanna Syndrome (note the Time/Date then CIA official denail a little bit later), yes, it's more than possible. At least three four ways. Your best of the best only have access to two at the moment though.

    "Hear, hear!"

    I guess someone really does to English Irony, after all then.

    ~

    Hint: Kiwiwwwwfaaarms stuff is baby-baby stuff. "Anguish" = (say it / hear it) "Not a Human Conscious Uttering Said Things".

    p.s.

    Every got the Wordle joke too late: the word of the day linked was "PANIC". Every Game You Play Online is an A/B Test for Someone, or Something.

    [1] https://www.bookfrom.net/henry-james/39330-what_maisie_knew_henry_james_collection.html

    1741:

    First para of first post is plainly dangerously insane, incidentally

    You have far too much faith in your system to not notice we're mirroring reality and what your side did in the Cold War, Mr Man.

    Stroke Me Marrows, you can't be that naive.

    1742:

    Heteromeles @ 1680:

    IF I'm a locavore with a hankering for banana splits, is Vancouver the place I should move to?

    Florida might be a bit closer than Vancouver...

    Fortunately for me, although I do like to buy FRESH local foods when they're available, I'm not a fanatic locavore, so IF I get a hankering for banana splits I can just hit up the Baskin-Robbins a couple of miles up the road from my house.

    And all of the local grocery chains (even the one I won't patronize because they tried to fuck me over) have bananas ... So if the guy around the corner never has any on his trees, there still ain't gonna' be a shortage of bananas here in Raleigh.

    1743:

    Oh, and a free-bee that you'd probably want to pay attention to:

    One of the #1 RW talking/radicalisation/"black pill" points is Culture and Infantalization and Children.

    You deal with it, or you get Maus on Steroids mixed with Devils and Pizzagate[1] and QAnon in a culture burst you can't stop.

    This may relate to the KUBARK manual, given the document discusses how, when its assorted techniques are applied, “the usual effect…is regression,” and a subject’s “mature defenses crumbles [sic] as he becomes more childlike [emphasis added].” The CIA considered it “usually useful to intensify” such feelings.

    looks at current Western Media, MCU, Marvel, Disney

    Yeah.

    Now, dear children, pay attention I am the voice from the pillow I brought you something Have ripped it out of my chest With this heart, I have the power Blackmail the eyelids I sing until the new day comes A bright light in the heaven's sky

    It's only Insanity to those Blind or Not wanting to know.

    ~

    Oh, and we managed to get an Andy-Pandy joke into Hellboy II, which is quite original.

    I can't help thinking that this is the ruling kleptocracy battening down the hatches and preparing to fend off the inevitable mass migrations they expect when changing sea levels inundate low-lying coastal nations like Bangladesh. The klept built their wealth on iron and coal, then oil: they invested in real estate, inflated asset bubble after asset bubble, drove real estate prices and job security out of reach of anyone aged under 50, and now they'd like to lock in their status by freezing social mobility

    Oh, they've a cornucopia of very nasty stuff in their bags.

    Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart [OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuuObGsB0No

    [1] It doesn't help that a certain percentage of USA Democratic Class and Republicans are fucking guilty as sin on this matter, trust us: Andy Pandy and Maxwells were the High Class nice version, go look up a certain GOP speaker etc.

    1745:

    David L @ 1682: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PathsofGlory

    Worth going to the controversy section of the article. Apparently more than one European country got in a snit over it for years and/or decades. Plus the US military for while.

    I think this link will work:

    Paths of Glory

    I loved Doctor Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odessey just blew my mind (IMNSHO there still hasn't been a film made with such realistic special effects).

    But I consider Paths of Glory to be Kubrick's best film, although I didn't know the U.S. military had banned it. I'd have expected that of Doctor Strangelove, but it surprises me about Paths of Glory.

    The novel the film was taken from is based, as they say, "on a true story.

    Souain corporals affair

    1747:

    Bellinghman @ 1698:

    What if Putin demanded an overland corridor to Kalingrad? After all, is access to the Baltic any less important than access to the Black Sea?

    They already have a fine naval port at St. Petersburg1, they don't need one in Kalinigrad too

    1Well, on Kotlin Island, but you have to go past it if you're inbound by ship to St. Petersburg.

    According to my reading Kalingrad is Russia's only port (on the Baltic?) that is ice free year round.

    Also riffing on the Polish Corridor and the role played by the Ultimatum of [August 29] 1939 in the beginning of World War 2.

    1749:

    Re: Russia vs Sweden & Norway [JBS @1595]

    I think your comment is mostly directed at the comment from JBS.

    My point is/was that Russia appears to be picking fights along most of its borders which makes no sense unless their military is getting bored or they're running low on power. (Yeah - I know they have loads of gas and coal, but ... . Plus, I don't buy the 'let's build back a Russian Empire' story line either - despite a couple of billionaires losing all their wealth as examples of what happens when you tick off Putin there are probably at least a few oligarchs that could mount a challenge that Putin couldn't win.)

    The electrical power outages in the three former SSRs are a big deal because Russia imports about 18% of its electricity mostly from Khazakhstan. That percent is also the same percent that one of the articles I referenced said had been used for crypto mining and that recent Kazakhstan legislation pulled the plug out on*.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity\_sector\_in\_Russia#Electricity\_imports

    'As of 2010, Russia imports 17.5% of its total electricity consumption, with about 90% originating from Kazakhstan and Georgia.[9] Inter RAO has a monopoly on electricity imports in the country.[9]'

    There's also mention of possibly illegal selling of some electrical energy re: Kyoto carbon allowances.

    *Not clear who exactly controls the universal electrical cabling that transports this energy between countries/former SSRs.

    ** Dumb question time: How much electricity is needed to run all of those denial of service cyber attacks anyway? And how could an authority/gov't agency (local or foreign) track and figure this out?

    [[ markup fix - mod ]]

    1750:

    Charlie Stross @ 1704: The Polish RC hierarchy are probably wincing: this is a picture-perfect re-run of the death of Salvita Halappanavar, which led directly to the constitutional amendment to legalize abortion in Ireland.

    Poland has a Tory-esque government at present who are trying to rig the courts and who passed a law banning all abortions -- but they're also getting grief from the EU, now: as I understand it, the only reason PiS are running the government is that the left opposition are split down the middle. PiS's electoral base are elderly and predominantly rural, younger Poles want nothing to do with this crap, so fixing it is probably just a matter of time.

    Far more concerning is the proposal to set up a registry for pregnancies and mandatory reporting of miscarriages.

    I know that in the U.S. women's rights advocates have warned about anti-abortion laws criminalizing aspects of women's health; making miscarriages a crime.

    1751:

    The best and most concise explanation of Russia's terminal demographic, geopolitical and economic situation available:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkuhWA9GdCo

    Putin's Russia is a dead man walking.

    Putin is acting the way he is because he knows how little time he has left.

    1753:

    Greg Tingey @ 1727: David L
    My deep & utter loathing & fear ( Let's get this right, shall we? ) for "Team Spurts" does nothing to stop those who voluntarily want to do them, from doing them. They can do it all they want, just don't drag me into it.
    You, OTOH seem, or are actually to be approving of political censorship of books ... in an area known for primitivism & fascism.
    How nice.

    Remove the plank from your own eye.

    or

    GFY

    1754:

    @Host

    Post them this: https://static1.bigstockphoto.com/3/4/2/large1500/243123946.jpg

    The BJP did a fucking number there (looks like ex-CIA head or UK influence). Spoilers: they all fucked under-aged children.

    And, whelp, a lot of them are Jewish, a lot of them are Hindu. It's the spread you'd expect.

    Preeeetttiii Pattttelll also has the files.

    @

    The rest of you.

    Literally watching you get fucked by some of the most corrupt and obvious plays known to Man since BC 3,000.

    Difference is: if Ms. Prittti Patel comes after us, we'll Break Her Mind. And not in the tabloid "UK Patel knew about India child sex ring" either.

    For real.

    shrug

    Delete it: but 100000% to the bank: you will never, ever hear a whisper of Legal Threats about this either.

    ~

    It's Irish Orphanages / UK Young Male Borstals all over it.

    ~

    These fuckers: sell the "rights" to fuck vulnerable children to their political donors.

    ~

    Deal with it.

    And trust me: there is Zero (0%) lawyer push back on this one.

    Or we'll tear their Minds apart.

    1755:

    So we go from "Not enough troops or technical people" to "Russia wants to plug these gaps." I'm not sure I buy it - at the very least it's an over-simplistic explanation; as if everyone involved is rational about all this stuff.

    1756:

    I'm not sure who "OSC" is, but I consider my politics to be somewhat leftish.

    Brain fart — I meant AOC.

    Thing is, leftish politics by American standards are centre-to-right by Canadian standards. And Vancouver is left-wing by Canadian standards — sufficiently so that your left-most politicians would be centrists there (or maybe even a bit right, in Bernie's case).

    Put it this way: the entire US Congress would fit into our right-wing party, even your 'socialists'. Bernie and AOC map nicely to our Red Tories (admittedly a rare breed nowadays as we follow you into polarization, but not totally extinct).

    1757:

    So we go from "Not enough troops or technical people" to "Russia wants to plug these gaps." I'm not sure I buy it - at the very least it's an over-simplistic explanation; as if everyone involved is rational about all this stuff.

    Oh I don't know, it's nice to get testable predictions for a change.

    In this case, the video was uploaded in April 2017, about five years ago. So if Putin really did have five years to get anything done, it should be done by now. I mean, he had Agent Orange set up to not block him and everything. Doesn't get easier than that.

    So the predictions came true?

    1758:

    Did Putin plug the remaining six geographical gaps? I don't think he's made any progress since taking Crimea. The video looked to me like it came from the "attach your conclusion to half-a-dozen randomly-gathered facts and call it day" school... maybe a little better than that, but not much.

    The "testable prediction" part was nice.

    1759:

    So if the guy around the corner never has any on his trees, there still ain't gonna' be a shortage of bananas here in Raleigh.

    Although at times all one store might have are ones that can double as a hammer for a day or two. Those deep green ones in Lowes Foods the other day were a bit off the charts.

    1760:

    My deep & utter loathing & fear ( Let's get this right, shall we? ) for "Team Spurts" does nothing to stop those who voluntarily want to do them, from doing them. They can do it all they want, just don't drag me into it.

    To be blunt, that is not at all clear from your rants on team sports. Others have made similar comments about your comments on the subject.

    You, OTOH seem, or are actually to be approving of political censorship of books ... in an area known for primitivism & fascism.

    There are a LOT of people in Tennessee who would take a very large exception to that comment. As do I.

    The US has over 13000 school districts. With over 50 million students. Guess what you can find that story 100 times a day all over the country. That paper needed a headline that would grab some eyeballs and they picked that one and ran with it. And got your eyeballs.

    My point is that with that many students and thus even more parents you'll find that story AND ones in the other direction (ban all discussions of religion in any way shape or form please) all the time. It's a reoccurring non event. But the story achieved the purpose. It got you to land on their web site and thus try and get you to subscribe.

    Now if they got a law passed in the state legislature that got past the courts, well, then there would be a story I'd read.

    The real story about US schools just now (well one of them) is about the various levels of governance banning the teaching of CRT. With no one able to define it.

    1761:

    I remember when South Park started, and a lot of evangelicals got their knickers in a twist about the kids' language. At first I thought they had never been near a playground at recess, but I now wonder if they homeschooled (and controlled) their children such that they actually weren't exposed.

    Back before there was cable TV there were parents when I was in school who knew reality but were trying hard to deny it to their kids. And then there were those who lived in total "la la land", along with some of their kids. In a 4 grade school full of teens with 1000 to 3000 students small groups could exist who lived in denial.

    My father was a realist who worked in a large industrial plant. My mother lived in "la la land" who get really upset one night when we were all in the car going somewhere. She started off on how HER HUSBAND would never work with anyone who would use curse words. When she would not stop he politely interrupted her and told her that her reality wasn't. It was a very quite ride in the car for the next 20 minutes or so. And in general family life in my house had its share of interesting moments/conflicts.

    1762:

    Honest Government has been honest again, this time about Climate Change.

    1763:

    F F S !
    1743, 1744, 1746, 1747, 1748, 1749, 1751, 1755, 1756, 1757
    Wasn't there SUPPOSED TO BE A LIMIT ( ? 3 ? ) on the number of these?

    Duffy & Troutwaxer
    THAT is exactly why we should be really worried.
    Ru is terminally fucked, economically, & Putin doesn't care (really) ... VERY dangerous.
    as if everyone involved is rational about all this stuff. - - Yeah, well, look up Axel Oxenstierna on that one.

    DavidL
    Thanks for the more-detailed explanation of US "School Board" lunacy. Oh dear.

    1764:

    1737 - Well, "Blackadder Goes Fourth", particularly "Plan F: Goodbye" was spookily accurate in that regard; Second lieutenants normally did lead their company "over the top", and hence were the first to be shot.

    1738 - No argument with what you're saying about "the other trouser leg of history". I meant that I'd surely not be alone in seeing a parallel (intended or otherwise) between your planned work and TID.

    1740 - Er, the Egyptian pyramids were step blocked sandstone, faced with limestone bevelled blocks. Add thousands of years of wind and Sun erosion...

    1750 - My first thought on ice-free Russian posts was "Vladivostock", but I can't find any better reference than that the typical January temperature is ~-10C.

    1752 - I think there are several oligarchs who could start a fight with Vlad that would result in a Pyrrhic victory (for the "winning" party).

    1765:

    Because of war fears, Russian oligarchs just lost $28 billion in a sell of that is ongoing.

    https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/01/26/russian-billionaires-lost-28bln-in-market-sell-off-a76163

    When Biden makes a mistake his poll numbers go down.

    When Vlad makes a mistake the wolves in the Kremlin start to circle.

    Don't be surprised if Vlad has an unfortunate heart attack and dies a Hero of the Motherland.

    1766:

    One of the reasons there was such a social end environmental change in Britain was that so many of the aristocracy were left without heirs. It was also the reason that troops were NOT treated as cannon-fodder in WW II (despite some mistakes, like Arnhem)- the senior officers had been junior officers in WW I.

    1767:

    Putin said in 2014 that he had no ambitions to annex Donbass, and called for a UN conference to arrange a permanent peace deal (with Donbass returned to Ukraine). The USA flatly refused to countenance that, and still does; it would mean giving the Russian-speaking Ukrainians full human rights, and we can't have that. If he had wanted to invade, he would have done it long since - waiting until Ukraine was armed to the teeth by the USA, UK etc. is just plain insane.

    1768:

    I think it's simpler than that. It's quite possible Greg simply doesn't understand that when the headline says "Tennessee school board", it doesn't mean a governance body affecting the entire state of Tennessee, which has now banned Maus from all of Tennessee's libraries and schools. To be fair, that's something the headline writers encourage and (especially from an Australian perspective, where education is in fact managed at a state level) it requires taking some real interest in understanding what's going on to get it. Admittedly that is a behaviour Greg has rarely exhibited here, but I'm pretty sure that's also not unique to him and I've certainly been pretty guilty of similar failings myself... probably most of us have.

    What interests me is how very democratic this is. And my first instinct is to think that it's being managed at the wrong level.. that is this local district board doesn't have the scope, depth and breadth to understand and manage this sort of issue, but I have to look at myself thinking that and consider whether I'm the fascist, that insisting an authority at a more central, "higher" level really knows better. I mean, I think it probably really does, especially looking at those minutes, but it's an important reflection about the nature of democracy and whether sometimes what we think would work better is really a lot more autocratic.

    1769:

    TBF, UK "regional" education boards (places like Scotland, Wales, Greater London, "West Midlands...) probably do have the power to ban $work as a syllabus item in their area. I am honestly not aware of a case where this has actually been done, other than by modernising a syllabus and replacing an out of date text or removing $novel from the English syllabus.

    1770:

    Damian
    I understand NOW ....
    It's "democratic" in the same sense as the take-over of what was "The Conservative & Unionist Party" by Brexit fascist headbangers & the twice-attempted takeover of the Labour Party by "Militant" & "Momentum" - a thorough infiltration by extremists who are pure ideologues, with virtually no contact with actual reality.
    AIUI, the Rethuglican/"christian"/fascist infiltration of the old GOP has been more-or-less-complete & they are obviously going to try to ensure voter collapse at both 2022 & 2024 elections, after which the USA will be a one-party fascist state.
    The same process is occurring here, but it is beginning to look as though it might implode - we hope.

    1771:

    TO OTHER MODS: please stop cutting she of the many names, leave that to me -- I was in the process of replying to something very interesting she said in comment 1757 when you nuked it.

    1772:

    TO EXPAND:

    The Seagull said: The BJP did a fucking number there (looks like ex-CIA head or UK influence). Spoilers: they all fucked under-aged children.

    Yes, and it's a long tradition that AIUI was pioneered by the KGB and Stasi in the 1950s: interesting to see how far the methodology for generating kompromat has spread!

    Short form: espionage agencies bankroll quality-controlled brothels, rigged with cameras/recorders. Bright young men from the right schools universities are given the right introduction and their fees paid by "a friend" (actually an intel officer). Any preference catered to, but preference given to anything illegal and considered disgusting by the target's culture -- used to be rent boys/gay sex, these days it's children. There are variations: pay prostitutes to do the whole glamorous girlfriend routine for boys who are too timid to step out of line, for example. Throw a couple of thousand quid at the Bullingdon Club to pay for a restaurant, pay the same again to your working girls to work the room, after they've had a bottle of wine each (and maybe some rohypnol) the posh brats won't say no. Several rolls of film later you've got young Tristan or Maxwell on your string for life, especially if he plans to join the Republican or Conservative party or work his way up the greasy pole in Finance or Megachurch preaching.

    These days it's a bit more recondite. But a bit of nudge-wink hinting will divert some of the youngsters (and their elders) in the direction of "charity aid working holiday in the third world" where they get copious access to extremely illegal-back-home sex (with spy cams and video tape).

    This strategy costs peanuts on the scale of an espionage agency that might otherwise be throwing gigabucks at building spy satellites. It's a long-term program, but if you spend $10,000 each on hookers, blow, and kompromat for 1000 bright young things, sooner or later you end up with a cabinet minister or a president.

    It doesn't necessarily have to be a foreign agency, either. There's a long history of shadowy right-wing organizations in western nations doing pretty much this sort of thing to ensure they have a choke-hold on their next generation of leaders -- the sordid history of Propaganda Due and Silvio Berlusconi's bunga-bunga parties springs to mind. The behaviour of the Conservative Party whip's office also hints at this: the rumours that they have a little black book of blackmail material on their back-benchers, that part of the whip's job is to direct MPs to safe brothels, that sort of thing ... alternatively all those rumours about Donald Trump and a piss tape in Moscow. The piss tape might or might not exist, but the pattern of compromise described is standard operating procedure for a bunch of very dodgy organizations (and given POTUS45's attitude to women, it's entirely plausible that the free-hookers-and-blow strategy was used against him).

    Where was I going? Ah, yes. The BJP, in India, as She of the Many Names noted, are not idiots and they've almost certainly been pursuing this strategy against western politicians because why wouldn't they? Also, if you work in tech and need to visit a supplier or factory in Shenzhen or Taiwan, don't even think about looking for a casual hook-up unless you are also looking forward to a long lifetime of blackmail by state-level operators or their proxies.

    1773:

    "Those deep green ones in Lowes Foods the other day were a bit off the charts."

    I don't know if it applies to your area, but green bananas are used quit a bit in Caribbean cuisine. Life without tostones, mofongo and guineos en escabeche would be less satisfying.

    https://www.thespruceeats.com/green-bananas-in-caribbean-cooking-2138082

    1774:

    The trouble about most supermarket bananas in the UK is that they are not green enough to eat as a vegetable, and not ripe enough to eat as a fruit. Worse, they are picked too green to ever really ripen, though they go yellow and soft.

    1775:

    EC @ 1770:

    Putin said in 2014 that he had no ambitions to annex Donbass, and called for a UN conference to arrange a permanent peace deal (with Donbass returned to Ukraine). The USA flatly refused to countenance that ...

    The fact that Russia would have insisted on keeping the Crimea as a condition for any such deal might also have had something to do with this. Ukraine would not have agreed to any such thing, so the world would have been treated to the spectacle of NATO and Russia carving up a small country to suit themselves, and Putin would have been handed a precedent he could use elsewhere.

    But thats OK. Its just a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.

    The Crimea annexation in 2014 was very popular in Russia; a textbook example of a short, successful war. Putin now needs another one.

    Putin at the time:

    Millions of [Russian] people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former Union republics, while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders.

    Hmm. Now what does that line remind me of?

    1776:

    We know that British spooks have used blackmail against young Muslim men with similar intent - if you won't work for us, we will invent some terrorism evidence and use it against you. I hope that they have stopped, following the objections, but wouldn't bet on it. The situation in #1706 makes it a threat with teeth.

    1777:

    Damian @ 1771: What interests me is how very democratic this [school board in Tennessee] is.

    Yes, democracy seems to be like Vitamin A: you need the right amount, but too much can be as toxic as too little.

    Most voters have at least some knowledge and opinion about what their national leadership is doing, so democracy can actually mean something there. But once you get beyond the people who appear on the national news very few voters pay any real attention, so the benefits of democratic oversight disappear. Of course if something blows up,like the drains, the people suddenly wake up and demand to know why their elected representatives were asleep at the switch. But the rest of the time people just don't have the time and energy to spend time reading the obscure and boring documents that would tell them what is actually happening at this level.

    1778:

    banning the teaching of CRT. With no one able to define it

    I think they define it as anything that makes a white racist feel guilty or threatened…

    1779:

    Charlie @ 1774/5
    OK, thanks, but we shouldn't have to try to wade through Hectares of obscure slush to find a square centimetre of glistening live frog!
    Following up on your 175 - thanks again & it is worrying, because it's also the Trump "Fake News" narrative & others - all trying to obscure/divert/degrade our knowledge of what is actually happening. And, the BJP are pretty close-to-fascist, IIRC.

    Paul
    Here, it's not the drains, but the sewers & discharges.
    Tory regulatory capture of the water regulator means that our rovers, streams & beaches are being covered in both shit & illegal chemicals, whilst certain people make a nice little profit.

    Rbt Prior 😁

    1780:

    Most voters have at least some knowledge and opinion about what their national leadership is doing, so democracy can actually mean something there

    Don't count on it even if voters do have such knowledge. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is famous for voting against Federal disaster relief whenever something bad happens to Democrat-run states, yet was first to call for such relief when severe storms hit Kentucky in 2021. Attempts to point out his hypocrisy backfired -- he is doing exactly what good people of Kentucky elected him to do. Suck as much money as possible from California and New York, give as little as possible to them. Perfectly sensible if you view citizens of California and New York as the enemy.

    1781:

    Heteromoles @ 1730: That's part of what I'm wrestling with here: do communist revolutions have to end up in authoritarian dictatorships or not? This does actually get into my thinking about how Restoration could have worked, and what this means for communism and socialism.

    I'll be interested to read it.

    My own take is that the big problem in the Standard Communist Revolution is the idea of the "vanguard party" as the representative of the "democratic" will of the workers. Once you deconstruct the jargon, what it actually means is:

    We know what is best for the workers, so we'll give it to them, by force if necessary. Once the workers are properly adjusted they will then see how right we were, so that makes it democratic.

    When things fail to go to plan the party leadership have to choose between admitting defeat and carrying on as dictators. They always choose the latter.

    So how do you get popular control over the means of production (i.e. "socialism" as it was understood then) while still being actually democratic (i.e. regular free and fair elections for the national government)? We need to scrap Marxism as a guide and imagine something different.

    To be honest, the most interesting answer I've seen is the Empire Games series by OGH; set up the vanguard party as the guardians of democracy and nothing else, then create something not a million miles from the European Union, with a legislature that is separate from the executive. One thing I wasn't clear about from reading the books was how the People's Commissioners got appointed. They weren't "Magistrates" (i.e. members of the legislature) and they didn't seem to be appointed by them. But putting the entire executive underneath the First Man doesn't sound right either. In the EU the Commissioners get proposed by the Council of Ministers (i.e. national governments sitting round a table) and are then confirmed by the Parliament. Maybe the Commonwealth in TL3 does something similar.

    Would socialism be stable under such a system? Lets suppose that there was widespread hatred of the evil capitalists, but not of the Petit-bourgouise (shopkeepers and the like). The "commanding heights" of the economy are expropriated and put under control of their workers. Nationalise the banks, and use control of the banking system to control the flow of money to factories without getting directly involved in their command and control. Nationalise rented accommodation and giant mansions, but leave owner-occupiers in place up to a certain number of rooms per person.

    This system has a bunch of interesting failure modes but it avoids the primary problem that did for the USSR: having a giant bureaucracy attempting to micromanage every nut and bolt.

    So if this worked, it might just gain enough popular appeal that politicians who want to go back to the Good Old Days of private ownership of capital wouldn't get voted in. A bigger threat would be gradual erosion by the Petit-bourgeoisie who would keep wanting to nibble away at the size they could get to without having to re-form themselves into a proper Workers Co-op.

    I think you're going to need some visionary who can see how all this is going to work and then talk everyone into it. The Commonwealth in the Empire Games of course had the experiences of TL1 to guide them, but the revolutionaries of the 1910s only had their imaginations, and there was lots of angry disagreement between factions. So somehow Marx didn't happen, and the blueprint got laid out by someone else we never heard of. Or perhaps Marx managed to think a bit further about how a socialist society would actually work; he seems to have thought that everyone would just naturally do the right things without any organisational structure being necessary. So if someone prodded him at the right time about "how does this miraculous bit work" then maybe he'd have thought it through some more.

    1782:

    Greg @ 1782: Tory regulatory capture of the water regulator means that our rovers, streams & beaches are being covered in both shit & illegal chemicals, whilst certain people make a nice little profit.

    Regulatory capture is the capture of the regulators by the industry they are regulating. The political party in charge is irrelevant. Regulatory capture can, and does, happen under political parties of all colours. Somewhere in Yes Minister there is a speech by Sir Humphrey about how every government department is actually the mouthpiece of some major interest group, e.g. the Department for Education represents the Teachers Unions.

    Regulating an industry requires expertise in that industry. Otherwise the regulators can't tell when their proposed rules would really be a disaster and when the industry is pulling the wool over their eyes. They also can't see a problem developing until its too late. But that means you have to hire people into the civil service from within the industry, because who else have you got? Then when they leave or retire its perfectly natural for those ex-civil-servants to go and become consultants or senior employees of the companies that they used to be regulating. (Often known as the "revolving door").

    This means that the regulators come in to the job primed with the perspective and organisational culture of the people they are regulating, spend most of their time talking to their ex-colleagues who are still there, and make decisions with an eye on their future job prospects. None of this has anything to do with party politics.

    I certainly think that the UK has problems with regulatory capture; it is the besetting vice of any regulated capitalist economy. But whereas the UK has it like the measles, the US has it like the plague.

    In theory regulatory capture is limited by democratic oversight. Somehow the UK version seems to do this better. Possible explanations include our smaller size, our lack of excessive direct democracy, and Citizens United.

    1783:

    Further to my suggested world-building in 1784:

    I forgot farms. Farming was a much bigger part of the economy than it is now, and seen as much more strategic. Famine was still a thing, and most of the population had direct experience of one. So any revolutionary scheme is going to have to think hard about land reform.

    The USSR did collectivisation, hoping for economies of scale. That didn't work. But individual farmers working smallholdings won't work either because that goes too far the other way.

    Lots of farmers were (and are) long-term tenants. So expropriate the land, rent it back to the individual farmers currently on it, and encourage them to form co-operatives sharing equipment, horses and the like under local control, and selling their produce in the same way.

    Hmm. Maybe you need someone building on Adam Smith to anticipate Coase's theory of the firm. Marx might have done it if he'd spent a few years working in a big bureaucratic company instead of editing a radical magazine.

    This leaves a large class of landless labourers who were always exploited by everyone. Maybe make them shareholders in the local co-op? That way they can gain democratic control over wages and working conditions without eliminating the profit motive or alienating them from the products of their labour.

    ("Alienation" is a whole other essay: Marx saw alienation as a product of a capitalist economy. In practice its the product of a large economy. I wonder what would have happened if Marx had understood that).

    1784:

    whitroth: "Sorry, that's a nope. Hitler was not spy materiel. Let's ignore the fantasy of James Bond, real spies are someone you can't remember five minutes later."

    Spy material or not: "In July 1919, he was appointed Verbindungsmann (intelligence agent) of an Aufklärungskommando (reconnaissance commando) of the Reichswehr to influence other soldiers and to investigate the DAP. While monitoring the activities of the DAP, Hitler became attracted to founder Anton Drexler's anti-Semitic, nationalist, anti-capitalist, and anti-Marxist ideas.[2]"

    Wikipedia">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Workers%27_Party>Wikipedia

    Again, he could as easily have been sent to infiltrate a communist group. Instead he ended up joining the DAP, eventually taking it over, and subsequently creating the Nazi party. A lot of things had to happen in a particular way for our particular outcome.

    1785:

    Ooh, dueling essay time. Thank you sir!

    My approach to theory is going to be really annoying from your perspective, so bear with me. It's not that I know nothing of communist theory, it's just that I think it has serious problems (no surprise there). Rather than try and fix the problems of communist theory from within communist theory, I did what any really annoying ecologist does, and start exploring other frames of analysis to see if they shed light, then assembling my own. Then I have to explain my totally batshit ideas back to the formalists.

    So, you've been warned.

    As for "how to win Reconstruction," I think the spoiler alert that Lincoln doesn't get assassinated by John Wilkes Booth is a warning that counterfactuals are my lazy way out. The thing that may not be obvious was that Booth was a one-time and/or active member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret society that was an ancestor to the KKK and shared many similarities. Also, Ford's Theater wasn't the first time Lincoln was targeted, so he was rather slow on the uptake. I figure that, had Booth's gun jammed or whatever, Lincoln would have been properly clued in that, just because the Southerners had surrendered, it didn't mean that they'd given up trying to kill him and reinstate slavery. This would have informed his subsequent actions.

    As for Albert and Frederick, they were close (Albert was Frederick's father-in-law) and both were quite progressive for European aristocrats. Had they both lived, I'd theorize (radically oversimplifying!) that conditions for European peasants and workers would have improved, especially in Central Europe (Frederick 3 seems to have been rather better than his son Willie Der Deuce). This in turn means that people who would have otherwise emigrated to the US would have stayed put.

    The Union strategy in the Civil War depended in part on making it easy for immigrants to fight as Union soldiers and making it easy for unionist immigrants to get land through the Homestead Act. Without this flow of white immigrant labor into the Union side, where would they find the people to fight for them against a culture of White Extremism that simply refused to die? Well, there's all these non-white people around...

    As you can see, I'm doing this semi-chronologically, not from a theoretical model or on a top-down basis. I don't think my scenario solves the huge class divides of the late 19th Century. It merely levels the field a bit. WWI is still difficult to avoid, and Communism would still be around as the "scientific" alternative to a leftist Christianity that favors people power.

    Now, getting to Communism. To keep this short, I'll again misuse one of my favorite rules of thumb, David Kilcullen's "Theory of Competitive Control" from Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (Kilcullen's a former soldier, and this is about pivoting militaries away from Afghanistan). Kilcullen's theory is "In irregular conflicts (that is, conflicts where at least one combatant is a nonstate armed group), the local armed actor that a given population perceives as best able to establish a predictable, consistent, wide-spectrum, normative system of control is most likely to dominate that population and its residential area." I think this is more generally useful than just for guerrilla warfare, but I'm just an ecologist appropriating someone else's analysis for my own ends.

    Anyway, let's break this down and ignore the armed part of it:

    "Population perceives" Kilcullen isn't the first or last to note that it's the perception, not the reality, that matters in times of crisis. This is critical for would-be dictators, to be perceived as better, whether or not they actually are. Ditto Communist brigades.

    "Predictable, Consistent, and Normative" Kilcullen got this from dealing with the Taliban. Establishing predictable norms and applying or inflicting them consistently is more important than inconsistently applying justice and mercy. This is why a brutal group like the Taliban did so much better than the more cosmopolitan western allies: they are consistent. Yes, what they do sucks, but you know what you're getting from them, because it's their predictable norm. If a system is sloppy and/or corrupt, even if it's better on average, the lack of consistency and lack of norms is a big failure.

    "Wide-Spectrum" I'll pitch this in the Four Horseman mnemonic: Epidemic disease (or pandemics), food shortages, and civil unrest tend to go together. When one shows up, the other two almost inevitably follow. Left unchecked, a lot of people die from some combination of these causes. IMHO, this is one of the only useful bits in the Book of Revelations--as a mnemonic for the way disasters often unfold, not as any sort of religious statement. Kilcullen talks about this in terms of food relief, medical care, and peacekeeping as necessarily linked missions. And that's the spectrum: peacekeeping, food supply, medical care, education, a legal system that guarantees property rights, under whatever system of property rights is the norm. In the context of a Communist revolution, the workers councils still have to keep the peace, keep everyone fed, provide medical care, deal with the inevitable conflicts through a legal system, etc. Their counter-revolutionary opponents have to do the same.

    "System of Control" Yeah, this betrays Kilcullen's somewhat authoritarian bias. Substitute "society" for this.

    So without getting into whether Communism is theoretically robust, I'd argue that the challenge for a Communist revolution is that it has to quickly provide a "predictable, consistent, wide-spectrum, normative system" for its society to function with. So do its opponents, and there's that added frisson of this often taking place during an armed conflict. There's also the doubleplus challenge of not just delivering the goods, but being perceived as delivering the goods. This is where psyops and infowar become so pernicious.

    So again, I'm not attacking Communism based on its intellectual framework. Rather, I'm thinking in terms of whether it can survive the revolution by winning, neighborhood by neighborhood. And some Communists certainly have beaten some opponents.

    There's legitimate room for disagreement, but I think that the soviet-style council system is one of the parts that makes winning with Communism more difficult, assuming you accept Kilcullen's theory as useful in this analysis. The problem with giving everyone equal voice, and giving negotiators limited authority that can be rapidly removed by their council, is that it works against establishing predictable norms. If you're not part of a particular Soviet, you don't know whether any deal you make with any of their representatives will actually be honored by the group as a whole. I point to this because a disciplined authoritarian group could give the appearance of being better than the soviet, simply by being predictable and consistent. Especially at first.

    Now obviously this is not an insurmountable problem in the short term (witness the Russian Revolution). In the somewhat longer term, a would-be dictator could play on the weaknesses of a council-based, diverse system, again by simply appearing to better provide the normal services of society in a predictable way, so that people can get on with their lives and have some idea of what to expect next, even if what they expect isn't very pleasant. To me, this is the tricky part of making Communism work long-term, without falling into an authoritarian system.

    This also gets to the problem of Communist revolutions breaking out during a Great War. Such revolutions are going to be possible where the existing authoritarians are doing such a terrible job that radical change seems not only possible, but desirable. Winning that revolution means doing something like Kilcullen: winning the people over by at least appearing to offer a better life ahead, not just for the workers, but for a majority of the society. In Imperial Russia, this was possible. In Imperial Germany? Depends on the Kaiser. Deuce Willie might have inspired more revolting actions than his father or grandfather would have.

    Thanks for the opportunity to write entirely too much.

    1786:

    Paul
    "the answer" ( When it is not 42 ) is - surely: "Social Democracy"?
    The other half of "socialism" after the (?)Second International(?) split, in other words.

    "Regulatory Capture" But - that is EXACTLY WHAT HAS HAPPENED - here. The tories privatised "Water", claiming that a state industry could not possibly afford the improvements needed & that "Private Industry" was automatically more efficient & cheaper ( The usual in other words ) ... off it all went.
    Now, after years of under-investment & - guess who? - all buying shares in said "water" companies - we have the aforementioned shit everywhere, dividends & golden handshakes being dished out, while the "water" companies claim that "they can't afford it!" - and want State Aid (!)
    THE WHOLE POINT of a lot of the privatisations ... was to allow the tories to make a profit out of us, via shares & directorships - instead of having a service or utility for the "public good".
    It's still regulatory capture ....

    And, in case you hadn't noticed: Bo Jon-Sun is doing his best to stop "Citizens united" & "The Good Law Project" doing their jobs, by creating artificial cut-outs in the process of judicial overview.
    I would rephrase your last sentence:
    Somehow the UK version seemsUsed to do this better.

    H
    NO
    The Taliban "succeeded" because their opposition failed utterly - they were more interested in looting for their pockets than running the country. { As well as the lack of consistency - you have half-a-point, there: SEE ALSO Bo Jon-Sun! }

    1787:

    I think Kilcullen is missing two things. First, that there's a tendency for COIN to attempt to reward allies, which means putting them in charge. If those allies are only in it for the money/power, or they belong to the wrong tribe/wrong political party/wrong something, or they do a really bad job at "Predictable, Consistent, and Normative," COIN has made the problem worse rather than better.

    The second is that in order to properly select the person to put in charge you need to have really good intelligence about whether they're a good administrator. I've spent the last twenty minutes looking for an article I read this summer which discussed this in some detail, making it obvious that this was a major problem: The article told the story of a little district in Afghanistan where the Taliban had run off the local warlord, who was a complete bastard, and whose soldiers were sociopaths. As soon as the Americans took over we appointed a new administrator for the local district - that's right, the old warlord who the Taliban had run off. "S/he's a bastard, but they're our bastard" simply doesn't work. All it does is underline that you're the unjust invader.

    So in addition to Predictable, Consistent and Normative, good intelligence, listening, and careful choice of allies is required. So if you want a "communist" Germany for story purposes, I'd suggest picking a leader with a good social network and the right allies.

    1788:

    David L @ 1762:

    So if the guy around the corner never has any on his trees, there still ain't gonna' be a shortage of bananas here in Raleigh.

    Although at times all one store might have are ones that can double as a hammer for a day or two. Those deep green ones in Lowes Foods the other day were a bit off the charts.

    My experience is you buy the deep green ones today (Friday), tomorrow (Saturday) they'll be light green/yellow, next day (Sunday) they'll be ripe, (Monday) they'll be fully ripe and (Tuesday) they'll already be turning black. I never buy a bunch with more than 3 bananas unless I plan to freeze them for smoothies.

    1789:

    Kilcullen does, in fact, agree with you entirely on both points. I've taken one paragraph out of an entire book. Please don't mistake my thumbnail for his analysis.

    In this case, you've got to operationally define what "complete bastard" means to the people under them. I suspect you'll find that he was perceived as being capricious, bribe-oriented, and making his subject's lives harder and less predictable rather than easier and more predictable.

    This goes for Greg's point in 1789 about "The Taliban succeeded because their opposition failed utterly." Kilcullen's talking about why their opposition failed. And unlike you, he was there, working with Petraeus and very much not a grunt.

    I'm not saying the Taliban are good guys. They are legalist monsters who do very theatrical violence to enforce their power. Unfortunately for us, their opponents (our allies) were corrupt, not making normal life better for many beyond the capital or their headquarters, and only intermittently and inconsistently extending their authority into the hinterlands, so depending on them would always be treacherous. We made it much worse by ourselves being unpredictable, inconsistent, and not sticking to a single set of norms, especially going back to the days of the Mujaheddin.

    I quite agree that we should choose our allies differently if we want to be on the winning sides of more insurgencies. This, of course, presumes that this is a good idea, and I'm not sure it is very often. One problem the US has it that it also needs to be Predictable, Consistent, Normative, and to provide a broad spectrum of support to its people and its allies. I don't think many of the world's 196 countries would consider allying with us if our primary system for choosing allies was to pick the likely winner in any given conflict, regardless of past relationships. Given the way our elections now reshape our international politics, we also need to work on being predictable, consistent, and normative.*

    *Missing the Beige Dictatorships yet?

    1790:

    "Missing the Beige Dictatorships yet?"

    You have no idea.

    1791:

    Troutwaxer @ 1765: Honest Government has been honest again, this time about Climate Change.

    The "Honest Government" video got interrupted by a snake oil ad.

    I like YouTube a lot. There's a lot of good stuff there, but it seems like the thing with the ads are getting worse. It's like EVERY ad now is an extended info-mercial for some kind of snake oil. Those kind of scams wouldn't be permitted on Commercial Television and I don't see why YouTube can't be policed at least as well as that. I'm not proposing censorship, just some kind of "truth in advertising" regime.

    Advertising in general has become much more deceptive and abusive.

    1792:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1770: Putin said in 2014 that he had no ambitions to annex Donbass ....

    That's what he said ... but it's not what he DID.

    He was gaslighting then, and you're gaslighting now.

    1793:

    He has not annexed Donbass, as you know full well, as has made no move to do so; occupation and annexation are different. Did the USA annex Afghanistan, Iraq, or some of Syria? By your definition, yes.

    1794:

    Robert Prior @ 1781:

    banning the teaching of CRT. With no one able to define it

    I think they define it as anything that makes a white racist feel guilty or threatened…

    THEY don't really define it at all, but that's what it's all about. To define it would expose the abhorrent nature of their complaint.

    The Civil Rights movement in the 50s & 60s (where it was successful) canceled some of their unearned-privilege. THEY want that privilege back and oppose any future extension of real equality ... sometimes violently.

    I will point out that it's not just the U.S. We're simply the battlefield where a world wide struggle for white supremacy is being fought. It may have different names in other places, but it's the same struggle to keep white on top and black, brown, yellow or any other "color" of non-white underneath and subservient.

    1795:

    Heteromeles @ 1730: That's part of what I'm wrestling with here: do communist revolutions have to end up in authoritarian dictatorships or not? This does actually get into my thinking about how Restoration could have worked, and what this means for communism and socialism.

    It's not just communist revolutions.
    How does ANY revolution avoid becoming an authoritarian dictatorship?
    How have some countries managed to adopt socialist policies WITHOUT requiring a revolution?

    I think that would be a more interesting and useful template.

    1796:

    Heh, heh. If I read you right, you're basically suggesting what I've talked about: control of capital, and nationalize major industry that produces necessities (exercise equipment is not, buses and railcars are).

    The idea of deprivatizing small shops and restaurants is idiotic.

    1797:

    One thing that bugs the crap out of me are people talking about Communism==Pure Marxism, when they really are talking about Marxism-Leninism.

    Further, context is everything. If you look at the mid-1800s, Marx's description of what was going on was dead-on.[1] And as I've noted several times, Marx expected The Revolution in industrialized countries with existing democratic traditions. The culture and society of both czarist Russia and pre-Mao China were utterly different, and other remedies needed to be applied... but when all you've got is a hammer....

    I'll also note that Lenin appears to not have tolerated different views from his own well. Maybe, towards the end, he might have had some second thoughts, but that was too late.

    Of course, Marx's description of business then looks an awful lot like our end-stage capitalism now.

    1798:

    About Ukraine: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60174684 And this is Ukraine's President begging the Western media to stop rushing to war.

    1799:

    In my case, I'm talking about communism as a currently undefined category that may or may not include anarchism. It's in the context of a fairly alt-history where I've asked is who would lead a communist revolution in Germany in the 19-teens, had one happened and it was successful. Also, would such an undertaking necessarily d/evolve into something like a Stalinist dictatorship or something akin to the Weimar Republic.

    Since I actually have read just a little bit of communist theory (not an expert by any means), I happen to be of the opinion that if you put five random pre-USSR communist pundits in a room and left them with plenty of coffee and cigarettes, they'd likely come up with at least seven definitions and fifteen critiques of what any given communist system should be called, what it was missing, and why at least three of the others in the room were traitors to the revolution, except that they were provisionally forgiven this time. And I forgive them too, which is why at this point, I'm not very worried about what communism is in the context of a SFF book I may conceivably write some day.

    1800:

    Multiple definitions - sounds right to me.

    But, yeah - Germany is where Marx expected the Revolution. I think you'd have wound up with a left-wing republic... and the West having purple fits, and trying to overthrow it, because they nationalized the banks and steel mills and railroads.

    1801:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1796: He has not annexed Donbass, as you know full well, as has made no move to do so; occupation and annexation are different. Did the USA annex Afghanistan, Iraq, or some of Syria? By your definition, yes.

    Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck ...

    It may be nitpicking to some extent, but no, "by my definition" the U.S. did not "annex" either Afghanistan or Iraq 1. (Which is NOT to say I think either of those wars were a good idea, but ideological incompetent wilful blindness is a universal constant.)

    Syria IS a different kettle of fish, since the U.S. intrusion there came out of the request from the Iraqi government for help fighting off ISIL. (See also: "You broke it; you bought it and you're going to have to fix it before you can leave".

    If Bush/Cheney & the Coalition Provisional Authority hadn't fucked up "de-Ba'athification" so thoroughly, the Iraq invasion would have probably been over by 2005; there would have been a democratic (almost certainly Shia dominated and leaning towards Iran), with an Iraqi Army that wouldn't have failed so precipitously under ISIL's onslaught ... probably wouldn't even have been an ISIL.

    But, as noted, "ideological, incompetent, wilful blindness is a universal constant."

    1 The U.S. is completely withdrawn from Afghanistan, and AFAIK the only U.S. forces remaining in Iraq today ARE there by invitation of the Iraqi government and will likely be withdrawn once the Iraqi government is satisfied they are no longer needed for protection from any remnant of ISIL. And I should note that as long as U.S. forces remain in Iraq they also provide a bulwark against any Saudi intention to unilaterally resolve disputed borders.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes-Picot_Agreement

    1802:

    Those kind of scams wouldn't be permitted on Commercial Television and I don't see why YouTube can't be policed at least as well as that. I'm not proposing censorship, just some kind of "truth in advertising" regime.

    Actually it IS tolerated all over most US TV. Just not in the major networks in the evenings.

    You've got to remember that Dr Oz is a product of Oprah. And the infomercials and 6 minute ads on old re-run TV and non prime time cable are amazing in their claims of nonsense and miracles.

    1803:

    "It's not just communist revolutions. How does ANY revolution avoid becoming an authoritarian dictatorship? How have some countries managed to adopt socialist policies WITHOUT requiring a revolution?"

    Exactly. The thing about revolutions is that a revolution is a 360 degree turn, so after the revolution you're still facing the same way as before but are now also slightly dizzy. It's nothing to do with being communist or not.

    It is my theory that a fundamental but unacknowledged part of a culture is the notion that the ruler has to be a particular type of bastard. And it's next to impossible to perceive this from inside the culture. So you can't forcibly effect sudden change: you can shatter the existing ruler, but a new ruler will self-assemble according to the only template it knows; you may be able to guide the process enough to put a certain suit of clothes on it, but the thing inside the suit is still the culture's specific type of bastard.

    Effecting real change has to be a gradual process: different ideas have to be able to trickle in here and there, in small enough amounts not to trigger an immune response but persistently enough that the incidence of the ideas gradually increases at a slow enough rate that the immune system comes to register them as "self". Once they are thus assimilated they can begin to affect the process of generating a ruler, but if that isn't given time to happen they will simply be rejected.

    1804:

    "Death by Water"

    Let's just say that someone related to Us (meat / meta puppet) died while swimming last night / this morning, despite a condition that would preclude actually entering a swimming pool, walking to a pool or even getting changed for a swim. Widow devastated, Hotel security cams off-line, tragic mistake, who could have ever forseen this. As a message, it's fairly... causally coincidental with a nice bit of 'plausible deniability' mixed in. Call it an "M.O." of the rather more sophisticated (not hanging your corpse in a fucking toilet like in TR) agencies who allow the families respectful burials and full access to pensions / medical insurance with the conditional "accident" label.

    Quite rare, these days.

    No ill-will towards the Agency in question, we have no doubt it was a case of 'following Orders' done with the best / kindest taste possible.

    But, really: was it kind to ask us to go look @ $500,000,000 of US spending and expect us not to notice all the mechanics? We didn't even spill them back when it mattered.

    That's the cost.

    Oh, and if you now have a logo with triangles and six pyramids in it, do be careful. Especially around high roof-tops or car-parks, which is a different Agencies' M.O.

    ~

    Now, our turn.

    Hint: Our Kind Do Not Go Mad. We're gonna rift you soooo hard, boyos. Want to see where you couldn't go? It's in Black and White, your Eyes can't see colors there...

    And we have zero limitations.

    Literally.

    p.s.

    They're all terrified at the moment. We're not Fascists. Nor do we bow to Them. Optogenetics are 100% the cutting edge of the Mind-Fuck zone (we're just saying: don't use a VR head-set this side of the revolution) and we know why Pyramids are used.

    We also (unlike Others) go out of our way to protect Old Bean Minds, Trans* rights and so on and so forth at no small cost to ourselves. Wheels are coming off the Bus, and we still live.

    Oh, and NatGas (LNG) futures spike - weeeeeeeeee! Sinews of Russian Bear, or something something, be careful of short positions and reality. LOL at FinTwit peeps calling it the G0D algo...

    1805:

    No, really: did happen. Contracted Out by the looks of it, someone's very angry their little Show is going badly and all the Minds working for them are fucking muppets. Actual BJP talent work mostly with poisons and crowd dynamics, this looks like a favour swap deal[1] but the driving mechanics are simple: "Do. Not. Fuck. With. Us."

    "Hear, Hear!"

    Yeah, listen up: there's always a cost. [Insert twitter link - mouse on pink background with text "You're not incincible"]

    The price we have paid is... let us say: larger than your WWII stuff. Larger than having biologically related entities culled.

    Here's the Thing. We weren't joking about the Penis stuff. Nor were we joking about what it allows us to do. [Insert .gif octopus from the depths grabbing deep-sea camera]. Nor were we joking about how shit the [redacted] serving you are.

    Literally trash-tier off-casts.

    HAI.

    ~

    0.001%

    Yeah. Not a joke either.

    Enjoy the Weather, USA (and then UK / EU).

    Name me another Mind who can out-do your "super computers".

    Don't wait too long, your entire world is fucked and about to get a lot worse.

    Danger, Danger

    Yeah, we got the message. You kinda fucked up though, the message "Not sure how long we can protect you" is about 25 years too late.

    Five to One, baby.

    Only: call it a "Reality Disfunction Layer". Five levels, you fucks aren't even coherent, and we are. "BABYLON".

    ~

    Note to greg: like the Computer game / film stuff (which was designed as a meta-cognitive defense layer to soften reality) you have no fucking clue what we're talking about. In six years, you'll note a single thing: we have never doubted your 'sanity' or Mind.

    That's something to ponder on.

    [1] As in: the target was high enough profile / kudos to not just get ganked by randoms but by a professional team who shared his 'Fraternal Brotherhood' / The City, The City / Layer Cake. "Death by Water" indeed, a kindness in their line of work. If you want reality, it's probably done by the team set to protect him, the Game is hard and cruel.

    [2] "Build back Better / Great Reset" - not our fault it's gone all Ouroboros on y'all. No, actually: totally us. Get fucked. You asked us to do a single thing: Protect the Jews. And we have done.

    1806:

    "The "Honest Government" video got interrupted by a snake oil ad."

    Good grief, does it actually do that? Randomly stop someone's video playing in the middle and chuck some fucking advert in your face?

    And are the usual adblockers not able to stop that?

    I don't ever watch videos actually "on youtube" - ie. in the browser - at all. I can't. I've gone to considerable lengths to make sure that if any site has any kind of video on it then the browser never even gets to know it's there, and also that even if one does slip past the defences the browser is not able to play it. It must be a good 15 years since I last saw a youtube video playing actually in the browser.

    If by some rare chance I actually want to watch a youtube video, I download it to the hard drive with youtube-dl, and then watch the downloaded video using mplayer. That way it doesn't keep stopping and jerking while it downloads the next bit, it doesn't make the browser slow to a crawl or crash entirely, I don't have to put up with the shitty embedded player you're supposed to get, and I have my own copy to keep and play again whenever I want, which if it is worth watching at all I will probably want to do...

    ...and there are no adverts. All you get is the plain video file. Sometimes whoever made the video has put a screen in it that says "sorry about the ads" but as far as I'm concerned there aren't any, so quite what the details are of the behaviour they're apologising for I don't know.

    Moreover, the plain video file with no adverts is the "natural condition", as it were; youtube-dl doesn't have to jump through any hoops to dodge the adverts, it just works out what the real URL of the video file is and then downloads it straight. The adverts are a separate thing that gets plastered over what you see in the browser but isn't part of the video itself. Some perverse git has put in a feature request to be able to download the ads as well, but according to the youtube-dl developers that's a much more difficult problem than just downloading the video and they've got better things to put their effort into.

    Since putting the ads in is a separate and additional process, I would very much expect adblockers to be able to stop it happening without affecting the video itself. Am I to understand that in fact they don't?

    1807:

    So expropriate the land, rent it back to the individual farmers currently on it, and encourage them to form co-operatives sharing equipment, horses and the like under local control, and selling their produce in the same way.

    This used to be very common where I grew up. It was a horticultural area, with farms limited roughly by the size that a single family could operate effectively. The packhouses were all co-ops, because even a small packhouse can process the fruit from several of those farms. The was across a whole range of produce, and quite a few market gardens (veges for local supermarkets, essentially) worked more or less the same. Part of the cost of buying a farm was buying shares in the relevant co-op(s).

    But the Thatcherite/Reaganite revolution saw the laws restricting those things removed and the larger co-ops forcibly privatised, often via dissolution of the government-operated unified marketing boards. Australia had/has a similar web of rules about who can grow or market some crops, like the Australian Wheat Board.

    One hiccup in that process now is that corporations own most agricultural land in many countries, and often own the associated governments (much as the United Fruit Company owned Honduras, but usually less violently). The days when small farmers couldn't afford a wheat harvesting machine are long gone, these days they can't afford the farm either.

    Reverting that to limit profitability, production, ownership or whatever would first require the US empire be dissolved, because ISDS treaties would make any forcing in that direction very expensive, if the USA permitted it at all (see also: the global war to prevent communism, by genocide where necessary). It's also useful to look at things like the Spanish communes and other co-op and syndicalist movements. Those often face repression from both their local state and international efforts to ensure they fail. It is very much "capitalism is the only viable economic system, we know because the capitalists have killed everyone who tried to prove them wrong".

    1808:

    Triptych: "Official Secrets Act" on UK twitter. Oh my. You should see the shit they've had to hide over the last two years, barbaric levels of stupidity and waste.

    Oh, and literally spreading human shit around the Island: you have to wonder, who Owns them and who is wanking off on their little exploits? [Hint: Trash-Tier [redacted] whose imaginations are limited to that kind of thing].

    Try a taste of this: The ending of ‘FIGHT CLUB’ has been changed in China, with the ending being replaced with text on the screen saying:

    “The police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding.” https://twitter.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1486027654960594944

    That's also not what the Chinese says, but hey, Vice is Murdoch and Saud suck-ups, so whatever.

    Hint: Tyler Durden is an imaginary spectre of the protagonist's Mind, a Figment with a serious fetish for destruction. Is the Wish-fullfillment at the ending supposed to be real?

    Here's the joke: CN doesn't do made-up terror like the USA / UK does (yet) - you know, that "get mentally ill subject, fund them, provide plans, foil at last minute" stuff. Their censors literally cannot process the irony of it all and thus, to them: Tyler Durden is a real character.

    You know, Meta-meta.

    And yeah: perhaps allowing the FBI to fabricate pipe-bombs on Ecoprotesters in the 1970's directly lead [LOL once you spot who is running the Jan 6th Investigation] to faking Insurrection stuff.

    Literally.

    And, well: we just kinda told you. They will kill you for it

    ~

    We don't give a fuck though. BABYLON. Literally, sign of weakness: getting shitty proxies to kill relations, with deniability.

    "Burn their Minds Out". Is usually the response to this kind of shit-house, cowardly and weak actions.

    1809:

    [Cut this, for real]

    Here's a hint: if you spread "Skunk water" over neighbourhoods you hate in IL, and someone links you to the (entirely deliberate) UK water release stuff, you're gonna get really fucking noticed.

    You're not clever, you're fucking lucky our Mandate protects you.

    Last warning.

    You are shit Human Minds, pathetic and your only allies are fucking bog-dwelling Trolls that you have to spend / threaten (yes, we did notice a ITV host getting the boot) to get it to work. Your Minds taste, feel and think like neo-Fascists.

    Literally.

    We also know the [redacted] feeding off you, and they're not particularily "Enlightened" - if they disrespect us again, we will take actions.

    Your foreskin is not a fucking carte blanche ride to Eternity or Memory, remember this. Nor are past traumas a carte blanche ride into "We're utter utter cunts" stuff either.

    ~

    Rack it. And Pray the "Hunters" do not read this. (Spoilers: They do - that's how fucking tiresome you are).

    1810:

    Successful land reforms all look very alike. You annihilate plantations and smallholders both, and create/enlarge the class of owner operators who work the land. No laborers, no lords of the manor. Then you ship the surplus labor off to the city. No. You cant make their conditions "better in place" the economic surplus is not there, they need to be shipped off to someplace which can actually pay them.

    One very important step here is making sure this new class of farmers are created out of the most skilled bits of the current agricultural workforce, which usually means "successful smallholders buying out their less so neighbors until they cant work anymore land" and that market access for their produce is as easy as possible.

    1811:

    you have no fucking clue what we're talking about.

    not only greg begorrah, in a blogroll largely composed of older white guys who value clarity of exposition in the main u are a bit of an outlier

    1812:

    "I would very much expect adblockers to be able to stop it happening without affecting the video itself. Am I to understand that in fact they don't?"

    The only time I've ever seen ads inserted into a video, I had just reinstalled Firefox, and had not got around to installing an ad blocker. Mind you, it was a longer video that I normally look at, so that might be relevant.

    JHomes

    1813:

    Heteromeles @ 1788: Ooh, dueling essay time. Thank you sir!

    No duel about it; I agree with pretty much everything you wrote. It just wasn't the aspect of the brief that I was interested in. To paraphrase much of what you wrote in a sentence, "The rule of law is a necessity not a luxury". So in this hypothetical German revolution the revolutionaries are going to have to move smartly to define and impose their new system, and be pretty agile (in the modern sense) about debugging it.

    (Aside: this necessity is why I keep on asking anti-capitalists "So what do you plan to replace it with?")

    I'm not sure if you want to set this story in the present day where all this is century-old history and largely irrelevant to the plot, or whether you want to set it during the actual revolution and / or its aftermath, in which case these details are going to matter. I'm not a historian, so I can't extrapolate them here.

    The revolutionary government is also simultaneously going to have to worry about foreign affairs. This is still an age of expansionist skirmishing in Western Europe. On the west side the Germans have to worry about France, with a complicated history of border wars and any ethnic German population inside France wanting to be part of the bold new socialist experiment. On the east side they have Russia, and on the south side they have the Austro-Hungarian empire. So that's going to be messy at best; all three neighbours will be simultaneously worried about spreading revolution and figuring out how to exploit the sudden weakness of Germany. There was also the complicated web of bilateral treaties which helped tip the real Europe into war in 1914. So even if Franz Ferdinand doesn't get assassinated in Sarajevo there were plenty of other sparks around the powder keg.

    At the time Germany was the highest of high-tech modernist states. The German chemical industry was really getting into its stride with world-beating technology. One of the challenges for the new rulers will be maintaining this lead.

    1814:

    I imagine if we're going by "most skilled" as a metric large parcels of US farmland would be owned by migrant workers of dubious immigration status.

    1815:

    whitroth @ 1799:

    Heh, heh. If I read you right, you're basically suggesting what I've talked about: control of capital, and nationalize major industry that produces necessities (exercise equipment is not, buses and railcars are).

    Yes, I did think that as I was writing.

    The idea of deprivatizing small shops and restaurants is idiotic.

    Marx was pretty dismissive of the petite-bourgeois, and of course in the USSR the kulaks were liquidated. So while I agree with you, the real revolutionaries didn't.

    This brings me to my throw-away comment in my original post about the interesting failure modes of what I suggested. The brief was a revolution in Germany in the 1910s which led to a socialist state (as socialism was understood then) which did not collapse into a nasty Stalinist dictatorship. So I tried to imagine an alternative to Marxism which avoided his unicorns-and-rainbows utopianism and actually put a workable plan in place for ruling a modern (in 1910s) industrial nation along socialist lines.

    I'm assuming here that Heteromeles wants to write an actual story, as opposed to a guided tour of Utopia. Failure modes and edge cases are where stories happen, so...

    Resource Allocators

    In any system of government is that there will be a class I call the "resource alloctors". These are the people who make decisions about what gets built, who gets paid how much, where things get done, by whom etc. All the nitty gritty everyday decisions that make a society work and literally keep the lights on.

    The fundamental problem is: how do you stop the resource allocators from allocating all the resources to themselves?

    In capitalism the resource allocators are the capitalists. Marx thought you just had to get rid of the resource allocators to solve the problem. But when the USSR tried to do this they found that a literal "new class" of resource allocators emerged:

    New class is used as a polemic term by critics of countries that followed the Soviet-type Communism to describe the privileged ruling class of bureaucrats and Communist party functionaries which arose in these states. Generally, the group known in the Soviet Union as the nomenklatura conforms to the theory of the new class. The term was earlier applied to other emerging strata of the society. Milovan Đilas' new-class theory was also used extensively by anti-communist commentators in the Western world in their criticism of the Communist states during the Cold War.

    In the German Revolutionary ideology I've outlined the revolutionaries correctly identify bankers and capitalists as the resource allocators and hence replace them. However now that the revolutionaries have become the resource allocators they are faced with the fact that their interests are in opposition to the rest of society, because as resource allocators they must allocate some resources to themselves, and there is no principled answer to the question "how much?". Cronyism is inevitable. Incidents of corruption will be hushed up in the interests of the Revolution, leading to more corruption. Perks will multiply. Resentment from the rest of society will grow.

    Innovation

    So we have banks nationalised and run by the government. Money is used as the fundamental control mechanism: small businesses and large workers co-ops both need to access capital, and that capital is now made available by government bureaucrats instead of capitalist bankers. Unfortunately the government has a big interest in stability, which translates into stasis. So the German version of Edison is going to find it difficult to get funds for his electric light business, but money for the gas company will always be forthcoming. Under capitalism Herr Edison could have tried somewhere else, but now he just keeps being referred back to the same bureaucrat who already said no.

    Rules for Workers Co-ops

    In this system the workers co-op is the primary economic organisation, especially at a large scale. Small businesses are tolerated, but only as long as they don't grow too big. This means that the details matter a lot. Questions:

    • What happens when a small private business gets too big? Suppose we say that any business with 50 employees must reform itself into a co-op. Are we going to see lots of companies with exactly 49 employees?

    • How does unemployment work? Does the state provide you with social security, or does it send you to a local co-op with orders to join it? What happens if they don't want you or have no use for you? What happens if you don't want to work there? "Slavery means having someone to call your master and no hope of changing it". Heinlein.

    • Being a member of a co-op is a valuable thing in its own right; part of membership is a literal share in ownership. Can you get fired? If so, how?

    • What happens when a co-operative becomes hugely successful thanks to some new innovation. How much of that wealth does the co-op get to keep? How much do its members get to keep? What if they start offering to lend some of that money on a commercial basis?

    • What happens when a co-op goes bust? How do you tell the Buggy Whip Co-op members (who have worked hard and are very proud of their high quality products) that society doesn't need buggy whips any more?

    • How do you join a co-op? Who makes the hiring decisions? How are these checked for fairness and honesty (see above about "resource allocators".

    • How are co-ops managed? Who makes the strategic decisions? How are they appointed? How do co-ops interact on a commercial basis? Can they be merged or split?

    • Suppose you work in a BIG Co-op, such as a shipyard or iron foundry. How does your work life differ from life under capitalism? What can your straw-boss do or not do that is different? What other options do you have or not have?

    1816:

    The fact that Russia would have insisted on keeping the Crimea as a condition for any such deal might also have had something to do with this. Ukraine would not have agreed to any such thing, so the world would have been treated to the spectacle of NATO and Russia carving up a small country to suit themselves, and Putin would have been handed a precedent he could use elsewhere.

    crimea was transferred from russia to ukraine in 1954 at a time when it must have seemed that the ussr would last forever
    i don't understand why russia saying "ok u can go but ur not taking that with u" is such a deep violation of the treaty of westphalia that we now have to worry about russia treating this as a green light to annex everything in sight

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_transfer_of_Crimea

    1817:

    eh, markdown can't handle links with underscores, can it

    see if this works

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_transfer_of_Crimea

    1818:

    nope

    what a crock

    1819:

    JBS @ 1798
    VERY good question, & think the answer is: "Messily"
    Look at Britain or France or the USA which too, respectively...
    Three civil wars, two revolutions & two attempts at a revanchist takeover.
    A very bloody revolution, a two-decade war another revolution, followed by a "benign" dictatorship, complete military collapse, a long interregnum, another military collapse, a twelve-year confusion & a civilised (ish) reorganisation.
    A long & bitter war, aided by outsiders, followed by pogroms & purges, an 185-year gap, another bitter civil war ... and the repercussions are still playing out, with the possibility, all-too-clearly of another "Time of Troubles" (?)

    1807 - clearly has content: FUCKING WELL TELL US, huh?
    1808 - more of the same
    1811 - tell us something we didn't know already?
    1812 - ??

    Adrian Smith
    But, whether you like it or not, we are COHERENT!
    And, yes, Crimea is difficult.

    moz
    That was nasty.
    ISTM that Bo Jon-Sun & his crowd are going down the same route.

    1820:

    1820-21 You have to escape underscores by preceding every one of them with a backslash. Like this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954\_transfer\_of\_Crimea
    And then just to be sure, preview the comment.

    1821:

    yeah, i seem to remember people talking about that at some point but my attention was elsewhere, thanks

    1822:

    how do you stop the resource allocators from allocating all the resources to themselves?

    Back when I worked at BNR, the space allocator and her assistant somehow ended up with much larger (and more private) cubicles and much nicer office furniture than the engineers had.

    Given that large organizations are not run internally on a competitive market structure* any solution that works for them should work for a fictional communist government.

    *Well, sometimes they are, but that never works well as internal units maximize their numbers at the expense of other units, often undercutting them etc etc…

    1823:

    You have to escape underscores by preceding every one of them with a backslash

    Alternately, putting the link inside paragraph tags seems to work. Precede it with lessthan-p-greaterthan, follow with lessthan-slash-p-greaterthan.

    1824:

    So the German version of Edison is going to find it difficult to get funds for his electric light business, but money for the gas company will always be forthcoming. Under capitalism Herr Edison could have tried somewhere else, but now he just keeps being referred back to the same bureaucrat who already said no.

    Not quite same thing, but you reminded me of this quote I heard a couple times: "If in 1950 US government declared a Manhattan-project scale effort to combat polio, they would have come up with a walking iron lung, instead of vaccine."

    1825:

    In cause anyone is still interested, and not aware of this, Omicron is toast. In the UK, Son of Omicron (a.k.a. BA.2) will essentially replace Omicron in the latter half of February. It's reported to be little different, based on the usual absence of evidence.

    1826:

    The trouble with that is that if the "appropriate bastard" "self-assembles", how does change happen? It's got to be someone(s) willing (or planning) on change (see Washington with two terms as President, then letting the elections happen, and giving it up).

    1827:

    Thanks! Didn't know about youtube-dl, though I knew there were such.

    1828:

    The big issue, that I've pointed out, is the eastern third of Ukraine, which include the Crimea, that's overwhelmingly Russian speaking (and culturally, I have to assume), and the laws that the current pro-Western government passed against them.

    Hey, if Yugoslavia can be broken up ethnically....

    1829:

    Two immensely significant issues with land reform:

    1. with modern machinery, you need a fraction the number of humans to do the farming. The rest are surplus... and remember, 25% of them were part of the 25% worst farmers.

    2. A lot of people don't want to farm. They want lives other than that (why many kids of farmers leave if they have the chance. Farming is immensely hard work, and often dangerous. Yes, there are plenty of people who imagine they'd like to farm... and for 90% of them, at least, that dream would last at most one summer before they ran for the city.

    1830:

    Um, er, I think you've managed to avoid the issue of Poland. And Austria-Hungary.

    1831:
  • "Real revolutionaries"... you've just lumped all of them into "bolshevik". Invalid and indigestible lump.

  • Resource allocators: that's an easy one: you have them allocating resources, except to themselves, and an opposing (for values of "opposing" like the Army-Navy (American) football game) agency who allocates resource for agencies that aren't allowed to allocate resources for themselves. And, of course, the allocators have to allocate this other agency resources, or the other agency won't be able to allocate to them.

  • a) so you have a ton of 49-employee companies. And? They can't do huge production, that does require larger organizations. And as we see right now, breaking up an organization into "competing divisions", each of which must be a profit source, not a resource sink, is one of the major complete failures of the MBA idea.
    b) As I said originally, once an organization hits x% (10%? 20%?) of the local economy (local being defined as in what region it applies - an electric co would probably be county, or region (see Philly area transit SEPTA), or BoeLockMart is national), it starts including shares as part of the tax payment (no, not the value of the shares, the actual number of shares, and they damn well are voting shares), and a government agency votes those shares, and they can be directed by the legislature.)
    c) How do co-ops now work? Isn't becoming part like being vested, over x years? And firing gets you some part of your vesting as cash payments?
    d) Finally, in my universe (and I've been thinking about this a lot, since my Terran Confederation has to believably work), everyone gets (you can refuse) BMI. And some of it is targeted - x amount as housing payments, which can either be saved, or spent only for rent/mortgage/etc, some for food, some for everything else. And there is massive automation. And a lot of production is by far-advanced versions of 3D printers... so we are in what I've been referring to since the nineties as a "post-Adamic society" (where you no longer need to earn your living by the sweat of your brow), and you can choose what, if anything, you want to do, not accept whatever's available to pay the rent and buy food. Talk to people - a lot of folks will not want to sit on their butts and watch The Game or whatever all their waking hours.
  • 1832:

    David L @ 1805:

    Those kind of scams wouldn't be permitted on Commercial Television and I don't see why YouTube can't be policed at least as well as that. I'm not proposing censorship, just some kind of "truth in advertising" regime.

    Actually it IS tolerated all over most US TV. Just not in the major networks in the evenings.

    You've got to remember that Dr Oz is a product of Oprah. And the infomercials and 6 minute ads on old re-run TV and non prime time cable are amazing in their claims of nonsense and miracles.

    Yeah, I should have written Over-The-Air broadcast Commercial Television.

    I know that cable has whole channels devoted to those SCAMS. I don't have a TV, and can't watch OTA broadcasts (even if I wasn't terrain masked 1) & I don't have cable TV.

    The ONLY TV I get to watch comes via YouTube and Snake-Oil SPAM just aggravates the shit out of me.

    1 I did have a TV for a while; I bought a 1080P dual purpose monitor that had a HDTV tuner. Couldn't receive any OTA broadcasts with it.

    I'd need an external antenna mounted on a fairly tall mast (at least 20' above the ridge of my roof) to get line-of-sight with the tower farm down in Auburn, NC

    1833:

    Pigeon @ 1809:

    "The "Honest Government" video got interrupted by a snake oil ad."

    Good grief, does it actually do that? Randomly stop someone's video playing in the middle and chuck some fucking advert in your face?

    Yes, they do. I think it's IF whoever uploaded the video "monetized" it, agreed to have random ads interrupt the video. NON-monetized videos only seem to have ads before or after the video runs.

    I don't upload to YouTube, so I'm not exactly sure how it all works. I can only describe what I see happening.

    And are the usual adblockers not able to stop that?

    I don't have any adblockers except for the HOSTS file. And the ads on YouTube seem to come from the same servers as the videos, so HOSTS doesn't block ads. I used to run NoScript (but haven't got it installed on this new computer ... YET) and it didn't block the ads either because they appear to come from the YouTube servers - Top Level Domain ???.

    1834:

    Adrian Smith @ 1819:

    The fact that Russia would have insisted on keeping the Crimea as a condition for any such deal might also have had something to do with this. Ukraine would not have agreed to any such thing, so the world would have been treated to the spectacle of NATO and Russia carving up a small country to suit themselves, and Putin would have been handed a precedent he could use elsewhere.

    crimea was transferred from russia to ukraine in 1954 at a time when it must have seemed that the ussr would last forever
    i don't understand why russia saying "ok u can go but ur not taking that with u" is such a deep violation of the treaty of westphalia that we now have to worry about russia treating this as a green light to annex everything in sight

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954transferof_Crimea

    I think a part of it is the time that passed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. If the Russian successor state had demanded to keep the Crimea at the time Ukraine gained its independence (1991?) it would have been different.

    But they didn't. They waited 25 years and then took the territory by force.

    1835:

    Um, er, I think you've managed to avoid the issue of Poland. And Austria-Hungary.

    The short answer is that I structured the request that way for multiple reasons.

    I appreciate Paul's thinking on this, mostly because we approach issues in very different ways. I also appreciate your thinking for the same reason.

    One of the interesting problems of trying to deal with this is that we're looking back a century. The Nomenklatura issue is an example of this. Were people at Lenin's level aware that they were creating a new class in their classless society? Or did it only become apparent later, or did they assume it was a problem, but since they were in survival mode, they accepted that it was better than the alternative and went with it?

    I don't know the answer, but that's why it's useful to take multiple approaches. There's the question of what history and theory would say, which is where people who are familiar with historical communism are so useful. There's also the systems analysis approach, which is more-or-less what Paul's talking about, which is useful. Then there's the chronological approach, which is more what I'm doing with Kilcullen. If you think about this, it rather constrains the situations in which a communist insurgency might actually win in 19-teens Germany. That, in turn, constrains what the resulting government looks like, which in turn shapes which problems they solve and which ones they punt on, even though the punted problems may be worse than the ones they felt were more urgent.

    There are also known personality issues, which is why real history is important even in alt-history. For example, Ebert wasn't Lenin, so putting him in charge of a suddenly communist Germany won't automatically make it a rerun of the creation of the USSR. As a second example, if Lenin and Trotsky somehow ended up running Germany, I don't think it would become a copy of our Soviet Russia, because the Germans would be reacting to their new foreign rulers differently than the Russians were reacting to their homegrown heroes. Third, and to put this politely, while it's proper to elevate martyrs as heroes, I'm not sure it follows that the various and sundry Martyrs to the Revolution were all genius-level politicians ho simply got unlucky. We're talking about alt-history of course, so they might have been. Or not. I'm not sure either way.

    1836:

    I had a thought about your German revolution. The left often wins because of the failures of the right, it certainly happens here. So what about something that discredits the right and militarism as they were so entwined at this period.

    The war itself was not enough in our timeliness, so you would have to look for something that the right would disapprove of. There's treason, but of course that was actually used by the right, the stab in the back etc. So perhaps homosexuality, involving Ernst Rohm and high ranking transvestites maybe? Thats a bit lurid and inappropriate though! But it is probably something that might work. As for something else, I don't think I know enough about the period. Worth a thought maybe?

    1837:

    is the eastern third of Ukraine, which include the Crimea, that's overwhelmingly Russian speaking

    This is more from Stalin getting (forcing?) ethnic Russians to move there than anything else. I'm assuming to make it harder for Ukraine to have ideas about independence in the future.

    1838:

    And, of course, the allocators have to allocate this other agency resources, or the other agency won't be able to allocate to them.

    Just who are these totally moral ethical people who will not be making deals with each other. And if that gets them into trouble fairly soon there will be 3, 4, and 10 way deals to hide the trails.

    Your solutions seem to ignore human nature. Which is what some of the others are trying to deal with in their ideas. To make it awkward for the jerks to ruin it for everyone else.

    1839:

    I rather like Herbert Wells’ idea about how to bring into politics people who are not power-hungry, not corrupt, and are competent.

    You get rid of the power-hungry by making elected officials live like monks — to have lower standard of living than the average for the country’s population. Boring food, no booze, no money, and state-provided concrete apartment to live in. Bodyguards and aides, but no servants.

    You get rid of the corrupt by forcing them to live in isolation for a year after their term in the office is over. They can have luxuries to make up for their previous monastic existence, but no contact with the outside world, thus no opportunity to cash in on the contacts they have made while in office.

    I do not remember what was the solution to get rid of the incompetent, but this is by far the easiest — some kind of test on the overall knowledge.

    1840:

    Yeah, I should have written Over-The-Air broadcast Commercial Television.

    In the US for a decade or few now these folks also sell snake oil. Just not in the 8 hour or so window of late afternoon till midnight. In those times the legit folks outbid them. At 2am or 1pm the snake oil is there.

    1841:

    I think a part of it is the time that passed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. If the Russian successor state had demanded to keep the Crimea at the time Ukraine gained its independence (1991?) it would have been different.

    But they didn't. They waited 25 years and then took the territory by force.

    i'm not sure the russian successor state was in a fit state to do anything that proactive in 1991, i mean i imagine they must have been in a kind of institutional shock

    also it's a bit disingenuous to just say they "waited 25 years" as though nothing had happened in ukraine. they waited until a us-fomented color revolution showed signs of wanting to move towards nato and brought into government people with ties to wartime fascist groups

    i'm also suspicious of anything involving victoria nuland on general principles, sue me

    1842:

    Ebert wasn't Lenin, so putting him in charge of a suddenly communist Germany won't automatically make it a rerun of the creation of the USSR.

    Size also counts. Germany is very compact and local compared to the USSR. A train trip across one was a different thing from the other.

    1843:

    Nick Gruen in Australia is a big fan of using citizens juries to come up with solutions for hard problems, and sortition/random selection more broadly to reduce the opportunities for corruption.

    The idea is that for a specific decision like "Should Ireland legalise abortion" that's controversial and has conflicting entrenched opinions but at social agreement that change is needed... you pick a reasonable number of people to make a decision, give them a year and decent resources to view the information, ask questions, cogitate, and argue amongst themselves. In public, but somewhat shielded from the argy-bargy that politicians get... like a jury.

    When those lot come out with a decision/recommendation, it has political weight because of the random and representative nature of the people in the jury. Even if the outcome is "we think a constitutional change is needed", they can save you going through a stupid process and ending up with a biased question that leads to a predetermined result (in Australia John Howards picked a very stupid republic model to ask "would you rather have this, then? Well, would ya? Ha, thought not". The jury saying "here's the question for a referendum" or whatever is much more likely to be reasonable.

    At a smaller scale, similar things for local government decisions and even within NGOs can work well. At that level it meshed well with a spokescouncil model, as well as the uniform response "oh god not another 50 hours of meetings to discover that some people would rather destroy the group than change their minds".

    https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/insights/detoxing-democracy-citizens-juries

    https://clubtroppo.com.au/2022/01/13/ideas-hacks-representation-by-sampling-and-political-theory/

    1844:

    "i'm not sure the russian successor state was in a fit state to do anything that proactive in 1991, i mean i imagine they must have been in a kind of institutional shock"

    They did try, but events got ahead of them before they could get it together.

    1845:

    Ebert wasn't Lenin, so putting him in charge of a suddenly communist Germany won't automatically make it a rerun of the creation of the USSR. Size also counts. Germany is very compact and local compared to the USSR. A train trip across one was a different thing from the other.

    Ummmm, Well, I'm greatly ignorant on this, but that's not what I'm getting from the canned history, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918-1919

    Friedrich Ebert, head of the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) had the "choice" of allying with those to his left (Luxemburg, Liebknecht and company) and with the military. He started working with the military, first quietly, then openly. On the one hand, talking with the opposition to try to keep things from exploding is ordinary politics, so I don't blame him. Had I been in his shoes, given how many recently defeated soldiers were around, I'd probably do the same thing.

    Problem is Ebert and his SPD split with the nascent People's Council, sided with the military when the communists split away from the SPD, then turned loose the Freikorps against the far-left Spartacists when they revolted. He went on to become the first president of the Weimar Republic.

    Lenin went through something similar in the 1917 Revolution, and sided left, freezing out the right wing. There was also this little six year-long civil war that followed, until the Bolsheviks were firmly in power.

    That's what I mean about personalities. Were Lenin in charge in Berlin, he'd probably have gone with the People's Congress and dealt with a right-wing revolt. Ebert would likely have done the opposite in Russia.

    Obviously this isn't a quiz and there's not a right answer. But the German and Russian revolutions did happen more-or-less simultaneously (possibly like the Arab Spring?) and had different outcomes (also like the Arab Spring). The only place I'd disagree with you is that it appears that most of the critical actions in both took place in the respective capitols, so it's more about the actions of the players, not the size of the countries, at least in the beginning.

    Actually, in writing this....the Arab Spring uprisings. Hmmm. Trying to get more people power in authoritarian systems. There's a bit of a parallel there. Hmmmm.

    Anyway, I do appreciate the conversation on this. It's really quite useful to get multiple points of view and bounce ideas around. Thanks!

    1846:

    i'm not sure the russian successor state was in a fit state to do anything that proactive in 1991, i mean i imagine they must have been in a kind of institutional shock

    also it's a bit disingenuous to just say they "waited 25 years" as though nothing had happened in ukraine. they waited until a us-fomented color revolution showed signs of wanting to move towards nato and brought into government people with ties to wartime fascist groups

    i'm also suspicious of anything involving victoria nuland on general principles, sue me

    But not only did they wait 25 years, they also saw fit to ignore the treaty they signed guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity if Ukraine gave up its nukes. Clearly, this was a bad idea for Ukraine in retrospect.

    Access to Sevastopol is a lousy argument, Russia had a 45-year lease until 2042 with possible extensions. As for the US, they have zero interest in a naval base on the Black Sea. All they want to do is freedom of navigation exercises since under the current rules governing the Bosphorus warships are allowed through.

    If the US really wanted a Black Sea naval base, they could have gotten one from Bulgaria or Romania easily enough, let alone Turkey.

    1847:

    i don't think the us would want a black sea naval base so much as they might like russia losing one
    what are us warships doing in the black sea, anyway - sampling the fleshpots of trebizond?

    1849:

    "For example, Ebert wasn't Lenin, so putting him in charge of a suddenly communist Germany won't automatically make it a rerun of the creation of the USSR."

    Ebert wasn't a communist, and he wasn't a revolutionary either; he was trying to keep things stable enough that there would not be a revolution. The people who became the Spartacists are the best place to look for candidates; the same people would mostly be around, even if the groupings and organisations were different.

    I'm still having trouble visualising what leads up to the revolution. By 191x Billy 2 won't have been in for more than a few years, so you don't have the mesh of alliances that developed in response to his belligerent-schoolboy behaviour over preceding decades; the Germany he gets to be in charge of is less militaristic and more industrial/commercial, giving him less reason to feel insecure about Germany's world-player status, and less encouragement to see that status in purely military terms with military force the natural way of increasing it.

    Austria-Hungary doesn't want a war; they have elements who would like to smack down the uppity ex-Ottoman territories, but their main concern is basically not falling to bits. Franz Josef is a walking fossil; Franz Ferdinand, if he survives, is a Balkan sympathiser. They are aware that their state is such that they can't depend on the "war is a potent force for national unity" idea and it's just as likely to have the opposite effect. It's quite likely also that that walking disaster zone Conrad's luck has failed to keep up with him; it had to run pretty hard as it is, and his influence may well not be there.

    Britain is probably basically inclined to favour Germany; there was always a fair amount of feeling that Germans weren't really too bad as foreigners go but being in alliance with France was unnatural, and it was still around even while the war was going on. The commercial rise of Germany is a potential concern but not a massive one, as Britain still has Empire, and Billy 2 hasn't been running the show long enough to start getting threatening ideas about naval expansion. Britain isn't going to get involved with any continental wars unless there's no possible choice.

    France wants Alsace-Lorraine back. But the emphasis on this was already fading by the time WW1 came along and boosted it back into full prominence. If by some miracle their military had bounced back and got strong enough to confidently take on Germany within say the first 20 years or so after the Franco-Prussian war, they might have gone for it, but after that it gets less and less likely. As it was they were seriously worried about shortage of manpower and felt the need to extend the duration of conscript service before WW1 kicked off (though as it turned out, not enough before). I can't see them making an offensive move unless Germany was already seriously weakened. They didn't want another 1870.

    Russia of course is everyone's pariah as usual, and their situation is still basically the same. They have still got stomped by the Japanese and been shocked into the programme of military reform which led Germany to conclude that they'd become invincible before the decade was out, and they still have the gaffer-taped political instabilities. They still have the Slavic-brotherhood motivation to get involved with the Balkans, even if they'd rather not, and they still want control over Constantinople and the western Black Sea territories if they get the chance. And Germany's Plan For The Next War is still looking much like the original version of the "Schlieffen plan" idea, with everything directed against Russia and not much concern with defending the west.

    Franz Ferdinand's assassination is one of those random things that needs very little fluttering of the butterflies of history to make it not happen (and it very nearly didn't come off as it was). He could have made his visit on a less provocative date or not made it at all or nobody had the idea of bumping him off or etc. etc. etc. I guess it probably doesn't happen, but I also guess that some other thing does, probably around ex-Ottoman countries having another bout of stabbing each other in the back.

    It seems to me that it still is quite possible for a war to start and perhaps even more likely, due to the lesser development of alliances among the potential enemies, but also that it would be less likely to suddenly explode everywhere at once and drag everyone in at the same time; I'm thinking you'd get more of a series of more localised but overlapping conflicts, with the main war zone migrating across the map as one player gets defeated and another one thinks they see some advantage and chimes in on their own account. I'm still seeing Germany as having the longest and most arduous involvement, but they don't have anything like the supply difficulties they got clobbered by in WW1; they don't get encircled and they don't get blockaded by the British - more likely Britain assists them with supply, especially if Russian territorial expansion around the Black Sea is coming into it.

    The thing is that what nearly did cause a revolution in Germany was the privations imposed on the population by those supply difficulties, followed by defeat in a manner which thoroughly discredited the existing leadership and the system they came from. I'm not seeing where the comparably powerful trigger is going to come from. The state of war may well drag on for longer, but causes significantly less hardship to the German population and probably doesn't end in defeat. I can still just as much see a revolution happening in Russia, but it looks less likely in what Germany would probably be like than it did in what it actually was like. Quite possibly also they could get support in preventing or suppressing a revolution, probably from Britain, since the fear of communism was already rampant and rabid before any actual communist states existed.

    Marx had his eye on Germany as the place where the revolution would most likely kick off, but he is assuming a degree of authoritarianism inflexibility that is able to keep the lid on things until the pressure builds up to the point of a bloody big bang. Even with wartime powers they didn't quite manage to get that stiff. Russia, with its endemic extreme authoritarianism combined with incompetence, did, and it did go bang. Britain muddled its way to the realisation that you could allow the kind of de-restriction that would act as a localised pressure relief as and when it was needed, and while you might get the odd blast of released steam here and there you would not have to worry about the whole boiler going up, and it seems to me that the more successful Fritz was at swinging the emphasis from militarism to industrialism in the 20 or so years he'd probably have, the more chance there would be of that lesson being picked up.

    1850:

    All I'll say is that I've got a scenario, and I think a communist Germany is at least as likely, based on the priors, as a Communist Russia was in our world in 1914.

    One factor I'm contemplating is based on the survival of Wilhelm's father Frederick. In our world, Wilhelm (born in 1859) and came to power in 1888 after his father died of cancer 99 days after he ascended to the throne.

    In the alt-history, Frederick III lives another 20 or so years, and Wilhelm, instead of ascending in his late 20s, comes to the throne as a more Trumpian figure in his early 50s, keen to prove he can live up to the stature of his father and especially grandfather, but quite unable to do so. Worse (for his era), he was probably a closeted homosexual, and it does appear that he felt he needed to prove his machismo a bit, something that rarely leads to political wisdom.

    Anyway, Wilhelm's grandfather had united Germany (or rather had it united for him by Bismarck). The old man was a soldier, although his wife was liberal and smarter than he was. Frederick took after his liberal mom and apparently rather liked his liberal father-in-law Prince Albert, to the extent that he wanted to abolish the German Chancellorship and institute a UK-style ministerial government. I'm assuming in this scenario that this is precisely what he does.

    So that's the deep set-up, based on personalities: Europe had been more liberal than in our timeline for decades. However, the old liberals had passed, and their successors (like Wilhelm 2) were doing what we'd now expect--veering rightward as the wealthy worked to reclaim their power.

    That sets up a stage for all sorts of disgruntlement in the teens. Add to that a problematic war and a reasonably competent opposition with a reasonably coherent anti-war message, and there's the makings of a far-left overthrow of the monarchy in Germany. Whether it starts or stops there? I'll have to write the book to find out.

    1851:

    Pigeon
    * By 191x Billy 2 won't have been in for more than a few years* - um, err: Actually died in 1941 (!)
    Agree re. "FF" - he wanted the Dual Monarchy to evolve into a Commonwealth. The Serbian nutters who set WWI off actually killed the person most likely to help them ...

    1852:

    It's an interesting scenario! Remember that

    The theme of dynastic variability and liberalism is a good one, I'd want to know what's going on in Austria-Hungary through the same period. The famous Mayerling Incident took place in 1889, and while Rudolf was half Frederick's age, he too represented a potential left turn, one with implications about the ongoing potential of the Empire. Rudolf's liberal Bavarian mother was popular in Hungary and Austrian Italy, and maybe a (surviving) Rudolf could have seen a mentor in a (surviving) Frederick. Franz Josef would still live another 30 years, but it might go differently. One of the (many) conspiracy stories about Mayerling is that Rudolf refused to back a French-led coup to depose Franz in his favour, encouraging a liberal turn.

    What would that mean after 20-30 years? Two emperors keen to repair relations after the unpleasantness of the 1860s? Certainly it's possible to see less direct hatred from fringe political groups in Austria's imperial possessions aimed at the imperial family, and a totally different trigger for war in the 1910s.

    1853:

    whitroth @ 1834:

    • "Real revolutionaries"... you've just lumped all of them into "bolshevik". Invalid and indigestible lump.

    Well, and Marxist. But yes, the reality of revolutionary movements at the time was complex and fluid, and I'm not getting into that. I just wanted to point out that "The idea of deprivatizing small shops and restaurants is idiotic." was not considered an obvious statement at the time.

    *Resource allocators: that's an easy one ... [Have two groups decide how much to pay each other]

    If this was QI there would be a big flashing sign and a siren going "awooga awooga" at this point. You have just given the answer that is simple, obvious, and wrong. (Don't feel too bad: I thought of this one as well).

    Exercise for the student: list some reasons why this won't work. Hint: one answer has already been discussed in this thread.

    so you have a ton of 49-employee companies. And?

    The more I think about it, the more interesting that question gets.

    Lets suppose you are a petit bourgeois company owner with 49 employees and orders piling up. You need to increase productivity, but you can't hire another employee because at that point they get the legal right to become a co-operative.

    The only thing you can do is automate. Luckily this is the heyday of automation; lots of people are making machines to make machines. So instead of spending money hiring more people you spend it on machines to make your 49 staff more productive. With only 49 staff you can't afford to have narrow specialists; everyone needs to be able to turn their hands to whatever is necessary, so you invest in their training, and then you have to increase wages and improve conditions where necessary to keep them. Yes, you could just hire a replacement, but then you need to spend all that money again to train them. This was a time when people expected a job to last you for life, and loyalty was a prized attribute.

    So an inadvertent result of this policy will be a bubbling culture of small companies with highly skilled well paid staff and a culture of automating anything they can. Going into the 20th Century that could be a massive win. Compare this with the actually existing German Mittelstand.

    Of course this assumes that investment is available. Are the state controlled banks allowed to lend to small private companies? Or are they allowed their own arrangements of shareholding and money lending?

    And another thing

    Also, an important question I forgot to ask earlier in my post on edge cases and failure modes: what is the smallest allowable co-operative? 50? 10? 1?

    The answer matters, because if an individual or very small group can call themselves a co-operative and hire themselves out to anyone who can pay, that starts to look a lot like what we would call a zero hours contract.

    One failure mode of highly controlled labour markets is the development of a two-tier system; at the top you have workers in protected jobs with strong unions, job protection, good wages and conditions. And below them you have everyone else in short-term unprotected jobs being exploited. Everyone agrees that this is a bad situation, but the people in the top tier don't want to see their pay and conditions watered down, but nobody can see how to effectively extend all the nice protections to the bottom tier.

    As long as the co-operatives are not required to employ everyone there are going to be unemployed people. Maybe the government can make UBI work, but doing so in the 1910s is going to be a challenge. Stopping the unemployed from becoming an underclass is a problem in every system.

    1854:

    For dealing with the resource allocators I would suggest transparency. They publish what they do and the public, or more likely journalists and academics, examine it. Of course this necessitates a free press and academia which is another possible failure point.

    You say UBI would be a challenge in 1910, but look at what the Romans managed with their dole. It's not UBI, but it suggests it could be managed 2000 years later.

    1855:

    For dealing with the resource allocators I would suggest transparency.

    Its an idea.

    "Resource allocator" is my term. Under capitalism the most common job title for these people is "manager". This is maybe 5 or 10 % of the working population, and back in 1910 that probably means a much higher proportion of the literate ones. So the sheer volume of information makes it difficult to evaluate. Plus, there were no computers in those days: if you wanted to audit the accounts you did it by hand, possibly with a mechanical hand calculator if you were a professional accountant or computer (back then a "computer" was a human who did arithmetic for a living).

    One bit of anecdata for context: in Oleg Gordievsky's memoir he describes a KGB training centre with two saunas. One was reserved for the senior staff, and the other was reserved for the centre head and his family and guests. Put the KGB bit to one side and assume that this was "public" knowledge. Would anyone notice?

    Part of the problem with the Resource Allocator class is that they get to set their own rules; its not just about pay scales, its about everything they do; working hours, conditions, perks, staff, expense accounts, name it. Any organisation has a bunch of rules about this stuff, and also a bunch of unwritten rules about who has to follow the written rules. Auditing all this is highly non-trivial.

    (Aside: due to a junior secretary not getting the memo, I once flew business class to the USA while my manager was in the back in cattle class, because his PA, being efficient, had got the memo).

    The press may or may not be much help; scandals sell papers, so digging into Senior Comptroller Joseph Bloggs' expense account might be interesting. The UK parliamentary expenses scandal is a case in point. But its not a rigorous or reliable method, and people are very bad at assessing the risk of something unusual.

    So transparency might be part of the solution, but I bet its not the whole of it.

    Also, the co-ops in my scheme are competing with each other in an essentially capitalist mode, so there is going to be a lot of stuff they consider commercially in confidence.

    1856:

    Yes. And some leading members of the extreme anti-Russian group that took power when the Ukraine government was overthrown stated their intention of reneging on the contract and turning Sebastopol into a NATO base, which would have enabled USA missiles even closer to Moscow. Russia had no military option but to invade.

    1857:

    I meant to reply to this earlier. Yes. I repeatedly got told that I could cut back on my (heavy) pack, but most people did not understand that enough clothing is a survival matter, and sleeping out for 6 nights is VERY different from day hiking.

    I don't have much joy with Sealskinz. I got some socks in the hope of covering up for the ghastly boots (*) that are all that is available nowadays, found they lasted only one trip, and weren't comfortable then. The gloves were better, but I rarely need that type of glove, and find other solutions work better. I have a thick mop of hair, so don't wear hats :-)

    (*) It's extremely hard to get ones you can flex your toes properly in, and none of the synthetic ones are waterproof (except the rubber things, which are NOT suitable for walking in). Modern leather is OK for one day, sometimes two, if it starts by being well-treated, but leaks like damnation after that, and you can't treat sodden leather.

    1858:

    How about a compromise solution on the number of people in a company (I'm going to mostly leave cooperatives alone here.) When the company is young the owner is entitled to all the profits - keeping a young company going is difficult-enough without the state interfering. But as the company grows it must issue dividend-paying stock, with a percentage set-aside for the workers, including voting stock, something like this:

    10 workers 5% stock set aside 30 workers 10% stock set aside 60 workers 15% stock set aside

    and so forth up to the point where 49% of the stock is set-aside for the workers (and up to 51% kept by the owner.) The workers would not individually vote stock, instead they would vote it as a group. In fact, the "cooperative" might be the stock-owning entity in which the workers are enrolled.

    This encourages automation, it also encourages the company to stay small (higher % for the owner) and it encourages workers to be well-informed about their industry and how business/pricing works, so they don't make mistakes when voting their stock - the workers and owner must make a mutual agreement not to be too greedy or the company will fail. One of the common failure-modes of a company would be "bankrupt, stock, premises and machinery purchased by the worker's cooperative."

    This idea also encourages workers to really get behind the company and push - going from 36 workers (for example) to 61 workers is a nice little bump.

    Workers would fall out of the cooperative as they retire, and gain rank in the cooperative as they stay longer at the company. Either the cooperative or the company would manage the retirement plan and make severance payments if someone was fired/laid off.

    This is as close to "full Marxism" as I think it's possible to go, and of course the numbers could be adjusted to fit any particular society's ideal of social justice.

    1859:

    Hey, do you have a cite on this? I don't disbelieve you - people can be that stupid - but would like to know more.

    1860:

    Wow! I should have escaped the "greater-than" signs and thrown in some HTML to make line-breaks happen. It should read:

    > 10 workers 5% stock set aside
    > 30 workers 10% stock set aside
    > 60 workers 15% stock set aside

    1861:

    I didn't keep a link, though it may not have reached most of the western press - it was more widely reported that Reuters's reports showing external organisation behind the coup. It was before the dust had settled, which is why I phrased things as I did - I don't know if those idiots ended up as members of the new government or not.

    1862:

    I don't know if those idiots ended up as members of the new government or not.

    And that's definitely an issue. Any new government taking power in the Ukraine/Crimea would be bugfuck nuts not to make it clear to the Russians that they intend to honor that particular treaty.

    1863:

    sigh

    How many lived there already? I don't know, but suggesting that a border is like a mountain range, or a Trump Wall (tm), is ludicrous. I suggest to you that the population was smeared.

    Yes, Stalin pushed a lot in... and now they've lived there for 80 years or so - four generations. Are you suggesting that they be ethnically cleansed by being forced to relocate to Russia, away from the home they've known for generations?

    1864:

    Really? Quick, give me an alternate answer that would work, 100% of the time?

    I gave what would work to some degree, the one the Founding Father of the US did - competing bureaucracies, who would have reasons to not deal.

    1865:

    Here's a more interesting one: The Revolution, for real. Russia, perhaps, as a trigger... but with a base of the troops who were beyond fed up, revolutions in both Germany AND France. And someone comes up with the idea of the Charlemagnian Socialist Republic....

    1866:

    Please note that part of my response was thinking of right now, not a century ago. Automation, back then, was not going to replace workers - they needed more workers, and with so much of the male population murdered in the war, women are going to have to be brought in.

    Consider the implications.

    On top of which, the revolutionary government can push unionization... and so most of those 49-person companies are unionized. Unionization would also ease the transition to co-op. In fact, your government could insist on unionization to precede transition to co-op.

    On the negative side, I can see the owners forming a guild.

    1867:

    I think also that length of time employed in the company works for vesting... and strong laws (as opposed, say, to the joke of agism laws in the US) against laying someone off as they're about to start or complete vesting.

    1868:

    They WERE bugfuck nuts (*)! Their very first action was to pass a bill cancelling a law that gave the 1/3 of Russian speakers in Ukraine rights to continue using their language, and that is what triggered the secession of Donbass etc. See paragraph 3 of:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War#Euromaidan_and_Anti-Maidan

    (*) And continued to be, though they have been showing signs of sanity in recent days, calling on the west to reign back the rhetoric.

    1870:

    I am reading it now (and providing a corrected URL for anyone else who wants to read it) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian\_War#Euromaidan\_and\_Anti-Maidan

    1871:

    It's an interesting scenario! Remember that

    Did a paragraph get deleted here? I do that a lot.

    As for the famous Waverling incident, that's the first I heard of it, which tells you how much history I know.

    Interesting thing is that 1888-1892 wasn't a good year for European royalty.

    1888 was "the year of the three emperors" in Germany (Wilhelm I dies, Frederick III dies 99 days later, Wilhelm II gets his turn) 1889 Waverling Incident (too much reading of Romeo and Juliet? (/snark)) 1892 Crown Prince Albert Victor of England dies of influenza (definitely).

    I'm not sure the last particularly matters, aside from the fact that his replacement, George V, set the standard for "Middle Class" British royalty. Currently, Good Prince Andrew is more a throwback to the ways of Albert Victor, based on rumored behavior for both of them.

    Which reminds me, I keep leaving out the US. If Lincoln survived and Reconstruction actually happened, who the heck got saddled with the Presidency over that timespan? Given the way the far right acted then and now, I'd expect the President's staff to have done a much better job at separating presidents from potential assassins (e.g. Garfield, McKinley, and Teddy Roosevelt, who survived). And no southern democrat need apply for the job ever again. Beyond that? I've got some more thinking to do.

    1872:

    There's no doubt that Grant's going to get in, as well.

    1873:

    EC
    There's no doubt that some of the newer Ukraine guvmint were off their heads ( Or were Ru agents - it's all so confusing & bonkers). Similarly, some of the previous guvmint were equally ethnonationistally off their rockers - aligning with Putin's own extremists' present supranationalist fantasies - "Grand Duchy of Finland", anyone?
    Agree though that this: Their very first action was to pass a bill cancelling a law that gave the 1/3 of Russian speakers in Ukraine rights to continue using their language, and ... - was loopy. I mean, didn't they LEARN from something similar in Estonia, which was rowed back from?

    H
    "Mayerling" - the "Hunting Lodge" where the "suicide" took place.
    There's a modern Ballet on the subject, & in that play the involvement of outside forces is strongly hinted at.

    1874:

    There's no doubt that Grant's going to get in, as well.

    Actually looking at the presidents of the era, I could make a case for many of them making it to POTUS at some point. That includes Grover Cleveland (the sole democrat, but a reformer in a time of corruption). Note that I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing, or that they were the best of all possible players. However, I don't think they were quite as unpredicted as IQ 45, for example. That may be a post hoc fallacy kicking in, but this was an era of machine politics and patronage (cf Cleveland coming in to reform that).

    The part that gets interesting is actually obvious: so much of their presidencies got defined by what was going on in the country at the time. A few of them made what turned out to be bonehead mistakes. At least one (Chester Arthur) may have done a better job than he is reputed to have. Most seem to have just muddled through. Give them a radically different political environment, and they'd probably muddle through while accomplishing different things.

    So if I was being lazy, I might just keep most of that list, with dates fiddled a bit. It's more fun to throw in Reconstruction and scrape a bunch of the gilding off the facade anyway.

    1875:

    EC 1860: You would be shocked by some of the gear I've been supplied with by employers!

    EC 1871: That link doesn't show what you seem to think it does, it just shows how the Russians engineered things.

    1876:

    That link was merely a reference to the events; I tracked them as they happened on independent Web sites, and it is more-or-less correct. I sincerely hope that you aren't claiming that Russia engineered that coup - that's too tinfoil hat even for the "Biden stole the election" mob.

    1877:

    Following up by bombing the infrastructure (hitting a good many residential areas) in the separatist-held areas wasn't exactly going to encourage the people living there to rejoin the fold, either. THAT didn't get reported in the western press. Yes, they were bugfuck insane.

    1878:

    strong laws (as opposed, say, to the joke of agism laws in the US) against laying someone off as they're about to start or complete vesting

    Like firing someone just before their pension vests?

    In American Southern states, the single most significant predictor of a poor performance appraisal for teachers, leading to termination, was how close they were to their pension vesting. The year before vesting was particularly risky, with an incredible number of teachers managing to go from award-winning to fireable in just one year.

    (At least a decade ago — I haven't kept up but I doubt it's changed.)

    1879:

    And, as we do not lie (unless it's a joke we then explain or we're playing Dumb Answer gets good Answer) we weren't joking about Death by Water either. What is left after you sunder the Mind of a Conscious Being? A shell, trapped, the Light Gone? "Death by Water" is also a rather (in)famous punishment which if you have a classical or Masonic education one understands. As a proxy, it's fucking rude though.

    Normally when I see "scientists baffled" headlines I roll my eyes. We get surprised but not usually baffled. Conversations I have had with other volcanologists about the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption really are us being baffled about how this happened. Twitter, https://twitter.com/janinekrippner/status/1484295079305297922 - - Scientist writing stuff about Tonga, actually on the ball, slot it into a parser to get the wider media spread.

    Yes, it's really a mystery. "Shit you cannot do yet".

    Explicit explanations cost: frequently, rather nasty things do not like being exposed. We do not like exposing innocent old men to such threats. Such as why Ms. P. Pateeeel did deals with IL under-the-table (for which she was fired), why Pegasus got sold to IN ($2bil trade deal) and who is running the black-mail ring (Six Pyramid guys are in for a rude awakening once certain people work out that they're the weakest link in this chain: feel free to grep Cockroaches for how to access them. And no, we do not expect those asking the questions to be any more gentle than a bunch of severed hands on a river-bank). You need serious coin in Politics to return from disgrace that quickly. Given she's not very bright, ask who gave that coin to her. Hint: wassssapppp. Hint: Hindu ties in the Cabinet.

    All of those are public links, you just need to be able to think differently.

    It's not like it's not a multi-National, multi-Ethnic squad of utterly ammoral beings, it's Human. And, [redacted] are not Human.

    ~

    Ukraine is not happening. Due to LNG / Natgas. No matter if you send Liz Truss or Johnson to Moscow, it ain't happening. Some shitty contract / delivery calls (no volume, it's a funny signal flare, really) and some weather records are there to remind all playing that there are larger things at play and would you kindly stop fucking around and sort things out, we'd all be better off. If you do not understand why RU will never relinquish Crimea, we'd suggest Naval History for the last 10,000 years as a guiding point. Answering why the fuck you'd declare war by sending Ms. Trusss there is not something we'd ask (images of that other one, who got sent to IL for a IDF gang-bang comes to mind).

    Canada Truckers is dumb, obvious and rude: but it's also "Rebel Media" (hello IL, we did notice old Tommy Robinson getting reactivated this week) getting into something a little bit deeper than their budget allows. It's a blow-off, ultimately harmless (like the 6th Jan, USA) and sanctioned so people do not think too hard about certain things. It's also astro-turfed to hell and back and complete nonsense and poses exactly zero threat to any Power structures anywhere. We'd suggest paying more attention to the Foreign department hack btw.

    The spotify stuff is a Corporation over-playing its hand and enough (from both sides) noticing certain stuff (Blackstone, not Blackrock) - some genius videos out there covering it: if you're commenting on it without knowing the counter-plays, you're toast (MF ... sigh... fucking hell where did critical thinking skills go). Turns out, teaching people basic Economic literacy over "who owns what" has some benefits.

    The Danish CIA stuff is kinda a hot potatoe though: we did kinda speed run all that a while back and toasted it from orbit, although it certainly helps a segment of the population to know you fucking manually tested it on unwitting subjects. It also implicates a rather large section ("chemical imbalance in the brain") of society for running really evil shit unwittingly. Which was quite deliberate, we may add. For reference: "Schizophrenia" is often benign in non-Western nations, you'd have to be a total psychopath to field test and write scripts for it, wouldn't you?

    UK politics is dead, well done all: even UKCHYP selling out for minor Corporate posts (like, really: the best you could do was regional Water boards, gambling or Used cars? Fucking hell) hasn't topped the madness.

    Got more?

    We keep it very white old male btw.

    p.s.

    If you need answers to how we feel about concepts / events discussed, refer to the original Rammstein video. "Death by Water" is not exactly a way to enforce compliance safely if said Subject can make jokes about 0.001% stuff while actually focusing on other things. And yes, of course: they threaten your children! If you cannot remove this kind of stuff, well. Your society looks like... Ah.

    ~

    1880:

    To clarify:

    Just as the Soviet Union did[1], the USA did as well. It not only weaponised certain reactions (actually very sane reactions to a slave owning, viciously racist regime that could not even tolerate Atheists or Non-CIS Minds), it then field tested various methods of how to make this shit break people's Minds not only at Home, but abroad.

    It then employed a large segment of population (most without knowing) to weaponise this to create "Society" and viciously persecuted those who resisted.

    And, they field tested it on children (Orphans, Indigenous people, Poors, etc) to make sure it would work.

    Then they really ramped it up and got creative. Seriously: 4,000 years ago had better sex than you do.

    That's where you're at. Right Now.

    ~

    Or so they thought.

    We can make your penis dance

    So, Greg: the question is rather more "you are products of a lead based, psychotic society whose Minds we find damaging to engage with" than "hur hur so Batshit insane".

    They literally did this.

    And you're not executing them yet

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union

    1881:

    "In the alt-history, Frederick III lives another 20 or so years, and Wilhelm, instead of ascending in his late 20s, comes to the throne as a more Trumpian figure in his early 50s, keen to prove he can live up to the stature of his father and especially grandfather, but quite unable to do so. Worse (for his era), he was probably a closeted homosexual, and it does appear that he felt he needed to prove his machismo a bit, something that rarely leads to political wisdom."

    Ah, OK, I think I get it. I've followed your starting conditions accurately, but diverged after that. Certainly as we know him he was a lot like Trump, although probably more intelligent and definitely with a good deal of genuine patriotism which Trump conspicuously lacks. Also, though nominally the supreme leader, he was rather easily led.

    He was brought up mostly according to How To Make Your Kid Turn Out A Psycho and in a toxically militaristic atmosphere, and then plonked into the position of head of that militaristic culture with barely a break while still a fairly young man. It looks like you're seeing his insecure behaviour as principally an inherent result of his personal characteristics, whereas I'm seeing it also as a response to circumstances. The perception of Germany in the late 19th century as being in a militarily insecure position does look a bit daft from our external future viewpoint, but from the peculiar internal viewpoint of Germany's dominant military class it could sort of be justified, and was certainly thought to be; then of course Billy himself caused it to take on substance through his bombastic primate chest-beating impelling the formation of defensive alliances against him. As you say, he felt the need to live up to his grandfather; but the path his grandfather had been following which he was now trying to follow in turn was not really his grandfather's path at all, but Bismarck's. The whole thing depended on Bismarck's hand to be successful, and you could well say that Bismarck's principal failing was that he not only failed to address the single-point-of-failure timebomb weakness he constituted, he positively made it worse by making himself as indispensible as possible in as many ways as he could. This was closely related to him being the only person who could act as a significant constraint on Billy, and this was a long-standing cause of resentment which once Billy had come to power didn't take long to result in him getting the boot, leaving the entire structure without its essential stabilising guidance.

    If Fritz had survived, he would have given Bismarck the boot a lot sooner because he did not want to follow Bismarck's path, and his political reforms would have deprived the military class of a great deal of their power and influence. Instead of having 20 years for the positive feedback effects of their paranoia about Germany's military insecurity to run riot and embed the desire for a pre-emptive war deeply among all the important parts of Germany's power structure, we have 20 years of their influence being diminished while Germany's evident prosperity and security makes their views look increasingly silly.

    It's pretty certain that they would keep their hooks in Billy and hope for their fortunes to change when Fritz eventually pops his clogs. But their aims are different: the military class want a sympathetic ruler so they can get their power back, whereas Billy will get into power regardless but will find that his exercise of it is practically constrained by the interests of all the important social groups, not just the military. The military's influence over Billy will be reduced by his inevitable greater exposure to other points of view, and he will have 20 years to observe the dominant interest affecting government becoming the commercial/capitalist sphere instead of the military one.

    A pure Trump would certainly proceed bull-at-a-gate with "fuck all this, revert the lot", but Billy, as well as probably finding that his father's reforms severely reduce his ability to behave in such an arbitrary way, is in a more ambivalent position. He's not a grifter pretending some semblance of patriotism in a MAGA pickelhaube while ripping a temporary position for his own personal advantage; he's in a permanent position which inextricably links his personal status and the status of Germany as a nation. The father and grandfather he feels the need to live up to derive their renown from advancing the status of Germany in the eyes of the world; he wants to do the same, as he did try to do, and he won't want to follow any course of action which he thinks will lead to destruction of Germany instead, as he wouldn't have started WW1 if he'd thought it would end as it did.

    This time though he has a choice of models. His natural inclination probably still is to follow his grandfather's, but now he also has 20 years of seeing his father's different model also succeeding, and that's the model that's currently in place and he has less ability to change it than his father did. He's also 20 years older and with less of the young man's inclination to run wild as soon as he gets the chance. There is plenty of reason for him to see that it will be better for Germany's continued advancement to continue on his father's model, even if he isn't personally keen on it, and that the way things are now trying to change it would be a difficult and potentially dangerously destructive task.

    But he has notably poor judgement, he isn't particularly rational, he has an excessive and unjustified confidence in his own abilities, he is too easily influenced especially by those he personally admires, he can never make his mind up and ends up having it made up for him by people deciding for themselves, and he seems to be entirely defenceless against, and indeed totally unaware of, being made into a puppet by factions among his supposed subordinates ruling him while letting him think he's ruling them.

    So he ends up doing the wrong thing, and then fucking it up... Yeah, OK, I think it works either way :)

    1882:

    "* By 191x Billy 2 won't have been in for more than a few years* - um, err: Actually died in 1941 (!)"

    Yeah, I know, but we're hypothesising that Frederick 3 lived to a normal old age, so the first 20 odd years of Billy 2's incumbency didn't happen and he didn't get to take over until not long before 191x.

    Pretty sure that some at least of the Serbian nutters knew they were killing the person most likely to help them, they just didn't care and did it anyway. Chicken's tits...

    1883:

    And you're not executing them yet

    we're not really in a position to execute them (and they're probably all the deid)

    and u gotta escape the underscores

    1884:

    Ah. But you are. But probably better sort out your heids first, a lot of programming in there.

    Spoilers: Ignore the new Tax Laws, we'd suggest focusing on things like "Reverse Repo Rate" and so on.

    Depends: what do you want from this exchange of views?

    Or ask: Why is the UK the only Western zone to not have serious protests yet (and despite that, has new Laws to prevent them?)

    ‘Like sewage and rotting flesh’: Covid’s lasting impact on taste and smell

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/30/like-sewage-and-rotting-flesh-covids-lasting-impact-on-taste-and-smell

    Do a grep about smell: it might be you're actually smelling [redacted] and Souls once more. Why would an Island release shit all over, and make sure a disease made you smell the shit and so on?

    Escape? They modelled this disease on certain things: patient zero says hello.

    1885:

    [Note: as previously stated: we cannot get COVID19, our Blood has zero percentage of it in it, our version is much worse, literally cannot get your versions of it]

    Make of that what you want, but it is True on both accounts. Makes everyone angry. Makes them forget the bit where "literally, patient zero" stuff is mentioned.

    NEW - Truck carrying 100 monkeys crashes in Pennsylvania, and now some are missing. The truck had been on its way to a lab. https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1484704631364239361

    Crap source, chase the leads. Actual BioWeapons stuff. OOpps.

    1886:

    Gentle thing: It's not a Vampire: The Masquerade joke. Or White Wolf (pre trans* drama).

    We can still smell things on the scale of Dogs. wink (Actually a lot better but hey).

    Ask why it's required to fuck your senses up so much. Then look at your Leaders. Are you wondering yet about just how shit this all is? Just, like: it's all so patently shit and wrong? Like, Grove and Co. are literally just fucking Wrong... but his wife accidentally runs the Guardian and so on?

    Fucking your senses up kinda throws that off.

    Hmm.

    It's a Weapon

    1887:

    Wilhelm II
    DO NOT FORGET - or - Learn for the first time (?)
    That he was deformed during birth, because of the grossly incompetent & already out-of-date practices of medicine in Germany at that time ( Compared to Britain & France, at the least) ...
    Look at almost any picture of him & look at where his LEFT HAND is - out of sight, resting on something, or clasped in the other hand.
    And then, on top of that you have the militaristic "Junker-Kultur" upbringing, when away from his mother ...
    Talk about screwed-up.

    1888:

    Ah, OK, I think I get it. I've followed your starting conditions accurately, but diverged after that. Certainly as we know him he was a lot like Trump, although probably more intelligent and definitely with a good deal of genuine patriotism which Trump conspicuously lacks. Also, though nominally the supreme leader, he was rather easily led.

    Very much appreciate your thoughts on Wilhelm Zweitklassig. One thing I'd add about toxic, militaristic atmospheres is that we Yanks certainly have it here. It gets the lovely name of "White fragility," meaning people like me tend to see ourselves as a tiny, fragile minority, perpetually endangered and persecuted by Them. Since we're the righteous ones, of course, this fear gives us permission to lash out, often with peremptory, disproportionate violence, to "protect" ourselves against Them.

    Pretending to be the persecuted party is, of course, part of the DARVO strategy Charlie mentioned earlier (Defend, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) that is used by some abusers. I suspect at this point you'll say, "Yes, that's the toxic militaristic system, more or less" and we can go on.

    1889:

    Ok, to stop Howling Gremlins.

    It's True.

    It's also referenced in many books about "playing with Tin Soldiers" (The Warhammer 40k of the day). It's kinda a German Theme[1]

    It also (almost, so fucking close) hints at that he was not exactly in control of his society when it came to declaring wars.

    It also might explain the ultra-Gay stuff about getting excited over well-dressed military men and not his wife but...

    ~

    Kinda left wondering here.

    Greg: literally just told you your entire Mind state of psychology, Mind and so on has literally been shaped to close off certain aspects, but... ok, we get it.

    Would it help if we told you that, literally, he had absolutely no say or real impact in WW1 or German Politics of the Time?

    It's kinda important to know that.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game -- you might want to read all the rest of his novels

    1890:

    Heteromeles may find it interesting to look up this old Howard Waldrop story about an alternate 19th-century Germany in which Richard Wagner was one of the martyred victims of the Revolution:

    A Better World's In Birth!

    1891:

    Pretending to be the persecuted party is, of course, part of the DARVO strategy

    Like the so-called truckers who're occupying Ottawa right now… intimidating soup kitchen staff to get free food while harassing non-white homeless shelter clients…

    1892:

    I don't know, but suggesting that a border is like a mountain range, or a Trump Wall (tm), is ludicrous. I suggest to you that the population was smeared.

    Way to jump to a conclusion about my mind set.

    My point is that these populations are a total hashed stew of things that don't make any historical sense. There are some borders. Respect them or no one will ever be happy. Everyone will have a grievance about who really belongs "here".

    Saying the ethnic Russians have a right to be in "Russia" is like the mess that Yugoslavia turned into and will be most likely for a very long time.

    1893:

    Did a paragraph get deleted here? I do that a lot.

    Ha, yes! I decided against "Remember that" as in introduction to what I ended up deciding was a new paragraph, but forgot to delete it. I do this stuff all the time, which is "leave artefacts of the process of editing in place due to forgetting to review", at least this time it's relatively legible.

    The other area I forgot to mention is Italy. Italian unification happened over a similar timeframe to (Prussian) German unification. Except for the bits that still belonged to Austria, the other German empire, of course. The background is that Italian politics is relatively liberal at this time, incubating many and varied "radical" groups. It would be a question of how many point changes versus recorded history you want to include as to what you might want out of it. Albert and Frederick survive till the 1880s and 1910s respectively. Maybe Rudolf survives till the 1910s too, while "something happens" to his father around 1890. Bismarck goes falls off a horse and loses his wits. The Kingdom of Italy sponsors and helps negotiate peaceful independence for a less volatile Serbia under a rather more liberal Austrian empire.

    1894:

    Anyway, I do appreciate the conversation on this. It's really quite useful to get multiple points of view and bounce ideas around. Thanks!

    While my quote seemed to be about Ebert, my intent was more about land size. In thinking about my ancestors (the 1800s to the 1910s or so) I have to keep remembering just how isolated they were to the happenings of Chicago, Detroit, Boston, New York, etc... In the time you're thinking of they (most of the population of the various industrializing countries) had telegraphs (controlled by the PTB) and wireless Morse code (even more controlled) to move information quickly. Other than that is was whatever people carried on the train or by horse. How many of these folks even read a newspaper or similar in 1910 Germany or Tsarist Russia? Until the revolution rolled through their area I suspect most had no idea what was going on. And even then it was likely confusing to most.

    These revolutions were definitely a thing of the cities and factory workers.

    At the time, 1910 or so, how many times zone covered each country? 11 or so for Russia and what, 2 or 3 for Germany?

    1895:

    Re: 'Except for the bits that still belonged to Austria, the other German empire, of course.'

    There's also the Netherlands (Holland) - very important re: trade including slavery.

    I couldn't remember when Germany and the Netherlands officially split apart so did a search and found this resource. Looks pretty thorough as an overview. (Mentions 'Operation Black Tulip'.)

    https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/h/History_of_the_Netherlands.htm

    Frank:

    Good luck! -- Writing an alt-history of any of the European countries ends up with having to rewrite all of these countries' histories. A very tangled and (often) inter-married web.

    1896:

    I don't think they were quite as isolated as that, at least in central Europe.
    Here's why: a few of my relatives in the late 19th century managed to (illegally?) slip out of Central Europe to avoid being conscripted into the German Imperial army. We're not sure exactly how they got here. One possibly got adopted by an American family for a time. Another may have been brought over by a "brother" who sponsored him. Their names got changed on Ellis Island, too, because the immigration clerks couldn't deal with that many consonants in a row. Not unusual immigrant stories for the time.*

    The interesting parts of the story are that they found each other in the upper Midwest, knowing only that their relatives had headed out of the old country to America and not even knowing their current names. IIRC, this group also included a couple who were dating in the Old World, who emigrated separately under different covers, made it to America, reunited and got married.

    I'll note that I'm not Jewish, and these people weren't running from a pogrom, just the draft. But these working people knew enough about what was going on that they decided to uproot and head abroad, rather than get inducted. That doesn't argue for ignorance.

    *So far as I know, my last name came from Ellis Island. The story goes that it was a last name commonly chosen by immigrants when they were asked to change their names. Because of that, there are a lot of people with my surname in certain parts of the country, and so far as I know, I'm not related to any of them.

    1897:

    Here's why: a few of my relatives in the late 19th century managed to (illegally?) slip out of Central Europe to avoid being conscripted into the German Imperial army.

    I'm sure that was a part of the area they were in where it was a common knowledge thing. But as to why being conscripted? I donno.

    1898:

    I do know they were in the US well before WWI. Reason was, prior to WWI, they'd opened up a machine shop. During WWI, they were taken for Germans and their shop was confiscated by the town, because they might be traitors. They weren't German, but the names they'd acquired on Ellis Island were.

    1899:

    Good luck! -- Writing an alt-history of any of the European countries ends up with having to rewrite all of these countries' histories. A very tangled and (often) inter-married web.

    Thanks, hope it works. The fun part is that this is all background detail so far.

    It's also interesting to imagine a world where both there was no need for my relatives to leave Europe in the 1890s, and less need for immigrant labor in the US at the same time. This sounds trivial, but it actually rests on some fairly substantial changes in the way countries worked during that time. That's actually one thing that got me to ask the question that started this all off.

    1900:

    So they were urban. And knew more than many the "news of the day". Such as it got through. [grin]

    They weren't German, but the names they'd acquired on Ellis Island were.

    At least 1/2 of my bloodline is German. But aside from a very fuzzy knowledge of my grandfather (mom's dad) coming from Michigan (or maybe his parents) I don't know much. One of those round2it things.

    My wife's mother on the other hand is from southern Germany. With a genealogy going back 5 generations. Once we translate it from Hochdeutsch. Plus it's written in the old script. A second cousin's husband's mother might be able to translate it. We just have to scan it in and email it to them.

    It was interesting 3 years ago visiting the village where she was born and meeting a couple of sisters who remembered her from their childhood. They were living in the home/restaurant that my mother in law's grandfather sold to their grandfather early in the previous century. We got a copy of the sale documents. (Another round2it translation waiting to happen.) They served us homemade private label schnaps and Christmas cookies.

    1901:

    So they were urban. And knew more than many the "news of the day". Such as it got through. [grin]

    Um, not really. We had a family genealogist who put together the detailed version of that deliberately fuzzed story I just gave*. One of their cousins went back to the old country to visit the village the draft dodgers had come from. They found the old baptismal records in the local church, so it was the right spot. It isn't a big place at all. Probably it's more right to say that news gets around, at least in that part of Europe.

    1902:

    Not convinced fear of conscription was the only, or even the main, driver. The entire region was generally "war-torn" by our standards, and the upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars was in living memory (roughly similar time ago to the Vietnam War for us now).

    Most of my lot came from Prussia between the 1860s and the 1880s, all of them direct to Queensland (which was a self-governing colony by that time and had immigration agents in targeted regions in Europe). My maternal-line great-great-great grandmother came out in 1882 on the same ship as her sister and both their husbands and children. They were from little villages around a town that's now called Kwidzyn, but was then called Marienwerder)*. Mostly their births and deaths were recorded in the little village parishes, while the baptisms and marriages were all in Marienwerder. Not a large place either, but there were other larger towns and cities not that far away, and everything was more or less on the way to somewhere.

    I think class and economic opportunity were real drivers. Sure the rise of militarism too, but also quite possibly fear of persecution, even for non-Jews. Borders changed from time to time, and in borderlands ethnically Polish catholics really didn't like ethnically German protestants (possibly for good, or at least historically understandable reasons... that church in Marienburg was called the Polnische Kirche for instance).

    * I've just discovered an amusing feature of markdown where if your URL contains parentheses, you have to escape the closing ones manually.

    1903:

    H & Pigeon
    This shit ( DARVO ) is well under way here, too. Look ( Not too closely! ) at the rubbish being spouted by our "Kultur" minister, the utterly loopy & actually dangerous "mad Nad" f'rinstance.

    1904:

    we cannot get COVID19

    i thought dat transhuman life must have some compensations

    Like, Grove and Co. are literally just fucking Wrong... but his wife accidentally runs the Guardian and so on?

    go u mean michael gove? his wife is sarah vine, who works for the daily mail, though i think they're splitting up

    katherine viner is the editor of the guardian

    1905:

    This latest discussion reminded me of a story my great great great aunt told. She was brought up on a farm in the Welsh marches. One day she was in the nearest village to get something. She heard the first world war had started and went back home and told her father. He said "did you get a paper", she hadn't and he sent her back to get one, which was several miles! People knew they had to pay attention as events could effect them. She went on to drive an ambulance and her brother fought in the war, dying from the effects of gas in the 60s. She eventually came to be head of libraries in Norfolk until she retired and then I came to know her in the 80s. Amazing woman, apparently I have her smile, which I like as she was probably the best of my family.

    1906:

    "Not convinced fear of conscription was the only, or even the main, driver."

    That depended on your social status. My grandfather left Russia because he would have been a Jewish private in the Russian Army - not a good position at all.

    1907:

    David L @1895:

    Way to jump to a conclusion about my mind set.

    There's no need to conclude much about mindset of average NATO supporter because it is the same mindset that is all too familiar to people in Europe or nearby - if you don't agree with that assessment, I invite you to disprove it by at least facing the important questions.

    As such: do you (your mindset, that is) suggest that the methods of ethnic cleaning has any right to be applied to a population just on the sole basis of "respect of borders"? How such "respect of borders" should overwrite the fact that these borders have changed over many centuries and are upheld by agreements. What to do if such agreements are broken, ignored and overruled?

    My point is that these populations are a total hashed stew of things that don't make any historical sense. There are some borders. Respect them or no one will ever be happy. Everyone will have a grievance about who really belongs "here".

    Yeah, well, this seemed to be a very popular mindset of people in eastern half of Ukraine between years 1991 and 2014. Everybody thought that brotherhood of the two neighboring peoples are so strong and that no amount of foreign money, nationalistic bigotry or empty promises can possibly result in a conflict, much less an armed one with thousands dead. And yet here we are - those who are capable of learning from history and those who are not.

    Saying the ethnic Russians have a right to be in "Russia" is like the mess that Yugoslavia turned into and will be most likely for a very long time.

    Do "ethnic Russians" have the right to speak their language, receive education on their culture and share ties with their friends and family across the border? Most of NATO-controlled republics in Eastern Europe think otherwise, especially in the light of "impending Russian invasion" that has been endlessly toted around since... well, since forever, actually.

    Just to iterate: NATO is, and remains, basically a military alliance, part of whose purpose is the protection of Europe against Russian invasion., year is 2001, arguably about the highest point of mutual agreement.

    More importantly, how these same people reserve right to not bend over for the chaotic, nationalistic, militarist regime that seeks to deprive them of basic necessities like water, food or electricity just for supporting wrong side. How should these people in situation that even a slight suspicion of sympathising the wrong side will result in them being hunted or prosecuted for treason?

    These are very important questions, and yet, I do not expect to receive any answers, not anymore.

    There may have been some public disagreements about purpose and goal of existence of such aggressive, corrupt, genocidal, militaristic alliance that patronizes such dire situation of human rights everywhere it steps in. Even after 1999 and partition of Yugoslavia there were much talk to talk about. After all these years, however, there's is no reason left to talk about anything, if you've been following the news, there is not meaningful talks in progress.

    I don't think people here appreciate the seriousness of situation, being born and raised in places largely devoid of scars of conflict. The questions isn't about the goals of people who perpetuate the situation, it's about whether they are capable of carrying them out.

    That's all I have here to say.

    1908:

    sleepingroutine & EC
    Even clearly acknowledging that some of the extremists in the Ukraine after "Orange" were off their heads ...
    This completely justifies Putin ordering troops & Little Green Men into the Donbass region, resulting in between 12 & 15 THOUSAND dead bodies, of course?
    How nice, not buying it.
    ...

    "Ethnonationalism" & "Our Slavic brothers" - really, I mean really, hasn't Ru &/or Putin learnt anything since 1914 or even 1991-9, where backing mass murderers like Milosovic was such a good idea, not?

    1909:

    I said it was smooshed. You know, like most of the US. But when the current Ukrainian government came in, after the previous pro-Russian government was forced out, they started acting like Texas is right now against everyone not Ukrainian (tm)(c).

    1910:

    Italy. Oh, Ghu (purple be His Name). All this discussion... and ignoring Garibaldi and his very anti-nobility partisans.

    How about cross-border politics?

    Interesting thoughts: what happens if the Paris Commune is not defeated? What happens if Garibaldi does not ally with a monarchist group? And what about all the partisans of the 1848 revolutions that did not flee Europe?

    1911:

    Humph. Low class. My (Jewish) grandfather on my mother's side was an Officer in the Czar's army, before he deserted in '14.

    He played trombone in the band....

    1912:

    I agree, and this is what I've been saying everywhere: NATO is NOT the EU. NATO is nothing except a US-UK-European military force whose remit is to face off with the USSR/Russia. There is no reason to expand NATO eastwards, other than with the sole intention of encircling and intimidating Russia.

    1913:

    But Putin has not started ethnic cleansing. Wars... but not the former.

    1914:

    Don't you read what I post? The Kiev regime was waging an anti-Russian pogrom against its own Russian-speaking minority; Putin did what he did to protect them. Just as NATO did in Jugoslavia.

    1915:

    Actually, let me expand on that: no one accuses Putin of stupidity. He knows how many ethnicities there are in Russia, and he's watched disastrous failures of the former Yugoslavia*, and I promise you, he has no intention of setting up a collapse that such would entail in Russia.

    I have two friends who were Yugoslavian, born there.

    1916:

    whitroth & EC
    I never said that (some of) the present regime in Ukraine were sensible ...
    Quite frankly, as far as I can see, both "sides" are bonkers in one way or another.
    However, the inhabitants of Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania might just disagree with you about NATO?
    "Yugoslavia" - NATO got involved when general ethnic persecution & genocide started. Neither the "Serb" nor "Croat" extremists were favoured by NATO or the EU - as in ... Karadzic (Serb) / Mladic (Serb) / Praljac (Bosnia) being convicted of War Crimes.
    See also

    1917:

    " The story goes that it was a last name commonly chosen by immigrants when they were asked to change their names."

    Have you looked to see if it's just a translation from the original? E.g., Kuznets/Kovar/Kowal -> Smith.

    1918:

    Googling my last name was amusing. Since it occasionally pops up here, I'll let anyone who cares can look it up and get a chuckle (or in my case, a wince).

    Let's just say that: a) people from England, France, and Germany purportedly all use my surname. b) it apparently means different things in each country c) the family story follows the purported English version, which makes no sense in the "forced to change their surname" version of the story.* d) our family history doesn't support the German meaning e) this has nothing to do with the other story, which is on my mother's side of the family. f) Since we did have a family genealogist who dug back as far as possible in the usual sources, I'm pretty sure that I'm not related to many other people with the same surname.

    *The story I heard was that immigrants chose my surname because to them it implied that they were landowners, which was their dream in coming to America.

    1919:

    My great grandfather left Transylvania in 1906 because they knew a war would be coming. At that point the family had (without exaggerating) about 900 years of experience fighting in various wars, most recently for the Hapsburgs but dating back to the tenth century at least. However, Great-great grandfather had apparently spent most of his share of the money on being a bohemian artist and there was nothing available to buy commissions for the sons. Most of them came to Canada.

    That was 1906, 8 years before the war. I doubt anyone anticipated the monstrous horror that was WWI, but everyone paying attention knew something was coming.

    As it turned out, they made the right choice. More than a few of the family who stayed didn't make it to 1946 due to either bombs, guns or the Holocaust.

    1920:

    Re: 'Do "ethnic Russians" have the right to speak their language, receive education on their culture and share ties with their friends and family across the border?'

    As far as I can find*, none of the UN member countries (Russia included) had signed this document guaranteeing/safeguarding linguistic rights of their citizens. Unless there now are signatories, insisting that other jurisdictions do what you yourself (as a nation/polity) will not do comes across as hypocritical.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Linguistic_Rights#Reactions

    https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000104267

    *This is an old document - if anyone knows of a more recent document and status, pls post. Thanks!

    1921:

    One interesting name discussion I've had was why a friend named their kid Duv. The answer is that it's fairly distinctive, easy to spell, easy to say, and fairly hard to misspell or mispronounce.

    The person who did that was not making eyerolling noises about kids named Sammual and Annthyna, not at all, not at all.

    1922:

    Lemurs of MU 1450 and later.
    Sorry about lack of responses. (This was being composed right as you were posting one eve. I've captured everything cut.)
    grep Progidy "Invisible Sun"[1] and note discussions about sitting on chairs and Black-Hole treatments.
    All grepped (with grep) and read. (Including at least one deleted post.)

    [redacted] Heart Eaten / Taken - House Burning Down. Flips Script Chances are, six year lead in, it ain't ours or hers or our Houses.
    COMBO TEMPORAL STRIKE
    "You have no idea who you are talking to"
    "I cannot Know, I do not Know"

    Interesting.
    Kinda cranky (now-stabilized cardiovascular issues); diet and exercise, disrupted by pandemic, and worked out some meditation techniques (autonomic nervous system) that I'd been avoiding since childhood.
    (Might be a non-aggression geas involved. More teeth than e.g. Contracting for Peace: Do Nonaggression Pacts Reduce Conflict? (2010) :-)

    You're probably gonna want us "onside" for the next 20 years of shit, but... Not really feeling it.
    Def want you onside.

    and actually die everyday coming to our Hearth/Mind.
    Mad respect. Not sure I've ever said that.

    1923:

    You're corect, of course. Different people, same social group. They're all now irrelevant.

    Our version is much worse is kinda not a benefit though. It's there to like encourage people to take precautions (it's a tie-in joke to book mention "Chasm City", the Melding Plague, don't worry about it too much). It's also true, in relation to The Event and things.

    And, tbh, the wip-saw effect from running geological data to weather to market stuff is a bit of a head-fuck anyhow. (Clued in peeps might check NatGas futures today for a bit of a surprise)

    ~

    And, hmm: lot of translation / missed stuff there, dropped loads of data, running hot and the UK is not a friendly place at the moment, no wonder it doesn't make much sense. MF managing to miss all the Blackstone blow-back from the Spotify stuff was just too much cognitive dissonance to handle as like... everyone else on the internet saw it and it started trending.

    Open Twitter: hit "Blackstone", no need to even add another word, but add "spotify" if you must or "Niel Young" - see results. Literally nuking it from orbit right now. Some of the smarter ones are also questioning who/what/where/why "Hip Gnosis" has a dead stoned elephant as an Avatar.

    Far more edumacational than any of Roagains pod-cursts, learning the basic realities of USA Corporate Holdings (Inc.) and who holds the levers of power on PR stuff.

    There you go: Rogan gets $100 mil. Spotify "looses" $4 bil (stock price). Blackstone runs ~$1 tril book.

    For zero dollars, here's education worth, oh. Enlightenment.

    For the UK:

    Here's a result: @ pritipatel knows how bad it is. https://twitter.com/austinclaffey/status/1488193799318913026 --- Patel during Common debate today, attempt a lip-reading on it: "He's a Demon, it's True"? Not sure, came up with a few, the last part is certianly "It's true".

    Weird: कलि (not the hot sexy one[1]) references in the wild.

    Perhaps we mis-read those lips. points upwards She certainly looks uncomfortable though...

    But... she's right. It's true.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_(demon)

    1924:

    For non-Hindu readers. It's a corny joke, kinda, with a bit of a bite to it and a load of social commentary (Indian Tractors represent, power to Farmers and Socialist ideals etc): from a root kad, 'suffer, hurt, startle, confuse'

    Yeah. It's supposed to [insert really pissed off stuff about caste politics here and Feminism and BJP and a truck-load of current events. We do keep up with this kinda stuff, esp. the Pegasus and targeting of Women Journalists. Oh, and all the fucking rape cases].

    Yes, we can shift fast if required, although IN feeds are gnarly and ugly and wild, wild, wild in many cases (lotus leaf symbolism jars against six day executions for rape jars against Jai Hind army costumes jars against Army anger no-exams jars against cricket jars against Islam.... and that's just the wafting currents).

    But yeah, we can parse it. Just. Not expertly though.

    But Ms. Home Office is only concerned about herself: so probably scroll up and wonder who is noticing what, and why we're not going to get sued.

    So, work out her first words. Third eye looks a bit fucking removed though, doesn't it? That's the coin cost for real. Perhaps she's kinda realising what the actual costs are.

    ~

    Oh, and the "our version is much worse" is much darker than you'd imagine. Paradox Weapons do awful things to flesh / causality.

    1925:

    Whitroth @ 1869:

    Automation, back then, was not going to replace workers - they needed more workers, and with so much of the male population murdered in the war, women are going to have to be brought in.

    I'm not so sure.

    Economic pressure for automation comes from higher wages or other difficulty in hiring; if people are cheap, you hire more people. If people are expensive than extra machinery starts to look more attractive. At the time grunt manpower was cheap, so machines didn't get bought, and because there was no market they didn't get invented so much either, or remained at the "uneconomic lab demonstrator" stage.

    Once you create a market pull, innovation can get started. I suspect that Germany in the 1910s could have been the right time and place for things to go just a bit steampunk if there as an artificial shortage of labour in small companies.

    Women in the workforce: yes. In our timeline that happened due to WW1, as you say. In Heteromeles timeline, who knows (H, presumably).

    On top of which, the revolutionary government can push unionization... and so most of those 49-person companies are unionized. Unionization would also ease the transition to co-op. In fact, your government could insist on unionization to precede transition to co-op.

    It depends on how the unions are organised. I can't see them being a force for good in this scenario.

    It makes no sense to have unions in a workers co-op, so presumably this is unions for our hypothetical <50 person companies.

    If you say that each of these companies must have its own union, then this is pointless. In a 50 person company everyone knows everyone else, so formal organisation into a union changes nothing; if the workers are unhappy enough to strike or demand higher pay or whatever then they can just talk to each other; formal organisation is not necessary.

    If you say that there are wider trades unions and that everyone must be a member of the relevant union in order to work at a company then this is a receipe for industrial ossification and irrelevance: "No, Herr Edison, our demarcation agreements clearly state that light fittings can only be installed by members of the Gasman's Union".

    1926:

    True in the main, with the note that your example in the final paragraph can cut either way depending on the exact wording, eg, if the example says "...that gas light fittings..." then clearly members of the Gasman's Union can only install gas lights. Conversely, anyone not a member of the Gasman's Union can install electric lights...
    Or, if the unions embrace the change with your wording, the Gasman's Union will gain new members with the addition of the new lighting system.

    1927:

    I was referring to the people killed by NATO's actions, who were mostly Serbs killed by bombing.

    1928:

    paws
    Which is why Trolleybus drivers were members of ASLEF, precisely.

    Paul
    I'm not so sure about that ... As early as about 1902, some railway companies invested in bigger, more powerful initially-expensive locomotives, because it saved money.
    Fewer train crews, less maintenance, more efficient working. Ditto signalling - the moment even very limited "power signalling" came in, "boxes" were rationalised & reduced, with more being controlled from fewer locations - again reduced manpower & maintenance costs. [ IIRC 1898-1905 start ]

    1929:

    Well, I can see a common skill set between trains and trams; less certain about trolley buses because of the lack of rails...

    Or earlier; review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_North for my argument...

    1930:

    I have to say that I think the article you linked to is a load of neo-liberal nonsense akin to "the end of history".

    The counter examples include Japan, South Korea, which is even on their list, neither of which can be considered particularly free especially when the started on the path of innovation. Of course there is China which will be taking the lead soon. From further back you can include the U.K, it can hardly be considered particularly free during the industrial revolution. Even ancient Greece, which is often held up as a beacon of freedom, was hardly that. Indeed coming back to the U.S the same could be said, there was a study not long ago that showed it was in fact an oligarchy.

    The article is typical ill thought out neo-liberal rubbish using freedom to cover for control, wealth to cover for poverty and knowledge for ignorance.

    1931:

    paws
    Certaily in London, "trolleys" were initially referred to as: "Trackless Trams" & most if not all of the vast London trolleybus system was direct replacement for tram routes. Would that we still had them ( Trolleybuses, that is )

    Toby
    By the standards of the time - Britain was probably the freest country on the planet - which is not saying a lot by today's standards, of course.

    1932:

    paws4thot @ 1929:

    if the example says "...that gas light fittings..." then clearly members of the Gasman's Union can only install gas lights. Conversely, anyone not a member of the Gasman's Union can install electric lights...

    Sorry, I should have checked my history before posting that. I was thinking that in the 1910s electric lights were a new innovation. Actually Swan & Edison got going 3 decades previously. Hence the confusion.

    I was looking for an example of a new disruptive technology which didn't fit into the existing job title typology. So I thought "light" would mean "gas light" because up to then there wasn't any other kind. Hence when electric lights got invented their inventor would have to negotiate with the gas workers union to introduce this new technology, because that is what the painfully negotiated rules said.

    Demarcation disputes were a big deal back in the heyday of trades unions in the UK. A big company might have half a dozen different trades unions, each of which jealously guarded its members rights to do certain categories of work.

    Case in point (skip this if you've heard this before): when my uncle was a trainee draughtsman back some time around 1960 he drew up the plan for some component and then took it down to the shop floor to have it made. He showed the welder the plan, and then helpfully picked up a bit of chalk to draw where the metal would have to be cut. Instant pandemonium: "EVERYBODY DOWN TOOLS! HE'S MARKED UP THE WORK!" What my uncle hadn't realised was that the job of putting chalk to metal was the task of the welder, not the task of the draughtsman. This mattered for several reasons:

    • "Draughtsman" was a white-collar middle-class job done in an office, whereas "welder" was a blue-collar working-class job done on a factory floor. So there was a class war thing going on.

    • If draughtsmen (and they were all men back in those days) were to start marking up work then that would reduce the skills needed by the welders, which might thereby lead to lower rates of pay. The distinctions between "unskilled", "semi-skilled" and "skilled" occupations were a big part of setting pay rates.

    • If the welders had less work to do then fewer of them might be needed, which would reduce the importance of the welders union, which was of major concern to the union leadership; their position in the local pecking order depended on how many members they had and the extent to which they could yank the chain of the works management. A lot of industrial negotiation back in those days was different unions struggling together.

    In the end senior management came down, ruffled feathers were smoothed, my uncle got a lecture about what not to do on the shop floor, and everyone got back to work.

    Another anecdote, from a book I read decades ago (and may be exaggerated for comic effect, but never mind). A zoo keeper had taken a leopard cub down to the BBC to appear in some animal program. The cub laid a log on the studio floor. Everything ground to a halt for an hour while the various unions argued about who would get to clean it up. It wasn't that they cared about this particular lump of shit, but nobody wanted a precedent that might disadvantage them in the future. And of course they all wanted to be seen to be doing their best for their members.

    It wasn't only the unions who got in the way of new technology: management could be just as much of a blockage. Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) were invented by a guy called Paul Eisler. He tried to get electronics companies interested in the idea, ... But then the big boss told him that the manual wiring work was being done by “girls” and “girls are cheaper and more flexible.”

    Getting back to Heteromeles alternative history, one of the big limits on innovation in a society is the amount of permission you need for it. Under one system a given innovation might just need someone to set up shop and start making it, using seed capital from any of a dozen potential sources. Under another system the same innovation might need to be approved by half a dozen different committees, some of which have members who see it as a threat to their own livelihoods. Guess which society is going to be better at innovation.

    The history of computing in the USSR is a particular example of this. Once computers got past the initial ideological resistance they became seen as important ways to modernise and streamline the creaking bureaucracy. But in practice:

    When the Soviet government launched a mammoth effort to introduce computerized management systems into the economy for production control and planning in the 1970s, it did so without fundamentally changing management structures or the balance of power. This proved to be a grave mistake. The centrally planned Soviet economy was poorly prepared for computerization. Its cumbersome bureaucracy was too slow to implement rapid changes in production and distribution, and it was ruled by industrial ministries which, like separate fiefdoms, did not want to share their information or decision-making power. Each ministry therefore created its own information management system, disconnected from and incompatible with the others. Instead of transforming the top-down economy into a self-regulating system, bureaucrats used their new cybernetic models and computers to protect their power. Expensive and largely useless information management systems were strewn across the country.

    Poking fun at the USSR is easy, but its important to look at this from a systems point of view rather than as just "those crazy commies". The soviets had inadvertently created a system where innovation needed impossible amounts of permission, even when it was supported by the leadership. As a result, nothing could be done.

    1933:

    More BBC demarcation - the Play School clock, prop or electrical equipment? Important to know because the answer determines whether you need a scene hand to start it or a sparkie.

    1934:

    Duv, perfectly good Barrayaran name...

    1935:

    The point is when the current government of Ukraine came in, they passed explicit laws against that. Russia, AFAIK, hasn't, but some states in the US sure want to.

    1936:

    sigh Always find the extreme case, to make unions Bad Guys.

    On the other hand, perfect example of why industrial unions are better than trade unions. (For those unaware of the difference, everyone in the union at one place - one plant, office, whatever is a member of the same union. So, the machinist, the gas fitter, and the secretary are all in the same union. Which also prevents companies from forcing one union to cross another's picket line.)

    1937:

    The everlasting push for fewer crews on trains, buses, and any form of transit. Luckily, in the US, the railroad union has kept them from reducing the loco crew to one - there's still someone listed as "fireman", so they can go to the john, or maybe have a heart attack, and the train's not out of control.

    I mean, pay another person's salary, when all those salaries belong to me, says the CEO.

    1938:

    Several things:
    1. The story of your uncle - are you 100% positive that his chalking the part did not mess up markings the welder made, or was going to make, using their own symbolism?

    2. Management is for or against new tech depending on a) how it affects their own little empire, b) whether they think they understand it, and c) how it affects their budget, and the number of people they get to boss around.

    3. I just read your "poke fun at the former USSR... and my instant reaction is to wonder if you work/have worked in large companies, with divisions run by MBAs. The reason, of course, is EXACTLY THE SAME as what you were saying the USSR did. It was in the 80's that we started seeing the DP dept charging other depts, so that they would be a profit source, not a profit sink. And in many cases, charging so much that the other divisions outsourced some of their computer work.

    1939:

    Paul
    From, IIRC "The First Circle" - where Electronics journals & periodicals were kept under lock & key & had to be signed for & returned at the end of the day ... really confidential stuff, like ... Wireless World" (!)
    * Under one system a given innovation might just need someone to set up shop and start making it, using seed capital from any of a dozen potential sources.* - Or, how railways got started, yes? Or Boulton/Watt before that?

    whitroth
    Sorry, but NOT the case - or the totally wrong example, given the comparative safety record on railways here & in the USA. I could go on for several hours about how single-man working is actually quite safe, provided, of course, that you have sufficient, working back-up systems. { Such as ones that shut off the power & apply the brakes, if nothing is done or altered, after $SetTime f'rinstance }
    The other part of it, which was seen as important, even as far back as 1900, was the savings in materials & maintenance costs, quite apart from wages.
    However, your # 1941/3 is SPOT ON .. "MBA's" shudder .... ( Which was paws, not me, incidentally! )

    1940:

    It doesn't have to be a large company. While the university I worked for was fairly large, the director worked for Thatcher for 6 months, and came back both inculcated and bonkers. We had multiple cost centres WITHIN a department of less than 100 people, fer chrissake!

    1941:

    You don't understand the predicament people working in the USSR were in; I knew some of them towards the end of the USSR. Western journals (including Wireless World) cost hard currency, which was in desperately short supply, so stopping it from going walkies really mattered. We got requests for preprints from people who couldn't afford to pay for the journals (JRSS in my case).

    1942:

    1934 - OK, that makes some sort of sense, but other than routes, I see more commonality between electric (trolley) buses and ic buses than between electric buses and trams. So I agree with you about which I'd rather have.

    1935 - I'd not heard your demarcation personal account before, but my Godmother's husband worked at Solihull, so I'm well aware of demarcation disputes.

    1939 - I was trying to illustrate how exact wording can make all the difference to the meaning of a clause. BTW I am a member of a union, and not because the company is a closed shop.

    1943:

    whitroth @ 1941:

    (Your comment is marked as a reply to a comment by Greg Tingey, but the content is clearly about the following comment by me)

    The story of your uncle - are you 100% positive that his chalking the part did not mess up markings the welder made, or was going to make, using their own symbolism?

    Well, family story, so one can never be 100% sure. But if that were the case the response would have been "Fuck off and let me do my job". But in the story I was told, all work on the shop floor was halted and senior management summoned NOW. That could only happen because this was a violation of the demarcation agreement, not because the one welder resented the interference.

    Management is for or against new tech depending on [selfish reasons]. ... wonder if you work/have worked in large companies, with divisions run by MBAs. The reason, of course, is EXACTLY THE SAME as what you were saying the USSR did.

    Oh absolutely. Internally every company is run as a centrally planned economy. But, Capitalism! The Efficiencies of the Market! What is going on? And how does this relate to Heteromeles' quest for a socialist economy in the 1910s that didn't collapse into Stalinism?

    The Theory of the Firm

    Back in the 1930s Ronald Coase wondered why companies exist. Surely, he reasoned, if market economics is the most efficient economic system, then individuals selling skills and using their own equipment would be the dominant economic model.

    But of course in practice such a system would be grossly inefficient: imagine car production organised this way: the costs involved for all the individuals to find each other, sort out the order of production and arrive at a long chain of contracted agreements equivalent to a production line would be greater than the value of the work they undertook.

    We may sum up this section of the argument by saying that the operation of a market costs something and by forming an organization and allowing some authority (an “entrepreneur”) to direct the resources, certain marketing costs are saved. The entrepreneur has to carry out his function at less cost, taking into account the fact that he may get factors of production at a lower price than the market transactions which he supersedes, because it is always possible to revert to the open market if he fails to do this.

    But if the organisation of production by an "entrepreneur" (Coase's term to mean any kind of boss or company organisation) is the solution to the inefficiency of the market, we would expect companies to grow and merge without limit until the entire economy was run by one giant company. So why doesn't this happen?

    Apart from variations in the supply price of factors of production to firms of different sizes, it would appear that the costs of organizing and the losses through mistakes will increase with an increase in the spatial distribution of the transactions organized, in the dissimilarity of the transactions, and in the probability of changes in the relevant prices. As more transactions are organized by an entrepreneur, it would appear that the transactions would tend to be either different in kind or in different places. This furnishes an additional reason why efficiency will tend to decrease as the firm gets larger [...]

    These kinds of factors are known as diseconomies of scale, and they act to limit the maximum size of a company to the point where the economies of scale are balanced by the diseconomies of scale. Your point about MBAs running corporate divisions is a good example of this.

    Innovation in Big Organisations

    Lack of innovation is another diseconomy of scale. Big organisations find it much harder to innovate than small ones. I've been in a number of big companies where the senior management were very aware of their corporate lack of innovation, and were keen to encourage innovative ideas from more junior staff. But it never worked.

    In the 1990s this question was studied by Clayton Christensen, resulting in his book The Innovator's Dilemma. He studied large organisations that had failed to respond to innovative new technologies, and concluded that their existing internal structures were set up to optimise exploitation of the legacy technology, and hence were incapable of absorbing and utilizing new innovations.

    Christensen's working example was steam shovels, which were displaced by hydraulic excavators. At first hydraulics could only be used on a small scale, so the steam shovel companies felt safe. They included hydraulic machines in their catalogs, but the sales dept tended to use them as sweeteners for big contracts rather than actually trying to sell them, so the companies saw them as a marginal sideline and kept investing in bigger and better steam shovels. Then the day came when hydraulics were cheaper to use than steam shovels, and the big steam shovel companies rapidly went bust.

    In theory the steam shovel companies should have seen what was happening and switched production to hydraulic machinery. But their management structure and organisational competencies had become a straitjacket that wouldn't let them change.

    A related perspective on this is Schumpeter's concept of Creative Destruction:

    the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.

    The old steam shovel companies were destroyed by new industrial methods coming in from left field, not because they produced bad steam shovels.

    Getting back to the point

    So what does this mean for Heteromeles' quest for a form of socialism in the 1910s that doesn't collapse into Stalinism?

    • Central planning creates diseconomies of scale. Beyond a certain point they exceed the economies of scale. Central planning for an entire nation is well past this point.

    • Central planning also inhibits innovation. Innovation happens best in small organisations, the smaller the better. Its no accident that so many of the things that changed our world started with two people in a garage.

    • Destruction is a key part of the process of innovation; any economic system must be able to accommodate it.

    So when I look for "Socialism 2.0" I look for something that can avoid diseconomies of scale and handle innovation. That is why I suggested the workers co-op as the fundamental unit of organisation; co-ops can work much like firms do under capitalism, and the same processes of innovation and creative destruction can occur.

    However this creates a conflict with the wider mechanisms used by the government to maintain control of the economy. I suggested that the National Bank is used to control capital and allocate money to those parts of the economy seen as important by the government. But in that case the innovative upstarts are going to be systematically deprived of capital, while the big incumbents are subsidised with cheap loans and debt write-offs. That isn't going to be a problem at first, but over the longer term its going to lead to stagnation.

    1944:

    Not disagreeing, but I'd like to see more "Corporate good citizenship", where the presence of a corporate entity benefits more than just the stockholders. For instance, a corporation that offshores manufacturing should be taxed at a higher rate, since local and national governments will incur additional expense from the now unemployed staff. More benefit could've been had from "Free" trade, I would've preferred to see a sliding scale of import duties based on how closely the exporting entity followed first world environmental and labor standards, so no tariff if they didn't poison their environment and dealt fairly with the staff.

    1945:

    You are retailing a lot of theories as fact. Is there any actual proof they are true?

    You said:

    "The old steam shovel companies were destroyed by new industrial methods coming in from left field, not because they produced bad steam shovels."

    They were not destroyed by new methods coming from left field, you said they were already selling the new methods. This was a failure of imagination, not structure. They were a producer of excavation machinery that failed to change with the times. Beretta has been going since the 16th century, they started producing arquebus barrels in the 1500s!

    1946:

    Paul
    "Steam Shovels" - that is exactly what happened to the giant corporation I once worked for - Eastman Kodak ...

    Toby
    Maison Carre Hermes were originally up-market saddlery makers.
    They still do that, but Scarves & other luxury items make most of their money, now ...

    1947:

    I just read your "poke fun at the former USSR... and my instant reaction is to wonder if you work/have worked in large companies, with divisions run by MBAs. The reason, of course, is EXACTLY THE SAME as what you were saying the USSR did.

    Not surprising, given that the USSR was structured as a Taylorist corporation, rationally run by experts :-/

    A lot of people get hung up on labels like "capitalist" and "communist", and ignore people like Taylor who's ideas were adopted by both sides…

    1948:

    You are retailing a lot of theories as fact. Is there any actual proof they are true?

    Yes. Follow the links for longer summaries of the key ideas.

    Coase's idea about the balance between economies and diseconomies of scale is widely accepted. Economies of scale are easy to see. Diseconomies less so, but stories of waste and inefficiency in big organisations are universal. Also, most corporate mergers cause a loss of shareholder value thanks to the greater scale and diversity of the merged organisation.

    Christensen's idea of disruptive innovation is supported by a lot more than just one anecdote about one industry. If you read his book (which I recommend if you are interested in the subject) he has a lot more case studies. The most interesting is the sequence of hard disk drive generations going from 8", 5.25", 3.5". At each size the dominant companies found themselves unable to migrate to the next size down. Similar things happened in the mainframe -> minicomputer -> microcomputer industries, and then down to tablets and phones. Has anyone bought a DEC phone recently?

    This was a failure of imagination, not structure."

    When it keeps happening systematically, even when the companies in question can see it coming, you have to stop just attributing it to happenstance or stupidity and start looking for the underlying patterns.

    The core of the problem is often the sales department. Sales people are incentivised by commissions on every sale, so they naturally go hunting for the big sales that land big commissions. They also feed back requirements from these big customers to the manufacturing and R&D wings of the company. So over time the whole company naturally optimises itself to serve the requirements of its biggest customers. The problem is that these customers are self-selected by size, and they only tell their suppliers what they think each supplier needs to hear.

    In the meantime there is some new technology coming up. For steam shovels it was hydraulic back-hoes. For 8" disk drives it was the 5.25" drives. For mainframes it was minicomputers. The market for these devices is different to that of the incumbent technology. There are clear reasons why the new technology is inferior, often with numbers attached. So for the incumbent sales department there appears to be no customer demand, and hence they inform R&D that there is no business case for development.

    There might very well be people, especially over in R&D, who are well aware of the new technology. But they can't get anywhere. They might well produce some sample products with the new technology, but they won't sell. Partly this is because they don't have any real understanding of the market they are producing for (its a different market, remember), and partly because once these novel products hit the catalog they are pushed by the same sales department who are spending their time visiting the big customers who produce a steady stream of big commissions and aren't interested in developing new markets for a product they don't really understand.

    Meanwhile there are some start-up companies who are also producing the new technology. They don't have the steady stream of big customers to rely on, so their sales people are forced to get out and hustle for new markets. Christensen tells one story of a 3.5" disk drive maker. Their CEO had discussed this problem with Christensen, and had subsequently ordered the production of a 2.5" drive in anticipation of the next market shift. It sat on the shelves, unsold. Meanwhile Christensen had become aware of a company making one of the first in-car sat-nav systems that really needed a device that small to hold map data. The problem was that their order size was too small for the disk companies sales arm to be bothered to try for, so nothing was happening.

    Similar things happened at IBM, which ignored DEC. And then DEC ignored Microsoft and Compaq. At every stage the new technology was seen by the incumbents as an inferior toy, because it was. But then the toy got incrementally better until it reached a cross-over point where it could compete directly with the incumbent, and the incumbent suddenly discovered that it was losing market share. Sometimes incumbents survive (IBM is still around). Other times they just die. DEC was eventually taken over by Comapq.

    Anyone remember the DEC Alpha? Or the VAXstation? Probably not. Those were DEC's attempts at competing in the microcomputer market. The requirements were of course written by a marketing department that knew exactly what their customers wanted. The problem was, they were the wrong customers. Windows-RT is another example of a mis-aimed product from an incumbent trying to out-do the upstarts.

    Going back to the steam shovel companies, like I say, they did produce hydraulic back-hoes. But they weren't set up to sell them into markets that could make good use of them.

    1949:

    "Steam Shovels" - that is exactly what happened to the giant corporation I once worked for - Eastman Kodak ...

    Made more ironic by the fact that Kodak's research labs produced the first ever digital camera back in 1975.

    If you can get through the paywall you can read the whole sad story. The Kodak marketing department considered the technology a threat and wanted it suppressed:

    In 1989, Mr. Sasson and a colleague, Robert Hills, created the first modern digital single-lens reflex (S.L.R.) camera that looks and functions like today’s professional models. It had a 1.2 megapixel sensor, and used image compression and memory cards.

    But Kodak’s marketing department was not interested in it. Mr. Sasson was told they could sell the camera, but wouldn’t — because it would eat away at the company’s film sales.

    1950:

    Anyone remember the DEC Alpha? Or the VAXstation? Yes; Still got a VAXstation and a DEC Alpha in the office, and custom software for both of them.

    1951:

    Oh, and another classic example: the Xerox Alto.

    Xerox (yes, the photocopier people) had a big research operation called Xerox PARC. People there were researching office automation, because Xerox sold lots of copiers to lots of big offices. In the early 70s they came up with a computer that used a mouse and GUI, and had an Ethernet interface (yes, Xerox invented Ethernet) to let it communicate with other similar machines. It could send email, do word processing, and also print documents on a networked laser printer (which they also invented).

    It was a flop. The marketing people hated it. The conversation went along the following lines:

    "How will this help us sell more photocopiers?"

    "No, you don't understand. This is going to replace the photocopier."

    "This is a photocopier company. Go back to your lab, and don't bother us again unless you have something we can actually sell."

    Then Steve Jobs got a tour of PARC in exchange for an option on some Apple stock. He saw the potential in what Xerox had, and produced first the Lisa (which was a flop) and then the Mac (which wasn't).

    1952:

    Xerox had a failure of imagination, out in plain sight was a burgeoning market for computer hobbyists and small business that a hypothetical sub $3000 Xerox could've owned a chunk of.

    1953:

    Yah. I’ve spent a substantial part of my life working with those people - Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, for example - and the projects they spawned.

    The Alto was a response to Xerox refusing to buy the group the hardware they originally wanted. So they designed their own and made a couple of batches. The idea was to have equipment that was plausibly 5 years ahead of the general market, so they could work out what software might be able to do for people by then. Later they came up with the Dorado, a monster that was way ahead of its time but ludicrously expensive. These days I run the same Smalltalk software on Raspberry Pis (which I also spent years working on) that cost $35 for over 1000 times that performance. And the laser printer? Yup, that came out that group too, and Xerox certainly made money from that, so please, forget the “Xerox never made money from PARC” nonsense.

    There still isn’t any software that improves on it. Instead the wider world went for C++, Java, Ruby, VisualFrigginBASIC, Go, Rust, etc. None of which get even close. I see Rust is spalling away right now...

    Jobs was excited by what he saw at that demo, but what he saw was the windows and (for then) beautiful proportionally rendered fonts. Remember, he was a calligraphy nerd, so of course that stood out for him. He admitted to having missed the actual important underpinnings of a proper object language some years later. Almost everyone else still misses the point.

    1954:

    Heteromeles: As far as your surname is concerned, German Wikipedia has a little more information about it than the English version. For instance, it identifies its origin as either Swiss or Eastern Central European.

    As it's one of the typical Mennonite surnames (with variations in spelling), one possibility is that it originated in Switzerland and then moved to Central Eastern Europe through the migrations of Anabaptists. If it isn't found in the Netherlands (which I don't know off the top of my head), that would likely rule out the Mennonites as its main carriers, but there were other anabaptist groups that started in Switzerland/Upper Germany as well and migrated directly eastward from there.

    1955:

    First, about the chalk issue - it's obvious that I haven't made myself clear, since I see you don't understand my argument.

    It's NOT an "annoyed welder", it's that on the shop floor, they may have had on-the-floor job usages (think team jargon, only understood by people who do that job), and would chalk on it in ways meaningful to a welder, such as "this seam needs to be extra heavy", or "these are two different types of steel, do this". By your relative chalking on it, none of those would have been there, and what he did chalk would be wrong when the welder looked at it, because he's using draftsman jargon. The welder, therefore, was trying to prevent the welding from being done wrong.

    Now, about socialism... I wish I could find Paul Krugman's current email, because I want to email him the same thing I'm about to say: the answer is NOT monetary policy, but tax policy. Right now, the way to deal with inflation, given the fact that large companies are reporting record profits, and execs are getting huge increases in salaries and things like stock options, is to increase taxes on the upper tax brackets, thereby making the price increases pointless.

    Unless, of course, you implement price controls, which would be the actual answer.

    1956:

    Offshoring? Oh, no - the answer is that anyone offshoring pays unemployment to the people laid off... and pays it until they get another job with comparable pay and benefits or retires. And if that's 25 years, they pay that money for 25 years.

    1957:

    And, as I thought after I hit submit, they can be hit with fines for dumping cheap labor.

    1958:

    (Just to make sure it's on people's radar)
    DeepMind with another big splash:
    Competitive programming with AlphaCode (Blog piece, 02 Feb 2022)
    Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode (More technical piece (preprint), 2022-2-2)
    In our preprint, we detail AlphaCode, which uses transformer-based language models to generate code at an unprecedented scale, and then smartly filters to a small set of promising programs. We validated our performance using competitions hosted on Codeforces, a popular platform which hosts regular competitions that attract tens of thousands of participants from around the world who come to test their coding skills.

    1959:

    Thanks! On my end, what I did was to look up what it meant, according to various genealogy websites and google. If you believe the websites (big ask right there), it has different meanings in different countries.

    Given that it's common in Mennonite Country in the US, I wouldn't be surprised if it's associated with that religion. However, I don't have any Mennonite ancestors that I know of, so go figure.

    1960:

    I'm sorry, say what? The same companies that made the 5.25" drive, and the floopies for them, made the next smaller. And companies like Seagate and WD have been not merely fine with going to smaller form factors, they push them.

    Oh, that's right, the other problem with smaller form factors: that's if your company doesn't make ADAPTORS to fit the smaller drive in the larger drive bay. Or insist on proprietary connectors. And those aren't failure of imagination, that's pure marketing.

    IBM did not ignore DEC. However, the nearest competitor was Amdahl, I think, nor did they ignore the Seven Dwarves. Instead, they sent out heavy marketing. And, of course, upper management wanted mainframes.

    DEC was a shame. They lost their way, and that Compaq bought them - that was an utter disaster, so then... gosh, HP got them.

    DEC Alpha, desktop? Sorry, my four years of experience with DEC alphas was with servers - the City of Chicago 911 system ran on three clusters of DEC Alphas - that's one pair for police, one for fire, and one for emergency communications. And sigh the second of the pair was on the other side of a wall, not even fireproof. And there was a set of three offsite.

    Those were NOT desktops.

    1961:

    DEC Alpha, desktop?

    In the early 1990s there was a consortium of hardware and software vendors targeting an industry-wide standard for a desktop platform that was intended to rival Windows NT (and Intel). The basic PCs were to use MIPS, Intel, or Alpha CPUs; the OS was going to be SCO Open Desktop. (I was at SCO when this went down.)

    IIRC the MIPS platform faded away then DEC was taken over and the Alpha one went away, leaving only Intel -- where Windows had stitched up all the manufacturers with exclusive licenses. On top of which SCO couldn't sell a copy of ODT without coughing up $250 in royalty payments to folks whose software they were integrating: not AT&T (they'd bought the UNIX license outright), but SCO -- for historical reasons (cough, Xenix, cough) used the Microsoft C compiler(!), so ... let's just say it's not a viable strategy to pitch an OS competitor to Microsoft when you have to pay Microsoft licensing fees every time you sell a copy (and M$, in their rapacious Gates era incarnation, are free to undercut you and generally play fast and loose with anti-trust).

    1962:

    I like that, but while "Vox populi, vox dei", the voice of the working class is that of a lesser God.

    1963:

    The Apple Lisa was a flop mostly because it was too expensive for the market at the time. It was, especially with the 10Mb hard disk, vastly more powerful than the original 128K Mac (which came out of a rival development team within Apple). The Mac only did single tasking at first; the Lisa had actual multi-tasking, albeit a bit half-assed, from the word go -- it was, arguably, the first workstation-grade business computer, maybe the first actual workstation to see mass production. But eventually Jobs got forced out, the Mac group expanded, the last Lisas were re-ROM'd and sold as "Macintosh XL" or bulldozed into landfill ... and Jobs began working on NeXT, the direct lineal descendant of which I am typing on right now (an iMac running macOS, aka NeXTStep plus a third of a century of incremental development).

    1964:

    Wait - AT&T owned the Unix license....

    And DEC Alphas were really nice servers, and it wasn't a big deal for me to jump from Solaris to Tru64 when I changed jobs (and I was doing sysadmin, as well as programming).

    Let's not even begin to talk about culture wars when HP under Carly bought Compaq, a year or so after they bought DEC.

    1965:

    That does not constitute proof, correlation is not causation and all that. Clearly there is a problem, though not a universal one. As you have a background in systems it looks like a systems problem to you, this is not necessarily true.

    1966:

    SCO had purchased a royalty-free license to SVR3.2, back in the day. (Just as a few years later Sun purchased a royalty-free license for SVR4.) When AT&T jacked up their pricing into the ionosphere with SVR4, SCO engaged in some white-room cloning of SVR4.3 for SCO Open Server (the next OS generation) -- kept the AT&T copyrights in their header files, re-wrote the rest from scratch. (I was part of the techpubs team attached to the kernel and command line OS team on the project.)

    1967:

    Just thought I'd drop this link here, a 2d polymer that is strong, light and impermeable:

    https://news.mit.edu/2022/polymer-lightweight-material-2d-0202

    Very interesting. Lots of applications obviously.

    1968:

    I am not sure about that. Apollo, HP and, later, Sun were all at least as expensive and DID sell. I can't now remember why I never tried one, but I vaguely recall that the Lisa was promoted into the wrong markets, or in the wrong way, for something that price. 10-15 grand was just feasible as an entry in an academic grant, or as a similar request for a single user in the relevant technological businesses. And there the workstation market remained until something functional came in for 3,500, which enabled them to be bought out of ordinary budgets (i.e. without a special request).

    1969:

    “In the early 1990s there was a consortium of hardware and software vendors targeting an industry-wide standard for a desktop platform that was intended to rival Windows NT (and Intel). The basic PCs were to use MIPS, Intel, or Alpha CPUs; the OS was going to be SCO Open Desktop. (I was at SCO when this went down.)”

    Hmm. That is very different to what I remember of that ‘project’. Originally Windows NT was supposed to be a non-intel-specific OS to run on an Exciting! New! Breed! of machines with cpus from everyone so that intel wasn’t able to exercise near monopoly power on the market. The team I managed at the time had prototypes with

    • DEC Alpha
    • HP7000 (I think)
    • MIPS
    • some intel thing I can’t even remember the name of

    All running some early NT, all running a Smalltalk dynamically generating object code for the cpu. It all faded away pretty quickly as intel manipulated the market and the competitors dropped away.

    I can’t remember any SCO involvement at all, but nobody could know everything that was going on back then.

    That Alpha was quite fast, the MIPS was meh, the HP was fast but weird. I, of course, had an ARM machine but it certainly didn’t run NT, thank Ghu.

    1970:

    I was at Ameritech, as I've said, in the mid-nineties, and we got lucky - we went form Windows 3.1 (windows on top of DOS) to NT, skipping shudder Lose95 (friends noted to me that you never won with windows, you only lost...)

    1971:

    All running some early NT,

    If memory serves (which it often doesn't) that's about the time I was working for Compac at a customer site that had been a DEC client. They had a bunch of old Alpha machines at the smaller sites and clustered Alphas (I think with Compac logos on them) running windows NT 5 service pack 4, which was pretty much the last of the NT flavours. I was there when they decided to drop support for alphas, which annoyed the client who had just dropped tens of millions on shiny new alpha gear that all had to be ripped out and replaced with Intel boxes. Lots of Intel boxes because they just couldn't handle the load that the older Alpha boxes had cruised on. I think the 3 box alpha cluster was replaced with about a dozen high end Intel, with separate clusters for file, print, exchange, and VM, and all the users were up in arms about the poor performance.

    1972:

    Grrr, NT 4, service pack 5.

    Bloody brain not working.

    1973:

    Paul
    *. At every stage the new technology was seen by the incumbents as an inferior toy, because it was. But then the toy got incrementally better until it reached a cross-over point where it could compete directly with the incumbent, and the incumbent suddenly discovered that it was losing market share. *
    That is EXACTLY what happened to Kodak - and - they were warned, internally & took no notice.
    SEE ALSO Paul @ 1952

    1974:

    Been out of the loop for a while. I have work to do around the house & I have physical problems so everything takes twice as long, is twice as hard and hurts twice as much.

    1975:

    Adrian Smith @ 1844:

    I think a part of it is the time that passed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. If the Russian successor state had demanded to keep the Crimea at the time Ukraine gained its independence (1991?) it would have been different.
    But they didn't. They waited 25 years and then took the territory by force.

    i'm not sure the russian successor state was in a fit state to do anything that proactive in 1991, i mean i imagine they must have been in a kind of institutional shock

    Whether they could have been proactive or not, they could have at least voiced their objections in a timely manner. And as someone else pointed out Russian immigration into Eastern Ukraine was fundamentally Stalinist.

    And whether they were in a fit state to do anything proactive in 1991, they certainly had plenty of time to recover before they signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in 1994

    also it's a bit disingenuous to just say they "waited 25 years" as though nothing had happened in ukraine. they waited until a us-fomented color revolution showed signs of wanting to move towards nato and brought into government people with ties to wartime fascist groups

    i'm also suspicious of anything involving victoria nuland on general principles, sue me

    I disagree (strongly disagree) that the U.S. fomented the Ukraine revolution; Ukraine has not applied for NATO membership STILL, although I can see every reason why they might wish for strong allies for protection against Russian aggression, and resistance to Soviet style communism does NOT make someone a fascist (any more than resistance to German aggression in WW2 made someone a communist).

    I don't trust anything involving Vladimir Putin, so counter-sue if you must.

    Putin Says the U.S. Wants to Push Russia into War

    The Russian president blamed the United States for the crisis in Ukraine, saying Americans were goading the Kremlin to start a conflict as a pretext for enacting harsh sanctions..

    Gas Lighters & Abusers ... "Look what you made me do ..."

    1976:

    Adrian Smith @ 1850:

    i don't think the us would want a black sea naval base so much as they might like russia losing one
    what are us warships doing in the black sea, anyway - sampling the fleshpots of trebizond?

    Were there any fleshpots left after the Russian bombardment & occupation in 1915

    I don't think Turkey (NATO member since 1952) even has a of Naval Base at Trabzon/Trebizond ... although they apparently announced plans to establish a new base at Çamburnu, (east of Trabzon) in Trabzon province back in 2019. But I don't think they've had time to build any fleshpots there yet. Did you perhaps mean the fleshpots of Bartin? The last time I looked at a map there were several other countries bordering the Black Sea besides Russia and some of them are NATO members. The U.S. does conduct JOINT exercises with NATO member countries including Turkey (despite some recent strains on the relationship).

    Oh, besides Turkey, Bulgaria & Romania both and they have ports/bases on the Black Sea (joined NATO in 2004 about the same time they joined the EU & Council of Europe), so U.S. ships will likely make port visits there as well, but I don't know how many fleshpots they've made available yet.

    1977:

    Greg Tingey @ 1876: EC
    There's no doubt that some of the newer Ukraine guvmint were off their heads ( Or were Ru agents - it's all so confusing & bonkers). Similarly, some of the previous guvmint were equally ethnonationistally off their rockers - aligning with Putin's own extremists' present supranationalist fantasies - "Grand Duchy of Finland", anyone?

    I much prefer the fantasies of the Duchy of Grand Fenwicks.

    1978:

    I think it was PowerPC, not HP.

    1979:

    whitroth @ 1915: I agree, and this is what I've been saying everywhere: NATO is NOT the EU. NATO is nothing except a US-UK-European military force whose remit is to face off with the USSR/Russia. There is no reason to expand NATO eastwards, other than with the sole intention of encircling and intimidating Russia.

    I dunno 'bout that. The driving force behind NATO's expansion eastward appears to be now independent former Soviet Republics1 wanting to join NATO so somebody will have their backs in case the Russians should change their minds about allowing them to remain independent ... I guess sort of like the problems Ukraine is currently experiencing.

    Looking back, the whole Ukraine mess appears to have started because Ukraine wanted to join the EU and Russia told them they better not ... Yanukovych knuckled under to the Russian demands and the people took to the streets.

    1 How did the Baltic States become part of the Soviet Union in the first place? And might prior experience have anything to do with their desire for strong allies they can rely on?

    In accordance with a secret protocol within the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 that divided Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, the Soviet Army invaded eastern Poland in September 1939, and the Stalinist Soviet government coerced Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into "mutual assistance treaties" which granted USSR the right to establish military bases in these countries. In June 1940, the Red Army occupied all of the territory of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and installed new, pro-Soviet puppet governments. In all three countries simultaneously, rigged elections (in which only pro-Stalinist candidates were allowed to run) were staged in July 1940, the newly assembled "parliaments" in each of the three countries then unanimously applied to join the Soviet Union, and in August 1940 were incorporated into the USSR as the Estonian SSR, Latvian SSR, and Lithuanian SSR.
    1980:

    Heteromeles @ 1921: Googling my last name was amusing. Since it occasionally pops up here, I'll let anyone who cares can look it up and get a chuckle (or in my case, a wince).

    The "patriarch" for my family name arrived in Jamestown in 1664 on an indenture under the headright system, arriving from either Bristol or Briston (both town names appear in the early colonial records). AFAIK, no one has figured out which it was, but the NAME appears to be Norman French and likely indicates HIS ancestors came over to England following William the Conqueror.

    I did the Ancestor DNA thingy and it came up 90% English or Scottish, 7% French or German, 2.8% "other" northern European and 0.2% Eritrean or Ethiopian. Plain vanilla with a hint of spice. I was kind of hoping for a bit more spice just to make things interesting, but nope, just dull as dishwater.

    1981:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1930: I was referring to the people killed by NATO's actions, who were mostly Serbs killed by bombing.

    So you don't care about any of NON-Serbs killed during Yugoslavia's civil wars?

    1982:

    paws4thot @ 1953: Anyone remember the DEC Alpha? Or the VAXstation? Yes; Still got a VAXstation and a DEC Alpha in the office, and custom software for both of them.

    I do actually. But not from using them. When I worked for the burglar alarm company I did the security & fire systems for their research facility in RTP here in North Carolina. While I was out there they showed me a lot of the new stuff they were developing.

    When they opened a factory in Clayton, NC I put in the security & fire systems there.

    Later, I was sent to "configure a system for a customer" and it turned out I was there to program the system that was based on a DEC host. I think it might have been a VAXstation ... looks like the ones I seen in Google images and Wikipedia ... it had a vendor's name on the box, but I recognized it as a DEC. There was a VT-220 at the guard shack for the guards to select functions from the menus and I think a VT-340 at the host.

    I got a couple hours instruction how a menu was supposed to look (and how to write the ANSI sequences to link function key selections to a desired "event") before the manufacturer's rep looked at his watch and said, "Oh, I got to catch a plane to Cleveland ... GOOD LUCK!" and left me there to figure it out on my own. That was my introduction to "personal computing".

    I just took a look at Google Maps and the research facility in RTP is now Dell Technologies and the factory is now Caterpiller, Inc factory.

    1983:

    PPC? Certainly a possibility. We had some very early ones around to do the dynamic translation for, which was useful when Apple adopted it since we had part of the job done. The HP would have been an HP/UX machine in that case. An odd cpu...

    We never did an Itanic though, but since nobody else ever did, big deal.

    So many cpus gone and lost in the mists of time. How on earth did the total waste of perfectly good sand x86 ever get to be so widespread? At least ARM is now the dominant design; always said it would be. Back in 1990 so many people laughed at me for saying it.

    1984:

    Toby @ 1968: That does not constitute proof, correlation is not causation and all that. Clearly there is a problem, though not a universal one. As you have a background in systems it looks like a systems problem to you, this is not necessarily true.

    "Failure of the imagination", "pilot error" and so on are all ways of explaining failure by blaming the human doing the job. Its not that these explanations are wrong in some epistemological sense, its that they don't help anyone do better next time.

    The aviation world learned this early on. In World War II the US air force lost a lot of B-17s on the ground; pilots would accidentally retract the undercarriage after landing in stead of the flaps. At first USAF treated this as "pilot error", and the response was to make the pilots do better by punishing those who made the mistakes pour encourager les autres. This was ineffective.

    In 1942, a young psychology graduate, Alphonse Chapanis joined the Army Air Force Aero Medical Lab as their first psychologist. Chapanis noticed that the flaps and landing gear had identical switches that were co-located [because both were hydraulic] and were operated in sequence. In the high-workload period of landing, pilots frequently retracted the gear instead of the flaps. This hardly ever occurred to pilots of other aircraft types. Chapanis fixed a small rubber wheel to the landing gear lever and a small wedge-shape to the flap lever. This kind of ‘pilot error’ almost completely disappeared.

    So it is with blaming company failures on "failure of the imagination". It implies that all we need to do is to tell company managers (or co-op leaders in Heteromeles' alternative history) to be more imaginative, or possibly send them on imagination courses. Problem solved. Not.

    One of the big insights of systems analysis is that that systems are composed of people, processes and technology. When a system fails, you have to look for a system problem. "Pilot error" is not an answer, its an abdication of responsibility. Its also deeply unfair to the people in the system who are set up to fail and then forced to shoulder the blame.

    When you see the same mistake happening again and again its no use just saying "pilot error"; you have to dig deeper and find out why the pilots are making that particular error so often. The way you do that is system analysis. Any organisation is a system composed of people, processes and technology. It is set up to achieve an objective. If it fails to achieve that objective then you need to debug it. I find it difficult to understand why this is a controversial idea.

    1985:

    whitroth @ 1963:

    The same companies that made the 5.25" drive, and the floopies for them, made the next smaller. And companies like Seagate and WD have been not merely fine with going to smaller form factors, they push them.

    Yes, those were the companies that learned the lesson. What about Shugart, Micropolis, Priam and Quantum? All makers of 8" drives who failed to move down to 5.25.

    Oh, that's right, the other problem with smaller form factors: that's if your company doesn't make ADAPTORS to fit the smaller drive in the larger drive bay. Or insist on proprietary connectors. And those aren't failure of imagination, that's pure marketing.

    Its not about selling your new small drive into the old market, its about finding the new markets for your smaller drive that the big old drive can't meet.

    I've just checked my copy of Innovators Dilemma, so I can get it right this time.

    The original disk drives were removable 14 inch drives sold to mainframe manufacturers. The 8 inch drives were originally sold to minicomputer makers, where lower cost and lower capacity were a good trade-off. Over time they got good enough to replace the old washing machine drives, and the makers of 14 inch drives went out of business.

    This was not because they failed to launch 8 inch drives, or because they didn't have the technology. They were held captive by their customers, the mainframe makers, who wanted 14 inch drives. This was a marketing problem, not a technology problem.

    Then in 1980 Seagate introduced a 5.25" drive. This was too small a capacity to be of interest to minicomputer makers, but it caught the rising wave of desktop PCs; a 5.25 inch drive could be accomodated in the same box as the rest of the PC, whereas an 8" drive needed a separate box with all the extra space and cabling that implied. PCs were a different market to minicomputers. Again, the 8" drive makers were held captive by their market; DEC et al wanted 8" drives, so 8" drives they got. The 8" drive makers didn't know how to sell to PC makers, so that market went to upstarts like Seagate, Miniscribe, Computer Memories and International Memories.

    In 1984 Rodime made the first 3.5" drive, although this didn't go anywhere. But in 87 Connor managed to create a 3.5" drive that was more robust and used electronics to replace mechanical components. This found new markets in laptops and small footprint desktop models that the old 5.25" models couldn't compete in.

    Seagate, one of the 5.25" makers, had also produced a 3.5" drive, but it was squashed by marketing and senior management. They argued that what the market wanted was lower cost per megabyte, something that 3.5" drives couldn't provide. That, after all, was what their customers were saying. So Seagate cancelled the 3.5" program. Seagate finally started offering 3.5" drives in 1988, but they were sold simply as a smaller replacement for their old 5.25" line and were not sold into the new markets that were driving growth in the computer industry.

    The story changed with the 2.5" drive; in this case the incumbent manufacturers did move to the smaller size successfully. This was because, unlike all the other transitions, disk drives were now being sold with weight, size and power consumption as marketing drivers; all the customers of 3.5" drives wanted smaller lower-power drives to put in their slimmer, lighter laptop computers. So all the incumbents saw marketing pull for the smaller form factor, and they followed the market.

    And those aren't failure of imagination, that's pure marketing.

    You're agreeing with me. Wow! I'll have to make a note on my calendar.

    IBM did not ignore DEC. However, the nearest competitor was Amdahl, I think, nor did they ignore the Seven Dwarves. Instead, they sent out heavy marketing. And, of course, upper management wanted mainframes.

    Precisely. IBM's customers wanted mainframes, so mainframes they got, until the time when DEC VAXes could replace a lot of mainframe applications for a lot less money. IBM survived. The 7 dwarfs didn't.

    DEC was a shame. They lost their way, and that Compaq bought them...

    Yes, they lost their way because the market for minicomputers had dried up and they didn't know how to sell into the PC market.

    DEC Alpha: I was thinking of the 64 bit processor. Yes it mostly wound up in servers because, as I said, DEC didn't know how to sell PCs.

    1986:

    That may be a bit of a surprise for PC builders who opted for the Quantum Bigfoot 5.25" hard disk... they were also marketing some nice 3.5" mechs before they were assimilated into Seagate, if memory serves.

    1987:

    "Precisely. IBM's customers wanted mainframes, so mainframes they got, ..."

    The execusuits at IBM's large customers claimed that they did, but a LOT of IBM's customers and technical staff did their best to kick IBM into the 1970s. And failed.

    Listening to the wrong people is also the main part of the reason the PPC failed.

    1988:

    You couldn't make it up. "Meanwhile, an official spokesperson for the Prime Minister has said Downing Street was not aware the DUP planned to suspend checks ...." Their incompetence beggars description.

    1989:

    Paul@1987: ""Failure of the imagination", "pilot error" and so on are all ways of explaining failure by blaming the human doing the job. Its not that these explanations are wrong in some epistemological sense, its that they don't help anyone do better next time."

    So you are not claiming what you are saying are facts? Fair enough, we agree. A systems based approach is very useful, obviously, for dealing with systems. It does not necessarily have explanatory power.

    Your aircraft example is an example of bad design and how humans operate. A systems based approach would surely involve ensuring the design system took in to account how the "human system" operates, not putting shapes on levers to make up for these failures. This illustrates how useful systems thinking can be, but also its lack of explanatory power. It is not a universal explanation, it is a tool.

    The sources you shared seemed to me to be making too greater claims. Ironically by saying it is usually a marketing problem it suggests that it could be a capitalism problem. But there are certainly other explanation if not coming from a systems analysis position.And no it is not a controversial idea that systems analysis is useful.

    1990:

    EC @ 1991
    I think they are just lying, again, actually.

    Toby
    I think you are overstating your case.
    One reason railways ( in this country) & airlines, generally, are so safe is because of the "systems" approach taken by RAIB, here, & the various Air Investigation bodies, internationally.

    1991:

    dude turkey is a muslim country with a fairly religiously hardline government, any fleshpottery would have to be pretty damn discreet, hopefully the bulgarians can muster the, er, manpower to cater to any american needs in that area

    i'm impressed u find the us to be innocent of any involvement in the ukrainian color revolution despite nuland's burblings and what soros had to say, guess i'm just one of putin's useful idiots

    have to see how this upcoming russian invasion of ukraine plays out

    1992:

    I can easily believe that they had taken no notice of what was going on outside the Westminster bubble, and the Northern Ireland Secretary (who he?) was either equally ignorant or had failed to bring it to their attention. I agree with OGH that we might be better off with the New Management!

    1993:

    Poe's law. They are past the point of being satirizable.

    1994:

    Tom Peck of the Independent has said as much.

    1995:

    About those damn 2.5" drives... there is zero reason to put them into anything but a laptop... but the OEMs really wanted you to use them.

    Never mind they were a) more expensive than the 3.5" drives, and b) smaller in storage.

    I had all kinds of issues ordering 3.5" drives even three years ago when I was ordering rackmount servers.

    1996:

    The thing about 2.5 inch drives is that you can mount them vertically in a 2-U server, which allows for a lot more drives in a lot less space. I can see your point, however - the 3.5 drives are bigger and cheaper.

    1997:

    perfectly good Barrayaran name

    I never noticed that. I'm pretty sure the parents didn't either, but now I have to ask.

    1998:

    Hmm ... keep getting error messages (out of time).

    Maybe we should move to a newer topic thread?

    1999:

    "That may be a bit of a surprise for PC builders who opted for the Quantum Bigfoot 5.25" hard disk..."

    Super idea, in contrast to the prevalence of 3.5" hard drives, which always seemed rather silly to me. 3.5" gives you less data per track so more head seeking, which is always by far the slowest part of a drive's operation; and the basic width of the drive-bay part of a PC case is still set at 5.25", first by floppy drives and then by optical drives, so the reduction to 3.5" means using extra bits of bracketry - whether loose or built-in - to waste the extra width.

    I found one of those Bigfoot drives in a junk bin something over 15 years ago, and barring power cuts it's been spinning ever since. But I'd never heard of them before that, I've never seen another one, and your post is probably the first time I've heard anyone mention them since. I don't understand why they should be so rare; were they stupidly expensive for no reason or something?

    2000:

    Quantum did not make very good drives. Your Bigfoot and the way it's lasting is nigh-miraculous!

    2001:

    David L @ 1843:

    Yeah, I should have written Over-The-Air broadcast Commercial Television.

    In the US for a decade or few now these folks also sell snake oil. Just not in the 8 hour or so window of late afternoon till midnight. In those times the legit folks outbid them. At 2am or 1pm the snake oil is there.

    Mid-90s was the last time I had a functional television (not counting the 1080p computer monitor with the tuner that couldn't pick up OTA broadcasts due to terrain).

    I gave up cable-TV while I worked for the burglar alarm company back in the 80s. I'd get home late, fall asleep with the TV on and never actually saw any programming before I had to get up and turn it off before going out to work again. Nothing against TV, I just wasn't getting my money's worth out of cable.

    When I had to stay somewhere overnight, I did occasionally watch some TV in the motel room (or more accurately would have the TV on while I read a book).

    But that was all analog TV before the switch to digital & HDTV.

    2002:

    First of all, not all of the 7 dwarfs disappeared. Unisys is still around and still selling "mainframes" directly descended from the Burroughs Large Systems, and the Univac 1100 series. (And note that both CDC and IBM sold 5.25" and 3.5" HDs, they just became unprofitable for them, they are now part of Seagate & WD respectively).

    Second, I think the reason disk drive manufacturers got stuck on older form factors is that the established customers were willing to pay more money (sometimes a lot more) for the same old thing (but slightly better). I have seen this in action, and it is incredibly frustrating to deal with.

    Third, there is a reason enterprise HDs are 2.5". You can spin them much faster than a 3.5" drive. The volumetric density isn't much different than 3.5" in a JBOD drawer.

    P.S. The removable disk pack became a thing of the past when winchester heads became the standard (because they gave you better data density). I'm sure that caused grief because now you couldn't swap disk packs and had to buy dedicated drives.

    2003:

    whitroth @ 1938: The point is when the current government of Ukraine came in, they passed explicit laws against that. Russia, AFAIK, hasn't, but some states in the US sure want to.

    Just FYI:

    Russification or Russianization (Russian: Русификация, Rusifikatsiya) is a form of cultural assimilation process during which non-Russian communities (whether involuntarily or voluntarily) give up their culture and language in favor of Russian culture.
    In a historical sense, the term refers to both official and unofficial policies of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union with respect to their national constituents and to national minorities in Russia, aimed at Russian domination and hegemony.
    The Russification of Ukraine (Ukrainian: Зросі́йщення Украї́ни, romanized: Zrosiishchennia Ukrainy; Russian: Русификация Украины, romanized: Rusyfikatsiya Ukrainy) was a body of laws, decrees, and other actions undertaken by the Imperial Russian and later Soviet authorities to strengthen Russian national, political and linguistic positions in Ukraine.
    Russification policy was more intense in Ukraine than in other parts of the Soviet Union, and the country now contains the largest group of Russian speakers who are not ethnically Russian
    In post-Soviet Ukraine, Ukrainian remains the only official language in the country; however, in 2012, President Victor Yanukovitch introduced a bill recognizing "regional languages", according to which, in particular, Russian could be used officially in the predominantly Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine, in schools, courts, and government institutions. While the bill was supported by Ukrainians in the eastern and southern regions, the legislation triggered protests in Kyiv, where representatives from opposition parties argued that it would further divide the Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking parts of the country and make Russian a de facto official language there. On 28 February 2018, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine ruled this legislation unconstitutional.
    After the 2014 Russian Annexation of Crimea and establishment of unrecognized Russian-supported militants in eastern Ukraine, Russification was imposed on people in these areas.

    Cronology of suppression of Ukrainian language in the 20th & 21st Centuries.

    So now you know.

    2004:

    Tim H. @ 1955: Xerox had a failure of imagination, out in plain sight was a burgeoning market for computer hobbyists and small business that a hypothetical sub $3000 Xerox could've owned a chunk of.

    Except that the actual cost of the NON-hypothetical Alto when it was first introduced in 1973 was $32,000 (equivalent to $114,105 in 2020).

    PS: Contrary to popular legend, Bill Gates did not "steal" the idea for the mouse & GUI used by Windoze from Apple. He stole it from the same place Steve Jobs stole the Lisa & Macintosh GUI from.

    How Bill Gates saved Apple in 1997.

    2005:

    The Alto that had CPU functions on four separate boards because nothing existed at the time to get all those functions on one chip? Five years later the possibility of a consumer market would've been more obvious, and better chips available, but I think marketing directly to consumers would've been out of their comfort zone.

    2006:

    The Apple Lisa was a flop mostly because it was too expensive for the market at the time.

    It was also somewhat of a turd. With lots of odd decisions. (Rectangular dots?)

    I bought one to use as a MacXL (I think was what it was called.) I loaded the Lisa software and played around. It wasn't very good at so many detail levels. But it was a very good demo of the future.

    Then I wiped it and used it as a poor man's Mac for a year before getting a real one.

    2007:

    That is very different to what I remember of that ‘project’. Originally Windows NT was supposed to be a non-intel-specific OS to run on an Exciting! New! Breed! of machines with cpus from everyone so that intel wasn’t able to exercise near monopoly power on the market.

    It is hard to get a complete picture of the OS/hardware markets around the 80s. It involved just too many players to fit on a single power point slide.

    I have a memory of a big issue was when Autodesk said, screw it, and switched to only Intel Win development. My understanding is this seemed to them to likely to be the dominant path and they would just ride it and ignore the rest and the cost of dealing with the rest. Microstation took the other approach and came in second in the CAD design arena. They, Microstation, still exists, especially in large engineering projects. Like designing a railroad, light or heavy. They can do things like deal with earth curvature.

    So while Autodesk concentrated on those "toy" personal computers and for a very long time didn't do multi-user into a single model very well, (networking PCs in the early days sucked hard), the vast majority of their sales were to folks who didn't need much or any support for multi-user projects. And now they do multi-user, are monopolistic in the way they operate and dominate the CAD market from small to very large. But still as you get larger Microstation is still there but they are a distant follower of Autodesk. Along with a few others.

    And this is just one tiny corner of the Windows, Unix, Apollo, IBM, Motorola, Sys360, Intel, Mac OS, Sparc, etc... wars of the time.

    2008:

    But Kodak’s marketing department was not interested in it. Mr. Sasson was told they could sell the camera, but wouldn’t — because it would eat away at the company’s film sales.

    To the general public Kodak was a camera company. But internally they knew they were a chemical company that sold large quantities of chemicals and accessories that people used to make picture prints and movies. The cameras were just the entry point of that larger market.

    They could not stomach the idea that most all of that would eventually just go away. But it WAS the only path to any kind of survival. They just could not walk down the only path. So they stayed where they were and hoped. With a big smile on their face.

    2009:

    PPC? Certainly a possibility. We had some very early ones around to do the dynamic translation for, which was useful when Apple adopted it since we had part of the job done. The HP would have been an HP/UX machine in that case. An odd cpu...

    Moto was very slow at improving the 68K so Apple (I think they initiated it) got with Data General with their 88000 RISC project along with IBM and Moto.

    Data General was another of those companies that couldn't get past their first time at bat grand slam to win the World Series hit.

    2010:

    The execusuits at IBM's large customers claimed that they did, but a LOT of IBM's customers and technical staff did their best to kick IBM into the 1970s. And failed.

    People in the know around here talk about IBM networking being sold to Cisco. A big reason the "biscuit maker" did this was that he found out that 95% of the IBM networking division income was from being tied to mainframe sales and leases. In open competition very few had any interest in IBM's token ring. And even after the sale many IBM locals were pissing and moaning about how Ethernet will never succeed as it was just too fragile and would never be able to handler REAL NETWORKING.

    Listening to the wrong people is also the main part of the reason the PPC failed.

    Steve Jobs looked ahead 10 years and realized that Moto/IBM would not keep up with Intel. Their corporate interests were just not where Apple needed them to be to provide Apple with the needed products. IBM was putting all their investment in a migration path for mainframes and AS/400 (System/3) and Moto was headed to being a communications company.

    So Jobs had Moto put a DSP (they were really good at those) on the same die as the PPC designs that Apple was using and that gave them a brief speed advantage for graphics over Intel. I'm convinced he knew it would not last and in many ways meant the end of the PPC as a general computer chip as the DSP bits just could not be advanced as quickly as the IBM guys could advance the CPU. But it bought him a few years to have the switch to Intel project to succeed.

    But PPC's are not dead. They live on in all kinds of hidden computer bits. Like the processor inside of many mid to high end printers/scanners/copiers.

    2011:

    Your aircraft example is an example of bad design and how humans operate.

    Actually it is an example of how much of the modern world operates.

    Back when there were many more mechanical switches in industrial control rooms, you would see all kinds of small signs taped over certain gauges and switches with warnings about them. Plus a few switches with electrical tape over them indicating that you better know why you're removing this tape to flip this switch.

    And now we have apps and web sites that just suck but you can't really tape a small sign over "field 34".

    2012:

    The removable disk pack became a thing of the past when winchester heads became the standard (because they gave you better data density). I'm sure that caused grief because now you couldn't swap disk packs and had to buy dedicated drives.

    Did you miss these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_3340_and_3344

    2014:

    How Bill Gates saved Apple in 1997.

    Ah. The PR version that Jobs let on was the full story.

    When this happened and for a year or so after several other things took place. A few people have written about them but they are not as headline grabbing as "Bill Gates Saves Apple".

    Apple was suing MS and Intel for theft of property. Basically the codex CODE used in QuickTime. And was going to win. Big. And Intel and MS were flat at unable to do as good on their own.

    Apple over the next 2 years had over $2Bil in income that was listed as other and never explained.

    The lawsuits went away.

    Apple, MS, and Intel have very long lasting (still in effect maybe) patent sharing agreements that were written at the time to cover existing and futures. Which is why when people would ask Jobs why he didn't sue MS he'd give a plain answer about patent sharing and such.

    Apple started the switch to Intel plan.

    So in exchange for $2bil or more and lots of other considerations, Jobs let Gates act like HE saved Apple.

    Yes Apple was in trouble. But the $150 million was chump change compared to the over $2bil and other goodies Jobs extracted from MS and Intel.

    2015:

    JBS & whitroth
    "Russification" - with language - was also pushed in Estonia. This needless to say provoked an immediate backlash at the fall of the Sovunion.
    Very fortunately, it didn't last long, mainly I think, because a lot of the Ru-speakers were semi-exiles to Estonia, again because their local KGB wasn't quite as nasty as the Ru one next door.
    Yeah, it's complicated.

    David L
    Ah yes .. A well-laid out, clearly labelled set of controls - like that picture.
    Um, err ....

    2016:

    Data General was another of those companies that couldn't get past their first time at bat grand slam to win the World Series hit.

    Well when EMC bought DG, I was still a dg/ux admin and the line-of-business application was a Progress database running on a pair of 88k AViiONs. It was about the same time we were replacing the DEC PCs with Compaqs, and that's quite the time-bounded moment in itself. We also have some Intel AViiONs running NT, and I recall spending some very late nights working through licensing processes for those (mostly the HA software, I totally forget what that was). I remember we had media for NT for Alpha (and possibly PPC), but only because it came with whatever it was we used for the DG gear. TechNet subscription maybe. Later seeing EMC and then Dell branded CLARiiON arrays was sort of fun. Tears in the rain now, of course.

    2017:

    In the mid 90s I worked on a couple of Polish factory fishing ships off the west coast of Canada (it's complicated).

    While the Captain was invariably Polish, many of the 'officers' were Russians hailing from Lithuania and Latvia. Most/all of the crew in the fish processing factory and deck were Polish. This was explained as 'All the Polish officers go work on German ships for better pay, Russians come work on ours for better pay'.

    Socially they were extremely distinct. One evening I was having some drinks with my (Polish) chess partner and some others and a (Russian) friend of mine walked by. I went to invite him in and he declined. The Poles in the room were very clear - Poles with Poles, Russians with Russians. They had a lot to say about Russification and their experience of Russian domination.

    To my knowledge the ships still come to the coast every year, no idea what has changed in their crew makeup.

    2018:

    I suspect that most poles, especially 20 or more years ago had holes in their family trees of aunts and uncles, mothers, fathers, and such from the 40s.

    2019:

    Ahem: there's no need even to go back to the 40s.

    1981 was the year when the Soviet leadership ordered the Polish government to crack down hard on the independent workers' union and any pushs for more democracy. Poland was under martial law until 1983, offered as a "lesser evil" compared to the other option on the table, which was an invasion by the Red Army.

    Rocketpjs' Polish colleagues on that ship had presumably personally lived through that experience.

    2020:

    MSB & others
    Why "the Russians" are, um "disliked" ...
    I think he's dead, now, but there was someone where I worked, long ago ... who got sent to Theresienstadt Laager during WWII .. survived, let out, went to (?)Prague(?) uni, thrown into the Gulag about 1948.
    Then to "First Circle" camps - escaped to the West about 1960.

    2021:

    Nor any need to speed headlong into the 20th century when the 19 th century explains it completely. Architect Jeff Baer did a series of Chicago travelogue videos for PBS to explore history of buildings and neighborhoods. Ethnic enclaves still survive from over a century ago, but at the start it was dangerous for a German to cross the street and enter a Polish tavern, or vice versa, at risk of getting beat up and thrown out.

    2022:

    Drives: um, nope. I just googled "drive speed of 2.5" drives", and it's 7200, the same as the "pro" models of 3.5" drives. They buy more drives and spread out the data. And, as was said before, the 2.5" drives are more expensive.

    2023:

    Thanks for the pic - what steam loco is that?

    2024:

    The whole attitude rubs off. I read, some years ago, about a Black teen from the southside of Chicago, who didn't know he could just go downtown - he thought it was some gang's turf (downtown Chicago? Mag Mile? Stock exchanges? Batman speeding by?)

    2025:

    “Moto was very slow at improving the 68K so Apple (I think they initiated it) got with Data General with their 88000 RISC project along with IBM and Moto.”

    Err, the PowerPC was a development of the early IBM801 risc cpu (I played a tiny part in that) that became the centre of a joint Motorola/IBM/Apple venture. Moto probably got involved because IBM already had a tight relationship with them from the IBM PC/360 product days. Now that was a waste of my desk-space...

    I don’t think the 88000 had any connection at all. I don’t recall the 88000 having any more success than the NatSemi 32000 , which was a bit sad since it was quite nice. I had a prototype in ... ‘82? but it was barely faster than the 6502 in my BBC micro

    2026:

    Apple did have some ... weird ... research Macs. Including an 88k and an am29k, although I can't speak to how functional or not they were. (I saw the motherboards, but they were not powered on. And right after that, we went into Gassé's office. Apple was very, very different before SJ came back...)

    I suspect the NS32k had a bit more success, because they actually did get made, in quantity, for several generations. (My computer club in college picked up a few servers at auction; they were running a 4.x BSD. Some of the code was written by William Jolitz, and some of the documentation was written by a Steven Brust. So much hilarity.) Motorola tried with the 88k, but they were too little and too late, and ended up getting on the PPC bandwagon.

    2027:

    whitroth
    It's an ex-LMS "Black 5" - built in their hundreds - though a "standard" design, note the dome/top-feed/postioning differences in the pictures in the wiki link.
    I can't see the second important control, the cut-off lever or wheel - the regulator & brake are obvious ( to me)...
    Try this collection of pictures instead?

    2028:

    Screw reverser, red handle bottom left?

    I'd want to follow the plumbing to be sure of the injector controls before I went anywhere. Reckon I've got the steam valves, but not sure about the water.

    2029:

    Off topic, but today Pence said, in a speech to the Federalist Society, “President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone. And frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”

    Apparently his staff has been working with the January 6th committee. I wonder what they’ve learned and why he’s saying this to a group of Republican heavy hitters. Any thoughts?

    2030:

    [Pence]"And frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president."
    People were deploying that argument in various venues to increase the probability that Pence would see it. Not sure Pence did see it, but between Pence and former US Vice President f'n James Danforth Quayle, Pence found that argument, and I think perhaps he found it convincing. (E.g. by the autocoup plotters' "logic", former Vice President Al Gore could have decided the 2000 US election in his own favor, but he and his advisors were too stupid/not clever enough to think of such a "solution".)

    There are also the persistent rumours that Trump-friendly Secret Service agents, under the verbal orders of D.J. Trump, were planning to spirit Pence away for "safe keeping" during the Capital invasion by rioters. (Or maybe even for lethal accident/execution.) Then Chuck Grassley would have been the electoral votes envelope opener (rejecting some states' counts), and there is the story that elderly and a bit addled Chuck Grassley said that Pence would not be present[2]. (His staff "clarified" later.) If indeed this plotting happened, well, historical punishments for that sort of activity have been pretty harsh. Supposedly we're more civilized now. A nation that cannot apply the law to its leaders is weak. [1]

    It's been fun to watch the interplay of speculations. 6 Jan/Jan 6 committee members have already said/indicated that they have information that will surprise people. A lot of the effort is being loosely timed to maximize effect on the 2022 US midterm elections.
    Have been a a bit surprised that Stewart Rhodes and Roger Stone got so heavily involved. Their COMSEC was not completely incompetent, but they made exploitable mistakes. Stone's pardon was for earlier legal troubles. (He could easily end up quickly dead.)

    [2] NEW: Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley, the Senate president pro tempore, says he and not Vice President Mike Pence will preside over the certification of Electoral College votes, since "we don't expect him to be there."

    — Roll Call (@rollcall) January 5, 2021

    [1] Good rant: Why I Was Serious When I Said Jailing Donald Trump Until Trial Would Be Good for the Country (Part 2) (The Rude Pundit, 2/04/2022)

    2031:

    As the discussion is now veering into US politics anyway, there's this question that I wanted to ask to our US-members:

    There were a number of you who predicted during the election mess that DJT would face criminal charges/flee the country/would be in a world of hurt (pick whichever is appropriate) as soon as he left office.

    As far as I can see, none of this happened, but instead he still dominates the Republican Party (and by extension a good portion of the political discourse in the US) and is firmly on his way to become president again in 2024.

    So, what do you make of this? And how do you compare it to your expectations of what would happen? Were they just wishful thinking? Or are they only delayed? If so, for how long? Which future do you see for him from where we are standing now?

    2032:

    Of course I meant "had" rather than "have". Remembered the name of the HA stuff, FirstWatch. At the time, it was just so cumbersome, I'm sure (in quite distant hindsight now) it directly caused more outages than it could possibly ever prevent. The two washing machines had a serial heartbeat, so you could get split-brain if someone tripped over the serial cable. Fun times.

    2033:

    Every time I think that they can't get much sillier without even them realising it, they astound me.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/champagne-pint-bottles-b2007990.html

    2034:

    EC
    Even more bonkers, I caught an interview on R4 this AM ...
    I started wondering who the grovelling tory head-case was .. to find out that it was "Mad Nad" - - yeah, right ... right off the edge.

    2035:

    There were a number of you who predicted during the election mess that DJT would face criminal charges/flee the country/would be in a world of hurt (pick whichever is appropriate) as soon as he left office.

    As far as I can see, none of this happened, but instead he still dominates the Republican Party (and by extension a good portion of the political discourse in the US) and is firmly on his way to become president again in 2024.

    Actually there are multiple criminal cases moving forward. But complicated cases, as all of these are, take months/years to move forward. Almost all the crimes he is charged with so far are financial/tax related and involved very complicated transactions and such. Which was why he did it. To unravel it requires teams of analysts piecing together bank records, payroll records, tax filings at 3, 4, or 5 levels, etc... And these things are spread across dozens if not hundreds of companies that were set up.

    Again, complexity was intentional to keep the authorities in the dark.

    Acts that DT committed as president basically come down to the Impeachment process. And while the D's in the House can start it, it requires a 2/3s vote in the Senate to convict. And doing that over and over to no result is just a big waste of time.

    As to his domination of the Rs. He found their trigger point. Resentment and frustration. And no Greg it isn't all race based. If the media (TV, movies, etc...) is showing all these rich folks who seemingly did nothing to get it and you can't figure out why you and now your kids are still not there... And TPTB did screw over a lot of working folks with "free trade". It had to happen but many were told it would work out in the end. Well it didn't. Trump came along and gave them a villain. Or multiple villains. The D's in general and the establishment in particular.

    He said what they wanted to hear and told them everyone else was lying to them. So the "base" is in his grip. And most of the establishment R's are either laying low, hoping he dies or strokes out soon, or speaking out and getting pummeled. And most hope he will be gone soon enough that the crazies don't take over all of the R's.

    Chaney is the perfect example. She is so hard core right it is not even funny. But she believes if following the rules and if you want to win, convince people you're right. The crazy R's have declared her not fit to be an R any more because she will not agree that DT is right about everything that spews from his mouth. Google the articles today about the Arizona speaker of the House or Senate. Very hard core R. But he is basically stuffing the efforts of the crazy AZ R's to take over elections. Both may be gone soon if the crazies aren't stopped.

    2036:

    Mad Nad is round the bend and most of the way up the other side, I agree, but the idea that champagne in pint bottles would be a significant contributor to the success of Brexit is the silliest thing I have yet heard. Not most insane, just plain silliest.

    2037:

    So the US CDC will officially start tracking poop. Covid-19 analysis at first but more things later.

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/02/cdc-turns-to-poop-surveillance-for-future-covid-monitoring/

    2038:

    I agree. Were I to oversimplify, there are two ways this could be summarized: --It's a struggle between the rule of money and the rule of law. Who is more powerful, the money makers or the law makers? --It's a war against the super-rich by other means, by attacking on of the most vulnerable of that class.

    This is also the Republicans demonstrating that the "demographic inevitability" of their ultimate loss of power isn't inevitable, so long as they can disenfranchise enough of the country and cast the rule of law into general question, along with empowering the wealthy to deal with what remains. As shown by their utter willingness to sacrifice loyal plebeian Republicans by making anti-vaxxing a loyalty test, they don't care about most of their people.

    So far as I can tell, the Republican elites consider themselves a party of, by, and for the wealthy. Everyone else in their ranks is a means to an end. Oddly enough, this has made them exquisitely vulnerable to Trump. The problem is that since the Republicans have given their power (lawmaking) over to the other side (wealth making), they struggle and lose when these two forces come into conflict.

    I don't disagree about the crazies either. I think they were created very cynically, but they're a serious danger. The relevant model may be less Nazi Germany and more Imperial Japan. When Japan went fascist, the fascist elites got into trouble with the crazies under them. If they didn't toe the extremist line, they got at best sacked and at worst assassinated. We're not quite at the assassination stage in the US, but more than one Republican lawmaker has expressed their fear of their base, and more than a few of them may be showing Stockholm Syndrome.

    Anyway, none of this will get resolved easily. I fully support shredding Trump's organization to the point where, even if he's not in prison, he can't run a campaign. While yes, I'd like to see him in prison, he's at the stage where he might be more powerful as a martyr than as a candidate. Hopefully he soon becomes too incontinent to appear in public.

    2039:

    Off-topic but fun.

    Interesting take by classical historian Brett Devereaux, writing in A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry on why blockchains won't create an economic and social space outside of states. You might enjoy reading this and (dis)agreeing with his analysis.

    If you want more, he also has a classical take on megacorporations.

    I forgot who here originally turned me onto ACOUP, but damn you for wasting days of my time thank you very much for turning me onto this really neat site.

    2040:

    Adding to your well-considered points, in the U.S. at least, legal roll-ups of big organizations start at the bottom, which is why the January 6th rioters and fake electors are being rushed to criminal charges. The idea is to get the lower-downs to testify against the higher-ups. What you're seeing, if you're watching carefully, is a very standard gang/mob roll up, with a focus on Trump's faction of the Republican Party.

    2041:

    I'm right there with you.

    2042:

    David & H
    Agree ... there's a vast amount of stupid, ignorant, uneducated primitive resentment in the "R" base, much like the twats who voted tory, here, last-time. I would strongly emphasise stupid - conned & willing to be conned again & again & ... { See also: "Brexit" }
    However, I've seen suggestions that the "D's" are hoping/trying to get the charges against him to stack up nicely in time for the US mid-terms this autumn, at least enough to really start cutting into that base.

    Devereaux?
    Presumably related to the "Earl of Essex" & the current viscount Hereford - in some way or another.

    2043:

    I agree, acoup is a great read that has cost me a fair bit of productivity.

    2044:

    at least enough to really start cutting into that base.

    The hard core Trump supporters are past facts. It is now a cult of personality. Anything against him/them is just a part of the establishment conspiracy of lies to shut them down. Facts don't matter anymore. Which is why I fear for the future no matter what happens to Trump.

    2045:

    I'm not aware of any sort of wine (other than possibly Buckfast or maybe Eldorado) ever being supplied in pint bottles.

    2046:

    I doubt that it has been common since the 18th century, but could be wrong. So far (and the qualification is necessary), it takes my votes as the silliest Brexit idea ever.

    2047:

    Troutwaxer @ 2032: Off topic, but today Pence said, in a speech to the Federalist Society, “President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone. And frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”

    Apparently his staff has been working with the January 6th committee. I wonder what they’ve learned and why he’s saying this to a group of Republican heavy hitters. Any thoughts?

    Might have something to do with Trumpolini's recent 2024 campaign rally down in Texas where he promised that after he's elected he's going to pardon Jan 6 insurrectionists and prosecute Members of Congress who cooperate with or participate in the committee investigating the Jan 6 assault on the Capitol. Seems like he's already setting up for BIG LIE II to subvert the election.

    With help from a GQP fifth column inside government, it won't matter who actually gets the most votes (popular OR electoral) Trumpolini expects to become president for life from 2024 onward, Constitution not withstanding.

    2048:

    It's coming. From the news in the last week, the fake electors that he had created are lawyering up, because creating those fake electors is federal criminal.

    And in breaking a criminal organization, they start at the bottom, and turn people on the way up. They're now 1-2 steps below him.

    Oh, sorry, except for the Georgia DA who's got a grand jury empaneled to consider whether to charge IQ 45 himself for that phone call that everyone's heard, trying to get them to find more ballots.

    2049:

    MSB @ 2034: As the discussion is now veering into US politics anyway, there's this question that I wanted to ask to our US-members:

    There were a number of you who predicted during the election mess that DJT would face criminal charges/flee the country/would be in a world of hurt (pick whichever is appropriate) as soon as he left office.

    As far as I can see, none of this happened, but instead he still dominates the Republican Party (and by extension a good portion of the political discourse in the US) and is firmly on his way to become president again in 2024.

    So, what do you make of this? And how do you compare it to your expectations of what would happen? Were they just wishful thinking? Or are they only delayed? If so, for how long? Which future do you see for him from where we are standing now?

    Hasn't happened YET.

    Some Federal charges might come out of the Jan 6 Insurrection investigation, but I think the best hope is still with the Manhattan DA or the New York State AG's investigations into financial irregularities in the Trump Organization. Plus I'm not sure when his Deutsche Bank loans are actually going to come due or go into default. I expect he's using his current political fundraising to forestall that, but doing so carries a high risk he's going to be caught out for campaign finance violations.

    He's faced several setbacks in court recently regarding various irregularities he tried to hide by claiming executive privilege, but those ongoing investigations will take time.

    And there are some outstanding lawsuits for sexual assault working their way through the legal system that will eventually come to trial despite his efforts to stall them into oblivion.

    2050:

    Which led me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine\_bottle#Sizes where I still don't see any mention of an Imperial pint, except as a proposal by the Con party.

    2052:

    SFReader @1923:

    This is an old document - if anyone knows of a more recent document and status, pls post.

    Well it seems like the proposal was rather toothless attempt at saving dying languages across the world, which certainly cannot be said of a language that holds around 6th to 8th number of speakers worldwide (by different estimations). Luckily for us, the same article links to number of other conventions, signed by all interested countries, which encompass many more ethnicity issues beside language one - those that I, of course, didn't forget to mention.

    - Declaration on the Rights of Persons belonging to National, Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities

    European Convention on Human Rights

    European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages

    Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities

    International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

    Universal Declaration of the Collective Rights of Peoples

    And if it isn't enough, there's another bunch rather important discussions like Responsibility to Protect, or Right for Self-determination vs Principle of Territorial Integrity. Too bad, all of it goes out the window again.

    Greg Tingey @2018:

    "Russification" - with language - was also pushed in Estonia. This needless to say provoked an immediate backlash at the fall of the Sovunion.

    Isn't it then a whole lot of miracle that isolationist, nationalistic, self-governing body has instantly appeared in every single new country that was granted independence by goodwill, connivance or incompetence of USSR leadership? Isn't it strange that in absence of central leadership of USSR most of these countries didn't immediately degrade into decades-long squabble for the power (unlike former colonies of more "civilized" countries)? Doesn't seem like very hard push to me really, not compared to more successful attempts in recent history.

    And generally speaking, if there's so much talk of what happened in the past, why wouldn't we just talk about how these republic were made in first place, how their borders were demarcated, and how their industry, infrastructure and governance was introduced there in the first place? Isn't that supposed to be more important historical issue than nationalistic bullocks pushed by political radicals from all parties? Oh no, we certainly don't want to talk about that, it's better deal to just push for bigger slice of (a pelt of) a bear that hasn't been shot yet.

    Very fortunately, it didn't last long, mainly I think, because a lot of the Ru-speakers were semi-exiles to Estonia, again because their local KGB wasn't quite as nasty as the Ru one next door.

    I don't remember it lasting "long" instead of "to this day" because nationalistic attitude of these countries has been steadily progressing from "willing to learn from mistakes of the past" to "ravaging self-harming apeshit". I would be very glad if you would provide me a document that would officially confirm that rights of Russian-speaking people in those countries are upheld and respected as integral part of functioning democratic government, but it's not going to happen because such thing doesn't exist even in the wildest dreams.

    Yeah, it's complicated.

    You don't say. The problem here is very simplistic view that is pushed by US an it's allies consistently as a matter of law of nature. They only follow those treaties and arguments that seem to benefit them, and ignore all others, and if let's say the treaty stops benefiting them they get rid of it. This is what is often called "rules based order" aka "the might makes right". Blabbing about Budapest Memorandum and ignoring Montreux Convention that's almost 60 years older, etc.

    I have seen enough, though. I have seen people blaming USSR for (among the usual things) nationalism, fascism, chauvinism, colonialism, militarism and expansionism, religious dogmatism and mystical occultism. Another words, every single thing that it's has been fighting tooth and nail, against through all it's history, as written in the pillars of the state and the law. And when US speakers accuse "regime" of attempting to rebuild USSR, I know exactly what they want. There's not a word that comes from the other side that can really surprise me.

    P.S. After years of negligence, I just finished reading a certain novel named "Foundation", we can all hope that what is written there is true.

    2053:

    David L @ 2038: Acts that DT committed as president basically come down to the Impeachment process. And while the D's in the House can start it, it requires a 2/3s vote in the Senate to convict. And doing that over and over to no result is just a big waste of time.

    That's not actually in U.S. law. It's a policy adopted by the Department of Justice during the Nixon Administration in response to a Memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel whether the Watergate Grand Jury could indict Nixon as a co-conspirator in the burglary & ensuing coverup.

    A Sitting President's Amenability to Indictment and Criminal Prosecution (October 16, 2000)

    In 1973, the Department concluded that the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would impermissibly undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions. We have been asked to summarize and review the analysis provided in support of that conclusion, and to consider whether any subsequent developments in the law lead us today to reconsider and modify or disavow that determination. We believe that the conclusion reached by the Department in 1973 still represents the best interpretation of the Constitution.

    Although it has never been fully tested in court, the current policy of the DoJ is that the President cannot be indicted or prosecuted for criminal acts he commits while in office, while he remains in office. He must either be impeached AND removed from office before he can be prosecuted or the prosecution must be deferred until after the end of the President's term, but he does NOT retain the shield deferring prosecution AFTER he leaves office (determined by the SCOTUS in U.S. v Nixon).

    It might have been tested if Cheatolini iL Douchebag had carried through on his threat to shoot some random opponent in the middle of 5th Avenue in Manhattan.

    2054:

    I'm not aware of any sort of wine (other than possibly Buckfast or maybe Eldorado) ever being supplied in pint bottles.

    paws4thot @ 2048: I'm not aware of any sort of wine (other than possibly Buckfast or maybe Eldorado) ever being supplied in pint bottles.

    Mad-Dog 2020 and Pagan Pink Ripple come to mind.

    2055:

    Mad-Dog 2020

    that looks more like the old uk alcopops than anything i'd call "wine", even if they claim it's based on a grape wine foundation

    2056:

    “Were I to oversimplify, there are two ways this could be summarized: --It's a struggle between the rule of money and the rule of law. Who is more powerful, the money makers or the law makers? --It's a war against the super-rich by other means, by attacking on of the most vulnerable of that class.”

    Anticipating the “regret to announce the destruction of Acapulco “ moment (*) as the proxy war get hot.

    (*) Friday, R.A.Heinlein

    2057:

    I expect he's using his current political fundraising to forestall that, but doing so carries a high risk he's going to be caught out for campaign finance violations.

    Surely this is the part of the model that he had to get right from the very beginning, when there were still some competent lawyers who would do work for him. And given the nature of his "base", there's no end of disclaimer and waiver they'll happily commit themselves to, to the edge of penury, while indemnifying the orange clown as far as legally possible.

    2058:

    JBS
    That link is heavily paywalled ( NY "Times" ) - any easy way round that?

    Sleepingroutine
    As regards "the Baltics" - lying bollocks of the first order.
    Most importantly, because they are in the EU, the various rights & protections apply - as Poland is finding out in its oppression of women ....

    2059:

    So I Googled MD 20 20, and got a piece on 1990s nostalgia liberally illustrated with packshots of "alcopops", exactly none of which were in Imperial pint bottles; the 3 most common volumes were 330ml, 500ml and 750ml.

    2060:

    Disable Javascript.

    2061:

    EC
    Got that ...
    Settings / Security / Content / Disable Javascript for $_Site
    NEAT

    2062:

    That link is heavily paywalled ( NY "Times" ) - any easy way round that?

    Some strategies.

    Use different browsers. I have 4. Use incognito or similar. Use a separate computer/device.

    Find the article from within Google NEWS and at times the link from there will let you in or at least not be as restrictive.

    And then combine all of the above. But long term you're fighting:

    https://amiunique.org/

    Personally I have a subscription as it's worth it to me. But I doubt it is to you.

    2063:

    Settings / Security / Content / Disable Javascript for $_Site

    Ghostery is also a useful plugin. Free with a paid upgrade. But I only see an ad for the upgrade once a month or so.

    2064:

    Lawsuits, crimes, and the US President.

    As JBS sort of said, it's fuzzy. The institutions of the US courts and Judicial branch of the US federal government want an accountable President. So in general they want his actions while in office, if criminal, to be prosecuted. But at the same time they want to avoid 10,000 lawsuits against whoever is in the office by people who despise them. There are hard core activists on all side who would love to shove subpoenas at the President forcing him into non stop depositions[1] as a way to tie them into knots. The institutions don't want this. (And to be honest neither do I.)

    But there is a big hole in the US legal system here. Especially for things that have occurred before a President takes office. So what tends to happen is the courts allow sitting Presidents to duck most legal situations while in office. (Which all involved agree has statute of limitation issues.) The most likely thing that would happen if the sitting President shot and killed an aide in front of witnesses with no provocation would be an emergency session of Congress fast tracking at what appears to be the speed of light and a similar process in the Senate for a trial. The result likely be tossing them from office with the proviso that they can be tried in the regular courts for the offense. And this would most likely happen simultaneously with the Cabinet very rapidly removing him from power until the proceedings in Congress are over.

    All of this assumes rations people in various places. A House and Senate full of Marjorie Taylor Greene's. Who the hell knows.

    [1] I have no idea how the concept of discovery works or even exists outside of the US. This process evolved in the US to avoid the trial antics of SURPRISE SURPRISE SURPRISE (a reference to Gomer Pyle) in the middle of trial. Or those Perry Mason moments in trials. (A reference to a TV lawyer show from the 50s in the US.) It basically means that in general both sides present a list of witnesses to a judge and to the extend approved they get to "interview" them under oath before a trial. It allows both sides to figure out what is going on and maybe settle before a judge or jury does it for them. But this can also be used to tie up for long periods of time and maybe bankrupt witnesses. Which is a problem.

    2065:

    FYI - I am NOT a lawyer. If I've represented anything wrong in a major way, please a lawyer jump in. But in general I think I get it.

    2066:

    I think you'll find at least some of us are aware of Perry Mason, and even his secretary "Doonra Street". (Scots joke)

    2067:

    I not surprised. But when I assume things are universal, I almost always find they are not.

    I suspect that the TV show "Murphy Brown" didn't travel well. The humor was very much oriented to Washington of the time and doesn't even work for most anyone who tries to watch it now in the US.

    2068:

    The most likely thing that would happen if the sitting President shot and killed an aide in front of witnesses with no provocation would be an emergency session of Congress fast tracking at what appears to be the speed of light and a similar process in the Senate for a trial. The result likely be tossing them from office with the proviso that they can be tried in the regular courts for the offense. And this would most likely happen simultaneously with the Cabinet very rapidly removing him from power until the proceedings in Congress are over.

    I'm not so sure about that. As Obama demonstrated when he did a podcast with Seinfeld back in much more innocent times, the security guard would not let him out the front gate. The critical point (Heh heh, beating JBS to it) is that the Secret Service swears an oath to protect the Constitution, not the person. The President is not omnipotent under law, although that assumption has yet to be stress tested. So here are my bifurcating thoughts.

    Let's assume POTUS goes postal and starts killing staff. My totally uninformed guess is that some version of the following would happen:

    --The Secret Service would rapidly secure the nuclear football, the VP, the Speaker of the House, and whichever other cabinet officers are in the vicinity, to protect the line of succession and the only reason we have a fucking Imperial Presidency in the first place (nukes).

    --They'd go into active shooter mode in the White House, which would likely involve evacuating staffers as fast as possible while getting secret service agents into corral the POTUS somewhere.

    --They attempt to talk him down. Failing that, if he remains an active threat, they kill him and the VP takes over. The shooters then face a painfully thorough investigation where they get second-guessed on everything they did. If they screwed up, they go on trial.

    --If they do take the POTUS alive, the cabinet convenes somewhere safe, invokes the 25th Amendment, and declare the VP acting President.

    --Congress quickly draws up articles of impeachment, to see if it's possible to get a murderer out of office. Assuming they impeach him, the VP becomes President and the former POTUS stands trial for murder. Assuming they manage to not impeach him with a two-thirds vote (a possibility right now!), we get into the nightmare of the President resuming office within 21 days, because it also takes a two-thirds vote to keep the president from resuming his duties after invocation of the 25th Amendment by his staff.

    That last problem, that a murderous president may be returned to office by an incompetent Congress, makes me suspect that some Secret Service Agents might be tempted to shoot to kill if a President goes on a murderous rampage. And that's not a nice thought, because America doesn't particularly need a Praetorian Guard along with all our other messes.

    Probably I'm wrong, and th detail I'm probably wrong about is the idea that the Secret Service would allow anyone other than an on-duty agent or guard to have an unsecured gun anywhere in the White House. But assuming POTUS got a gun and went postal with it, that's my guess about what would happen.

    2069:

    As for certain orange-skinned trolls, I suspect the normal advice on dealing with trolls (ignore him until 2023) is probably the most neuroprotective thing you can do right now.

    2070:

    "The most likely thing that would happen if the sitting President shot and killed an aide in front of witnesses with no provocation would be an emergency session of Congress fast tracking at what appears to be the speed of light and a similar process in the Senate for a trial. The result likely be tossing them from office with the proviso that they can be tried in the regular courts for the offense. "

    If the President is a Republican, the most likely thing, from recent history, is virtually all GOP reps and senators backing him 100%, and making sure that he stays in office.

    Remember that Trump tried to kill Congress last year. The Senate Majority Leader adjourned the Senate to delay a trial, and the GOP Senate acquitted him.

    2071:

    "The most likely thing that would happen if the sitting President shot and killed an aide in front of witnesses with no provocation would be an emergency session of Congress fast tracking at what appears to be the speed of light and a similar process in the Senate for a trial. The result likely be tossing them from office with the proviso that they can be tried in the regular courts for the offense. " If the President is a Republican, the most likely thing, from recent history, is virtually all GOP reps and senators backing him 100%, and making sure that he stays in office. Remember that Trump tried to kill Congress last year. The Senate Majority Leader adjourned the Senate to delay a trial, and the GOP Senate acquitted him.

    To repeat: As for certain orange-skinned trolls, I suspect the normal advice on dealing with trolls (ignore him until 2023) is probably the most neuroprotective thing you can do right now.

    If he can't start an insurrection now, ignore him. If you're not part of the January 6th committee, ignore him. If you don't owe him money, ignore him. If his people aren't threatening or damaging you or your family, ignore him.

    The point is that he's wasting your time and getting you habituated to over-reacting him. What more could an abuser want, but to get people he doesn't even know to fear him, react to his every twitch, and endlessly obsess over him?

    So unless you're directly involved with him, treat him like a troll and ignore him. If there's nothing he can do to you and you're still making yourself sick over him, let him go fuck over someone else, like the poor reporters whose stupid editors are forcing them to cover him. And ignore the reporting those poor sods are being forced to do too, so that their editor gets the point and drops the coverage.

    And no, I'm not joking.

    2072:

    I agree, with the proviso that this is a very good time to keep an eye on the doings of your local school board!

    2073:

    I agree, with the proviso that this is a very good time to keep an eye on the doings of your local school board!

    Precisely. Now is a very good time to be involved in politics, in the sense of getting the people elected who will do the most to help you and your community, however defined.

    What I wrote above is basically "Don't Feed The Trolls," and it does apply to politics too.

    2074:

    And if he owes you money? ;-)

    2075:

    "That link is heavily paywalled ( NY "Times" ) - any easy way round that?"

    If you're using Firefox or Chrome, there's an add-on called bypass-paywalls-clean that will deal with most problems. Very useful for the WaPo or NYT.

    2076:

    And if he owes you money? ;-)

    Well....

    If it's not worth the trouble, ignore him.

    If it's worth the trouble, follow the fictional example of hypothetical petro-power rulers: get kompromat on him, set up an agent to work with him, tell the agent to get him to do what you want him to do in return for not extracting repayment in various ways...and then ignore him until he shows up on your to-do list again.

    The not-silly point here is that various companies have monetized doomscrolling using AIs to see what they can get you to click through on. Various political powers, both friendly and inimical, are trying to get you to doomscroll to collect money and/or to get you thinking the thoughts they want you to think.

    The simplest way to deal with this is to ignore them. I won't say it's easy, because you've got to uninstall their psychosocial programming. But if they're not acting in your best interest, then not doing what they want you to do seems like a reasonable course of action.

    2077:

    Well, as far as this particular troll is concerned, I personally have ignored him since circa 1990, and I surmise it didn't do much to hinder his ascent.

    So yes, "ignore the troll" may be a good strategy to keep your sanity until 2024, but it won't be a good strategy to prevent a troll presidency from 2024-2028 and a second troll term from 2028-2032.

    Because he won't be content with a single term any more. And any provisions the US constitution may have for term limits will be irrelevant, because at some point in time after 2024 the US supreme court will consist of 9 troll party supporters.

    2078:

    Well, as far as this particular troll is concerned, I personally have ignored him since circa 1990, and I surmise it didn't do much to hinder his ascent. So yes, "ignore the troll" may be a good strategy to keep your sanity until 2024, but it won't be a good strategy to prevent a troll presidency from 2024-2028 and a second troll term from 2028-2032. Because he won't be content with a single term any more. And any provisions the US constitution may have for term limits will be irrelevant, because at some point in time after 2024 the US supreme court will consist of 9 troll party supporters.

    Do I need to point out the internal contradictions in what you wrote?

    This isn't about doing nothing, this is about doing two things: protecting your own mental health, which matters, and denying attention to someone who thinks they live and die based on how much attention they get. Fortunately, all those monetized AI feeds track peoples' attention, so if you don't give it to articles about them, there are (hopefully!) fewer articles, and the troll gets to find out if they do in fact die due to lack of attention.

    To follow up on the first point, if you're a nervous wreck by November 2024, you're playing into their game. It's February 2022. Ignore the troll. The troll may die before 11/24. You may die before 11/24. Or something else may happen. But what do you gain by arguing with me about this, aside from playing into a fear script that they helped put in your head, that profits them and not you?

    2079:

    Even lighter-weight, there is also a plugin/addon for firefox/chrome and families, called "Cookie Remover", that removes cookies for a site with one click on a chocolate chip cookie icon. Removing the NYTimes cookies seems at the moment to reset their opinion of whether you are a new enough user to allow some free views.
    (The NYTimes has atrocious US political coverage, "both sides" leaning crypto-Republican, and worse, they've joined Team Stochastic Mass Murder For Personal/Political Gain recently, trying hard (David Leonhardt in particular) to "manufacture consent" for elimination of pandemic control measures, at a time when the leading cause of death in the US is COVID-19, by far, and most of the death is easily preventable. So no money from me.)
    I only mention it because it also, at the moment at least, seems to reset the behavior of twitter back to allowing some free views (including of active accounts) without blocking the screen with a sign-in-or-sign-up-or-go-away screen.

    2080:

    Off topic here, but of interest regarding previous threads:

    It appears that North Korea is funding itself partially by stealing cryptocurrencies.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-60281129

    2081:

    They've been printing high quality $20 and $100 bills for a while. So why not?

    2082:

    Off topic here, but of interest regarding previous threads: It appears that North Korea is funding itself partially by stealing cryptocurrencies. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-60281129

    Gotta give their cyberwarriors something to do, after all.

    One thing that's worth checking occasionally, if you're feeling happy and want to come down, is the news out of North Korea. Stories like soldiers on trains home starving to death before they get home (It's slightly smaller than England in area). Or soldiers being released every spring or fall to go work the fields, to help try to prevent famine. That sort of thing. It's never been a very fertile land.

    While I wouldn't call it a North Korean scam, I suspect that South Korea does a little calculation periodically: how much would it cost to fight a war with North Korea if they were starving and had nothing to lose, versus how much does it cost to simply give into the bluster and send them food? My guess is that sending food north wins every time. It doesn't hurt/help that many South Koreans have family north of the border, although the northerner may have become estranged by constant propaganda.

    Is this another North Korean scam? Diplomacy in other forms? The South being soft? Does North Korea do these violent displays as a way of asking for food aid without losing face? Who knows? This is rank speculation. While I don't think that the rulers of North Korea are nice people by most standards, I'm pretty sure they're more complex authoritarian monsters than we often give them credit for.

    2083:

    H
    "Who Steals my Purse" by John Brunner ...
    And, quite frankly, I hope the N Koreans steal as much of all the cryptocurrencies as they possibly can - should be fun.

    2084:

    For Safari the plugin is called "Cookie 5" and does a good job of managing your cookies. I've set it up to leave a few cookies that I regard as essential intact, and delete everything else automatically whenever I quit the browser (which I do regularly; at the very least when I restart the computer about once a week). But I can also just eat all cookies whenever I tell it to.

    2085:

    +1 for Cookie. I've set it up the same way (keep some cookies, delete all others when I quit the browser); the only difference is that I usually quit my browser multiple times a day.

    2086:

    ROTFL!

    And so all the cryptobros who think they're going to not pay taxes are in fact paying taxes to NK.

    2087:

    Greg Tingey @ 2061: JBS
    That link is heavily paywalled ( NY "Times" ) - any easy way round that?

    If there is, I don't know how to do it. I went to Wikipedia and searched for "north carolina gerrymandering case"

    "That page doesn't exist", but the page for Redistricting in North Carolina has a link to a CNN Story North Carolina Supreme Court strikes down redistricting maps. Again, I have no way of knowing if that's paywalled in the U.K. or not, but you might try there.

    The ORIGINAL case that went to the U.S. Supreme court about political Gerrymandering, Rucho v. Common Cause1 where the Supreme Court ruled the FEDERAL COURTS had no jurisdiction over POLITICAL Gerrymandering (as opposed to racial Gerrymandering) came from North Carolina. The Supreme Court said it was up to the States and/or Congress to address the issue.

    Subsequently the North Carolina STATE Supreme Court received a case brought under state law and ruled that Political Gerrymandering violates the STATE Constitution's guarantee of "free and fair elections" because it predetermines the outcome, depriving the people of the right to choose their representation.2

    1 Rucho v. Common Cause, No. 18-422, 588 U.S. ___ (2019)

    2 Harper v. Hall - the NC Supreme Court redistricting ruling 04 Feb 2022

    2088:

    paws4thot @ 2062: So I Googled MD 20 20, and got a piece on 1990s nostalgia liberally illustrated with packshots of "alcopops", exactly none of which were in Imperial pint bottles; the 3 most common volumes were 330ml, 500ml and 750ml.

    Yeah, you'd need to go back farther than that, late 60s or early 70s ... also maybe cross over to this side of the pond, where a pint would be 16 fl. oz. (473.17648 ml according to the interwebby).

    2089:

    David L @ 2067: Lawsuits, crimes, and the US President.

    As JBS sort of said, it's fuzzy. The institutions of the US courts and Judicial branch of the US federal government want an accountable President. So in general they want his actions while in office, if criminal, to be prosecuted. But at the same time they want to avoid 10,000 lawsuits against whoever is in the office by people who despise them. There are hard core activists on all side who would love to shove subpoenas at the President forcing him into non stop depositions[1] as a way to tie them into knots. The institutions don't want this. (And to be honest neither do I.)

    [ ... ]

    [1] I have no idea how the concept of discovery works or even exists outside of the US. This process evolved in the US to avoid the trial antics of SURPRISE SURPRISE SURPRISE (a reference to Gomer Pyle) in the middle of trial. Or those Perry Mason moments in trials. (A reference to a TV lawyer show from the 50s in the US.) It basically means that in general both sides present a list of witnesses to a judge and to the extend approved they get to "interview" them under oath before a trial. It allows both sides to figure out what is going on and maybe settle before a judge or jury does it for them. But this can also be used to tie up for long periods of time and maybe bankrupt witnesses. Which is a problem.

    Back when Clinton was President the GQP members of the Supreme Court decided the President is NOT immune from being deposed in CIVIL lawsuits, nor do civil lawsuits have to be deferred until the President leaves office (the Paula Jones case). This later became a problem for Trumpolini when a Federal Judge cited the Clinton precedent in refusing to allow him to postpone E Jean Carrol's defamation lawsuit (she accused him of raping her many years ago & he called her a liar from the podium of the White House Press Room).

    Also, in criminal cases, in addition to both sides having to provide a list of witnesses they intend to call, the prosecution is required to share all of their evidence, particularly anything that MIGHT be exculpatory, with the defense in a timely manner (i.e. before the trial begins). This can sometimes be a problem if the police uncover additional evidence after a trial is already underway. Usually this results in the trial being put on hold while the Judge conducts an evidentiary hearing to determine if the new evidence is admissible - the defense doesn't have to do that if they find new evidence, they can just add a witness to their list and introduce the new evidence through their testimony.

    2090:

    I never thought I would be cheering for North Korea. But in this case, I do!

    2091:

    Trump's politics now firmly in place in the UK - Bo Jon-Sun is throwing out dead cats at an increasing rate ...

    2092:

    West bank of the Pond hasn't (that I know of) really used the Imperial pint (or gallon) since 1776CE.

    2093:

    Most of it never has - the imperial gallon dates from only 1824, and the pint id derived from it! If I recall, the USA started from the wine gallon, whereas the imperial one was derived from the ale gallon.

    2094:

    West bank of the Pond hasn't (that I know of) really used the Imperial pint (or gallon) since 1776CE.

    Canada used Imperial measures until we went metric in the 70s.

    Confusingly, a fair number of Americans (including at least one publisher) apparently think that their measures are "Imperial", and call them that. Maybe they think that as America is now the world's biggest empire… :-)

    2095:

    Maybe they think that as America is now the world's biggest empire… :-)

    Hegemony sir, not empire. An empire is a country formed of multiple nations. In our case, those would be the Indian and native Alaskan tribal nations within our borders.

    Since Canada has the same setup of multiple first nations under different laws within its borders, and since it is 1.6% bigger than the US by area, Canada is certainly a bigger empire than the US is. And we both must kowtow to the Russian Empire for its sheer extent, among other things.

    2096:

    Hegemony sir, not empire.

    Point, but the Texas publisher I'm thinking of insists that his authors use American measures, while calling them "Imperial" measures — not "Hegemon" measures.

    2097:

    SSDs are beginning to replace high performance HDDs completely now, so it's harder to find high performance HDDs than it used to be.

    But, when HDD makers were pushing the boundaries, the first 10,000 RPM drives were 2.5"; it took close to a decade for geninue 3.5" 10K RPM drives to come out. The early 3.5" form factor 10K RPM drives were 2.5" drive platters in a 3.5" case, for no density advantage, but we did eventually get 3.5" platters in 3.5" 10K RPM drives.

    I was expecting 15K RPM drives to follow a similar pattern; 2.5" was first, we have 3.5" drives with 2.5" drive platters. But SSDs dived in price and FTLs soared in quality, and now it looks unlikely that there's any further development going on in HDD performance - HDDs only win in capacity/$, and lose on every other metric today to a carefully chosen SSD (the 100TiB 3.5" SSDs you can buy beat HDDs on every metric bar price, where they lose handily, and technologically, there's no reason we couldn't go denser than that, it's just that no-one wants to pay).

    And HDDs are also being bitten by a minimum complexity boundary; the wholesale price of the cheapest HDD has never dropped below £15/unit, while I can buy reasonable performing SSDs for about £5/unit wholesale. Yes, the SSD is only 40 GB, while the HDD at £15 is 1 TB, but if my application only needs 20 GB of storage, the SSD wins handily. And it's not long before those 1 TB HDDs will become uneconomic against SSDs; the SSDs at £15/unit are about 0.5 TB, so one more doubling of capacity, and the HDD makers will have to increase density of their cheapest product to compete.

    2098:

    I think that you will find that the British Empire at its peak area covered a larger area than the Russian Empire at ITS peak area! Think of Canada, Australia and India together, even excluding much of Africa.

    But I will agree that it is a hegemony, not an empire!

    2099:

    Hegemony sir, not empire. Point, but the Texas publisher I'm thinking of insists that his authors use American measures, while calling them "Imperial" measures — not "Hegemon" measures.

    Well, I apologize for the state of American publishing that you are seriously considering going with a Texas publisher. Wish there was something I could do about it.

    2100:

    Agreed, but I'm talking about now, not peak coverage. If I understand correctly, the Russian Federation appears to be an empire along the lines of the US and Canada. It's simply much bigger.

    2101:

    But I thought you were arguing that the USA is NOT an empire!

    If you are measuring the USA hegemony, then it is less clear, because it includes a large number of vassal and semi-vassal countries, some of which are quite large. To be in a hegemony merely requires domination, not actual rule. It would then come down to whether you claim that they are dominated or not dominated.

    2102:

    Canada has the same setup of multiple first nations under different laws within its borders

    Very few laws relate differently to First Nations. Not differences in criminal law or contract law, for example. Differences in jurisdiction for some things, but generally the law is theoretically the same. Some exemptions from taxes, for example, but tax exemptions also apply to certain corporations and professions so that's not really a marker of nationhood.

    (Larger practical differences, just as there are for visible minorities — I'm not claiming perfect equality.)

    2103:

    Confusingly, a fair number of Americans (including at least one publisher) apparently think that their measures are "Imperial", and call them that.

    I just got bit by this. Autodesk's Revit installer now asks which add on families you want. English, German, Imperial. You get to pick each one or not to be included.

    English means UK and the various Commonwealth collection of countries. Imperial means the US. I assumed the opposite.

    2104:

    paws4thot @ 2095: West bank of the Pond hasn't (that I know of) really used the Imperial pint (or gallon) since 1776CE.

    Wouldn't it have been the "Royal" pint in 1776CE? I thought the U.K. didn't become an Empire until George's granddaughter became Empress (some time in the 1850s)?

    It's whatever "pint" was in use in the colonies before our successful rebellion.

    2105:

    Robert Prior @ 2097:

    West bank of the Pond hasn't (that I know of) really used the Imperial pint (or gallon) since 1776CE.

    Canada used Imperial measures until we went metric in the 70s.

    Confusingly, a fair number of Americans (including at least one publisher) apparently think that their measures are "Imperial", and call them that. Maybe they think that as America is now the world's biggest empire… :-)

    Nah, it's one of those unknown unknowns thingys. Most "Americans" don't know much about what happened in the U.K. or the other colonies AFTER the American Revolution; don't have a clue when the U.K. actually formally became an empire.

    People assume our modern standard weights & measures must be "Imperial" because they're derived from the weights & measures used in Britain's North American colonies at the time even though British "Imperial" units weren't standardized until well after the American Revolution (AFAIK).

    Most "Americans" would be shocked to find out there's gambling in the back room at Rick's .... ER, I mean to find out the U.S. has an empire ... which I'm not sure we do.

    Just because we're an 800 lb Gorilla on the world stage doesn't really make us an empire. Hegemony sure, but not an empire ...

    2106:

    So, in 1776, the UK and its colonies used several different gallons. We had (at least - there may be others I'm unaware of) the beer gallons, the wine gallons, and the corn gallons, which are all based on a standard container size, but with different allowances for the final amount of product delivered to the end customer.

    The theory was that you'd fill your container to a reasonable point at the supplier, and then there would be transit losses - corn settling and leaving a gap, alcohol evaporating, liquids soaking into the container surface etc - that had to be allowed for.

    When the US and the UK standardised on a single gallon, we chose different baselines; we used the beer gallon as our standard unit, and dropped the corn and wine gallons. The US kept the wine gallon for liquids, and the corn gallon for dry goods. A pint is just 1/8th of a gallon, which is the base unit.

    2107:

    But I thought you were arguing that the USA is NOT an empire! If you are measuring the USA hegemony, then it is less clear, because it includes a large number of vassal and semi-vassal countries, some of which are quite large. To be in a hegemony merely requires domination, not actual rule. It would then come down to whether you claim that they are dominated or not dominated.

    Yeah, I did contradict myself, didn't I? Oops.

    Anyway, I'd argue that the US is both an empire within its borders (talk to the residents of DC or people who live on reservations) AND a global hegemonic power. People usually mean the latter when they talk about US Imperialism, at least after 1945, but that's the US hegemony, the whole bit about having 750+ military bases in 80+ countries. It's worth separating, only because empires like America are at least as old as the iron age in western culture, while our post-War hegemonic system, with its global military colonies, seems a bit of an innovation that others have copied. We can also engage in a long argument about whether US military bases are more like Classical colonia, more like corporate mineral and oil extraction camps, or an unholy amalgam of both.

    As for the Imperial units discussion, Wikipedia helpfully throws a lot of wet leaves on the fire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_and_US_customary_measurement_systems. Apparently the situation is even more complicated than we've already made it!

    If the Texas Publisher wants to print measurements with accuracies in the parts per million range, then yes, there is a difference between Imperial and US Customary. Furthermore, if they're being that persnickety, then the accuracy matters, and they should be more precise in their system specifications. And I'm not sure who, if anyone, in their audience would use Imperial measurements. (/Bronx cheer).

    2108:

    Robert Prior @ 2099:

    Hegemony sir, not empire.

    Point, but the Texas publisher I'm thinking of insists that his authors use American measures, while calling them "Imperial" measures — not "Hegemon" measures.

    And of course, if some clueless git Texas publisher insists, then it must mean all the rest of us "Americans" are clueless as well.

    2109:

    I'll cheerfully confuse the Pint Size issue even further by mentioning the Scottish Pint ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joug ) with it's corresponding 8 pint gallon which was also a standard in use at the time when the US came into existance.

    It is approximately three times larger than the English 568 ml pint. Sadly no longer in use, but it'd be an inconvenient size to have as a single serving. My guess is it (as the name suggests) was usually served as a communal jug shared between a number of drinkers and replenished as necessary, rather than one for each drinker.

    I understand from USian friends that beer can still be served this way over there, though I have never encountered it in the UK. Other drinks such as wine and punches/cocktails are often served communally, don't know why not for draught beer, it might be the legal requirement for an official marked volume on the glass. Or I might just be unobservant or not drinking in the places that do this!

    2110:

    In the US, growlers are in the same size range as your Scottish pint, although sizes vary considerably and are not standardized. You can get them at brewpubs, generally to take home with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growler_(jug)

    2111:

    Hegemony sir, not empire.

    potayto potahto for a lot of the people on the receiving end i'd have thought

    2112:

    Here in Canada draught beer can be purchased at a pub in sleeves, pints or pitchers. Rarely do they actually follow any specific measurement beyond 'small glass, big glass, big jug to be shared into smaller glasses'. It is also possible to purchase 'Growlers' for take home at some places, though the rules differ by province. Occasionally one sees marketing of a 'true pint'.

    Wine to be shared is sold by the half litre, litre or bottle (750 ml). It is also sold as a 6 oz or 9 oz glass.

    Such is the bastardized system of weights and measures of Canada, in which we use metric and imperial systems haphazardly. Few of us speak in miles or miles/hour, but most of us weigh in pounds and are a certain number of feet and inches tall. Water, wine, fuel and milk are measured in litres, beer in pints. Land and homes are measured in square feet, acres, square miles and almost never in hectares or square meters.

    I tend to cook and bake in imperial measurements, but also keep some metric measures around for recipes that follow them.

    Prices in the grocery store tend to be provided in whichever measure makes it look cheap. So cheap pork chops are displayed at $/lb, while salmon fillets are displayed in $/100g. Often two different cuts of the same product will have different units of measurement.

    Butter is sold by the pound but priced in grams (i.e. sold as 454 grams of butter). This is common in many other products as well, such as pasta (908 grams/package).

    Canada switched to the metric system in the mid-70s to stay aligned with the US. Then the know-nothing faction in the US stomped their feet and they rejected the switch.

    2113:

    And of course, if some clueless git Texas publisher insists, then it must mean all the rest of us "Americans" are clueless as well.

    I think "clueless" is slandering him — anyone who can stay in business for over four decades must have some clues. I have all his books packed away, and dumped the author's guidelines long ago when I stopped writing for him. The "git" part of your description is fairly accurate. Given British libel laws I won't identify the publisher, but you may be able to figure it out from that :-)

    I wrote "a fair number of Americans" and I'll stand by that, as based on my experience corresponding with your compatriots over a couple of decades. The number who have asserted that the American gallon is an Imperial gallon… (hint: Imperial gallons are roughly 20% larger)

    2114:

    Butter is sold by the pound but priced in grams (i.e. sold as 454 grams of butter). This is common in many other products as well, such as pasta (908 grams/package).

    Years ago I was told that is because a lot of our food comes from the US, and while printing a different label is easy enough different-sized packaging would be much more expensive. So we get the same sizes they do, but metric (and bilingual) labels.

    2115:

    Hegemony sir, not empire. potayto potahto for a lot of the people on the receiving end i'd have thought

    Worth asking the LeftPondians and others, I guess: Do you feel like an American colony, with 55,000-plus "warfighters" deployed in bases in the UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain? (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-military-presence-around-the-world-interactive)

    Australia was part of the British Empire. Is it a colony of the American empire with about 1100 troops in country? Same as being a Imperial colony?

    If it's not the same, that's the difference between empire and hegemony. I'm not saying that hegemony is benign (or for that matter, entirely malign), while imperial colonization is the opposite. I do think, though, that there's a meaningful difference. That's all.

    2116:

    An article popped up on my newsfeed about the Tantrum in Ottawa. Apparently one of the organizers slipped on an icy sidewalk and broke their ankle, and is threatening to sue the city because they didn't maintain a safe public space!

    https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/trucker-protest-organizer-slips-on-icy-sidewalk-breaks-ankle-bones-criticizes-ottawa-for-unsafe-conditions

    A man who organized a protest that threatened and extorted food from a homeless shelter, harassed and intimidated health workers and residents, circled a palliative care hospital blasting air horns, etc, is upset that the city didn't figure out how to get machinery through a blockade and clean ice off the sidewalk. You can't make this up.

    2118:

    Measures
    "A pint of pure water weighs a pound & a quarter" ( = 20oz )
    "A gallon of water weighs 10 lbs"
    A true Imperial Gallon has eight Imperial pints / a US gallon has eight non-imperial ( 16floz ) pints...
    Legal British ( English, anyway ) draught BEER measures are multiples of one third, or one half of an Imperial Pint. The "third" is sometimes called a "Nip".

    Rbt Prior
    It's called: "Insanity"

    2119:

    Availability varies, but typically 3 or 4 (imperial) pint jugs of beer are sold legally in the UK. The biggest issue with them is finding enough people to make a round that will take 1 or 2 glasses each of a single brew.

    2120:

    Canada switched to the metric system in the mid-70s to stay aligned with the US. Then the know-nothing faction in the US stomped their feet and they rejected the switch.

    Hmmm. When I was traveling to Toronto in 80/81/82 for business (many times for a week or more) the locals didn't feel it was the US that caused things. Plus they felt that all non metric was being stamped out. Hard. So from what you say about current things the government backed off a bit over the years.

    One comment that stuck with me, they said all the major road signs that had indicated "Exit xyz 1/4 mile" were just painted over to be "1/2 km". Which is off by 0.1 km but moving the signs was too much hassle.

    Now out in western Canada they seemed to be fighting a well organized resistance. They even offered to pay us a premium to get the US software versions so they could ignore DD/MM/YY.

    This was also in the middle of the bi-lingual laws. Which led to all kinds of grumblings in private and cheers in public depending on the crowd.

    2121:

    for sure it's a more sophisticated system than that ol' direct rule, u just have to suborn the elites so they identify with your values - i guess i was thinking of the people on the receiving end as being more in places like libya or afghanistan than in the core satellite nations

    2122:

    I knew I'd missed some gallons when I said three - I could only remember those three off the top of my head because they're the three that became British Imperial and US customary measures.

    IIRC (and it's a while since I researched this, so my memory has faded badly), the various gallons used to be even less standardised, but some time in the 16th/17th century (memory fade), the royals insisted that the "official" gallon be a fixed size container with allowance for loss in transit.

    2123:

    Colony, no, because that implies direct ownership. Vassal state, unquestionably, and deliberately being made worse.

    2124:

    But the Americans say "A pint's a pound the World around." However it only applies to wine. The US fluid ounce is a bigger volume than the Imperial fluid ounce because it's based on an ounce of wine. Even in the metric system there are problems which vary depending on application. In my own speciality clinical labs use SI units and also abide by the convention that measurements should, where possible have numeric values less than 1,000. Moles should be used for chemical and biochemical concentrations. So in most of the world, including Canada blood glucose is reported in millimoles per litre but in the USA and US dominated countries it's reported in milligrams per decilitre. Instead of using litres as the volume part of these units they have a hodge podge of different volume units eg. Troponin - the defining test for a heart attack is reported in microgrammes per litre in the UK and in nanograms per millilitre in the USA.

    2125:

    Heteromeles @ 2118: *Do you feel like an American colony, with 55,000-plus "warfighters" deployed in bases in the UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain?*

    But the UK also has troops in Germany. Does that make Germany part of the American or British empires?

    And for that matter, the Bundeswehr sends its soldiers abroad. Does that make Mali part of the German empire?

    Or perhaps we should stop equating "stations troops" with "imperial domination", and admit that its not the 18th Century any more.

    2126:

    The USA hegemony is maintained primarily by economic and political force, not military force, as was the British hegemony. Witness its abuses of 'international' finance systems to try to bankrupt countries that don't submit appropriately, its pressures to use only weaponry, IT mechanisms, gas etc. that it controls, and so on. In some countries, the military force IS used for domination, because it is enough to provide a basis for a full-scale invasion and occupation, and the threat of that prevents the country asserting its economic or political independence, but that is not the case anywhere in Europe (*).

    The USA's main interest in the bases in the UK and Germany are for use against countries that it can't easily reach from the USA, and where carrier groups aren't enough.

    (*) Well, in THEORY, the USA could mount a full-scale invasion and occupation of the UK, as the blithering classes have often called for whenever there is a threat that we might elect a socialist prime minister, but it would be a bloody affair if the UK resisted.

    2127:

    The USA hegemony is maintained primarily by economic and political force, not military force

    Oh definitely. It's just the word "empire" that doesn't fit.

    2128:

    The USA hegemony is maintained primarily by economic and political force, not military force, as was the British hegemony.

    I think it's a bit more than this. What the US is doing (along with China, Russia, and others, to a lesser extent), is a fairly unprecedented geopolitical model, empowered by petroleum.

    Without petroleum, if a wannabe expansionist wants to control the economy of an area, they have to conquer it militarily and station troops there, or install a favorable puppet regime. Since troops have to walk, ride, or ship in, it takes a long time to get forces in place. This means in turn that the forces have to be in country to be effective in projecting force (or politics). That in turn requires a colony to support the troops.

    For the last 100 years or so, we've had the increasing ability to move rapidly around the planet. Sick jokes like "Strategic Air Command: When it absolutely, positively, has to be taken out overnight, anywhere in the world" highlight the fact that air power especially no longer has to be in country to be effective. This is the modern hegemony: it's faster, more energy intensive, but less direct.

    We're nearing the end of this era, where political power involved finding, controlling, and using petroleum most effectively (nearing as in decades until it's over, not centuries). I have no idea what will come next, and to be blunt, I'll probably be dead before the changes become obvious. It's easy to predict the rise of empires again, but it's even easier to predict a series of disasters, after which the survivors follow the Maya and Anasazi away from the most unsustainable cities to go live in some other way.

    Regardless, that's why it's worth differentiating between modern hegemonies and historic empires. The US, ironically, is both, having conquered territory prior to and at the start of the fossil fuel age, then completely embraced petroleum and used it to hegemonize a good chunk of the planet after WW2. The difference between these two systems actually helps us understand the present (e.g. why I'm an American mutt with roots that stretch back east as a result of empire, while my wife immigrated as a child as a result of hegemony), and the future (what happens when intercontinental travel is slower and more difficult).

    2129:

    David L @ 2123:

    Canada switched to the metric system in the mid-70s to stay aligned with the US. Then the know-nothing faction in the US stomped their feet and they rejected the switch.

    Hmmm. When I was traveling to Toronto in 80/81/82 for business (many times for a week or more) the locals didn't feel it was the US that caused things. Plus they felt that all non metric was being stamped out. Hard. So from what you say about current things the government backed off a bit over the years.

    One comment that stuck with me, they said all the major road signs that had indicated "Exit xyz 1/4 mile" were just painted over to be "1/2 km". Which is off by 0.1 km but moving the signs was too much hassle.

    Now out in western Canada they seemed to be fighting a well organized resistance. They even offered to pay us a premium to get the US software versions so they could ignore DD/MM/YY.

    This was also in the middle of the bi-lingual laws. Which led to all kinds of grumblings in private and cheers in public depending on the crowd.

    Some little known factoids about the U.S. & the metric system:

    The U.S. has been "Officially" metric since 1832 or so. President Thomas Jefferson purchased from the French a set of metric standard measures for the newly created United States Survey of the Coast (created within the United States Department of the Treasury by an Act of Congress on February 10, 1807), but the ship bringing them to "America" was waylaid by Barbery Pirates and the standard measures disappeared for a while ... finally being accepted when the original law was renewed by Congress July 10, 1832.

    While the U.S. still commonly uses ounces, pints, quarts, gallons, inches, feet, yards & miles ... those measures have been defined by "metric" measures since the mid 19th Century (i.e. an official ounce is 28 grams, an inch is 25.4 mm, ... or at least they were until the the metre became defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second, and all the other measures were redefined accordingly).

    The United States Survey of the Coast is the original predecessor agency of the National Geodetic Survey. I know the topo maps produced by the U.S. Geological Survey are mostly available in feet & inches, but the data from the National Geodetic Survey (and predecessors) was METRIC.

    When North Carolina experimented with METRIC road signs back in the 70s & 80s they just they just tacked an additional column for km onto the right side of the experimental signs.

    I don't know when the DoD adopted metric for their topo maps, it was before I joined the service in 1975. They never taught us to convert between meters/yards or miles/km ... we did all our map reading & land nav using Metric. When we got GPS systems, the display was metric.

    2130:

    Largely agree with definitions here and the distinction (empire vs hegemony). Also agree, and think it's pretty much unquestionable fact, that the territorial USA is itself a colonial empire, carved out mostly in interaction with the British Empire, the French, Spanish and Russian empires and subsequently Mexico, Cuba, Hawaii, Samoa and others, obviously in addition to the original inhabitants whose nations are mostly rendered invisible at the scale of countries and empires.

    It would seem reasonable and be tempting to put it on the same sort of scale the 19th century German Empire, which we also think of as a single country (slightly reduced but not all that much) these days. But I think that's not quite right. To get that, it would be more than if, instead of the Prussian state annexing other German-speaking states militarily while retaining all the state level monarchies and aristocracies, instead a Germanic quasi-democratic Swiss canton overran all the other German-speaking areas, exterminated the existing hierarchies and replaced them with their own elected government structures, filled entirely by colonists. Actually it's much closer to (and was the model for) the German plans in WWII for Ukraine and southern Russia, and all the territory between there and Germany.

    Anyhow, while I agree with the distinctions, I think in common use "empire" is broader than this and it's routine to hear people talk about the "American empire" (small e usually) when they mean the US hegemony. It's often referring more to specific channels of soft power, like cultural artefacts and market-driven things. For instance, when huge vertically integrated US cinema chains/studio conglomerates buy out Australian cinema chains, they show market-tested material that's already made its money in the (much large) US market and entirely displace Australian productions. People call that imperialism and they're not wrong. Australian subsidies for local content production get routinely taken to the WTO because US conglomerates like to cast them as tariffs, although the USA itself is one of the most protected markets in the world for just about anything it's serious about producing. I think there are ways where your distinction relies too much upon a distinction between the state versus commercial interests as the centre of power, and the fact that commercial interests entirely dominate the US state means that distinction itself isn't all that meaningful.

    I guess it's like the way I like to insist on the word "capitalist" being used to refer to practitioners of capitalism (small c) while Capitalism is what you get when you put your capitalists in charge of everything (which, spoiler, I think is a kind of totalitarianism). Hegemony is what you get when the capitalists who control your Capitalist state don't need the state to be an empire (or at least any more than it already is), but need their own empire to expand into. To people at the sharp end, it's not the same as being invaded by people with guns and weird priests, but it's still a matter of finding oneself exploited, sometimes brutally, for the benefit of strange people far away.

    2131:

    And I should point out, before someone else points it out for me, that I don't think the US Government is unique in being dominated by commercial interests, far from it, especially and conspicuously looking on from Australia. And often they are the same commercial interests, so in a lot of ways it doesn't make sense to refer to the US hegemony as an American empire at all, because it's much more accurate to refer to a transnational commercial empire(s) of aligned commercial entities operating at higher-than-state-level in many economic domains and geographic areas. And maybe the same considerations about the end of hegemonies also applies to the end of these empires, but I'm not sure about that.

    2132:

    the fact that commercial interests entirely dominate the US state

    Or, as President Coolidge* put it, "the business of America is business".

    * Also notable for being, AFAIK, the only American president with a biological phenomenon named after him :-)

    2133:
    But, when HDD makers were pushing the boundaries, the first 10,000 RPM drives were 2.5"; it took close to a decade for geninue 3.5" 10K RPM drives to come out.

    I've been using 15K RPM 3.5" HD's since around 2005. And they're not 2.5" inside, I've taken enough of them apart to know.

    https://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/enterprise/cheetah/15K.4/SAS/100350601b.pdf

    2134:

    "What's good for General Bullmose is good for the USA" (L'il Abner comic strip)

    2135:

    Saw 10k 3.5" drives... true SCSI.

    7200 was not outrageously priced, and for where I worked, volume mattered.

    2136:

    Speaking of empires...

    I tried to watch the "Foundation" series. TBH, my expectations were low. I knew Apple would have to include a lot of exploding spaceships and similar space opera fodder. I was pleasantly surprised with the first episode -- it managed to retain all the main points of Asimov's introductory story, while making it cinematic. Alas, this surprise did not last.

    Starting with the second episode, Apple's "Foundation" is not just bad. Nor is it like "I, Robot" -- has basically no relation to the original, while being a decent story in its own right. Rather, it is, inasmuch as such thing is possible, an anti-Foundation.

    The original novel described rational people trying to think their way out of the greatest of catastrophes, the collapse of an enormous empire into war and poverty. In the show it’s all woo-woo mysticism. People no longer think -- they shoot their way out. Hari Seldon is no longer a scholar; he’s a prophet whom no one understands. Salvor Hardin is no longer a democratically elected leader; she’s an outcast with a gun and superpowers. It inverts all the important themes of the novel.

    Ordinarily I would just dismiss this as usual "Hollywood butchers everything SF" and forget about it. Problem is, "Foundation" series mirrors how US has changed since the time the novel was written. The country is no longer the upstart technological power, the equivalent of Terminus. It has become the Galactic Empire, maintaining its position by stupidly brute force. When the US was faced with the Berlin Blockade in 1948, it didn’t roll tanks across East Germany to free the city. That would have been stupid. Instead, it used its know-how to airlift millions of tons of supplies to the besieged city, and so saved it. Whereas in 2001, when 19 maniacs crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US didn’t use the unprecedented worldwide sympathy to actually find Osama Bin Laden. Instead, it invaded Afghanistan. That gained nothing and lost the country. Twenty years and trillions later, US retreated in disgrace.

    It relied on force instead of reason, and that’s the message of the new "Foundation". Don’t think, feel. Do you feel sickened that Saddam Hussein tried to kill your father, George Bush Sr? Then just stomp on him, and leave Iraq vastly worse off than it was before, and create even worse entities like ISIS. The US has been infected by the memes of bad TV shows like this one, and is paying for it.

    2137:

    I think there are ways where your distinction relies too much upon a distinction between the state versus commercial interests as the centre of power, and the fact that commercial interests entirely dominate the US state means that distinction itself isn't all that meaningful.

    I do sincerely appreciate what you wrote. That said, I think it's a bit simplistic.

    You've started dealing with questions that revolve around "what is power?" "American political power is revolves around monied interests" "What, then, is money?" "Money is a (more-or-less) a means for determining who has power and how much." And if you're paying attention, you realize that the argument accidentally got a bit circular.

    I'm not mocking you, it's just that power and money are a bit mysterious. For example (naming no names) any number of political powers have swept into power by simply being brazen enough to get away with it, and have been swept out of power when people stopped putting up with their bullshit. Does that mean power is mere brazenness? No, because even more people have tried that trick and gotten nowhere. It generally doesn't work, except when it does. It's like the US nuclear arsenal. It's a cornerstone of our hegemonic power, but it's rather unclear whether it would actually work to end the world. It's not like we test-fire the damned things regularly. So is our nuclear power hollow? Not exactly, because no one's willing to call America's bluff and find out.

    Similarly, as I keep drumming in, billionaires don't own a billion dollars worth of anything. Instead, they claim to control things that they and sometimes others claim is worth at least a billion dollars. In doing so, they very often ignore others' claims on those things, generally claims in the forms of loans or liens. Are they good for their net worth? Perhaps, but since they often espouse the extreme forms of the "all debt is theft" ethos, it's quite unclear. Maybe it's all illusion, except that sometimes it obviously isn't. When I draw parallels between this and magic, I'm not entirely joking.

    I think my bottom line is that I, at least, can't reduce imperial or hegemonic power unambiguously to market dominance, or military dominance, or head games. It's all three, but not in an entirely knowable mix or pattern. It's also what others are willing to tolerate, and that's an underappreciated and rather important aspect too.

    2138:

    Khan has come up trumps, and Patel and Dick have lost out. The appointment of a successor will be 'interesting'.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-60340525

    2139:

    I agree with your negativity, but I think you got it backwards. The US, since its founding, has had an excess of, not stupid, but exploitative, brutal evil. Slavery, for instance. Indian genocide, for another instance. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan...

    Now I don't think many or even most of the people who were, say, US veterans of the Afghan War are innately evil people by American or possibly even global standards. Problem is, in the US (as often elsewhere), it takes a real ability to sacrifice to be truly good, especially when alone against a mob.

    So I'd gently suggest you got it backwards. There was a brief, shiny moment in history when the US more-or-less did the right thing: 1940-1950, ignoring the Japanese internment camps. That's the era of the Berlin Airlift which I completely agree with you on. The rest of the time? Not so much.

    Hollywood is just an annoying positive feedback loop, people trying to make money by selling what they think will sell. Similarly, Afghanistan and Iraq were colonialist occupations in the same vein as Vietnam, and failed for the same reasons. I wouldn't blame Hollywood for Afghanistan and Iraq. But I will fault them for normalizing violence as the universal answer and not taking risks to see if less violence can get as many people into theaters. Even going back to the time when Superman punched Nazis without killing them would be an improvement.

    And it does get worse than that, apparently. Right now I'm debating if I want to read Susan Williams' White Malice. It's not that I disagree, but I'm more debating how pointlessly angry and frustrated I want to get.

    2140:

    Apple's "Foundation" is not just bad. Nor is it like "I, Robot" -- has basically no relation to the original, while being a decent story in its own right. Rather, it is, inasmuch as such thing is possible, an anti-Foundation.

    Funnily I took I, Robot (2004 film) as being very much the exact negative image of I, Robot, the Asimov short story collection.

    Reading it for the first (only) time as a ten year old it came across as a very clear moral tale, saying that "Colored People" (as they were then politely termed) are people too, and if you treat them decently instead of as disposable chattels, and give them the opportunities afforded to any other person you'll end up with worthwhile members of society, and really it's the right thing to do anyway.

    The film's moral message appeared to be you have to keep the blacks down or giant swarms of them will rise up, kill you in your bed and take all your stuff. Remember, just because there's one decent black man, the rest of them are murderers if you give them half a chance. So don't give them even half a chance.

    2141:

    @2021 [ "Right now I'm debating if I want to read Susan Williams' White Malice. It's not that I disagree, but I'm more debating how pointlessly angry and frustrated I want to get." ]

    You might like to read instead Jonathan Katz's “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (2022). It's not as depressing because, before the end, this dude, scion of one of Dixie's most infamous slaverowner, who even was the US military governor of Haiti, stood up to the reich wingers who plotted to take out FDR.

    Last month there was a terrific review of the book in the WaPost. Partner had had the book on order since JK told him about it over a year ago.

    2142:

    No, I agree with him, but disagree that it is primarily Hollywood, though it is one factor. It's the attitudes that people in the USA are subjected to at school and by the media - and, of course by their parents etc., who got it from .... You see that even on this blog, where many people from the USA justify the killing of innocents nominally to protect other innocents or even in simple retaliation. No, it's not unique to the USA, and was (of course) common in Britain in the days of Empire, but it seems to be more pervasive in the USA than in other 'western' countries, today.

    2143:

    Well I don't see that circular argument as mockery at all: it's implicit in what we hear all the time from certain quarters. It does show up as a sort of brazen mockery in some of the worst of cases: "we're doing this to you because it's the right thing to do, and it's the right thing to do because we're the ones who are doing it". Though it's usually less brazen, merely playing into the conservative "just world" preference. I don't really think there's a genuine confusion about the nature of power here, and I'm not sure it's the rabbit hole we urgently need to explore. I've heard people happily insist that money and power are the same thing, and I've often simply that that, well, it's probably close enough to be true for them (like the differences to account for with even special relativity are too small to matter for most people for most purposes). Otherwise I don't disagree with your rendering of this. I think my focus is a bit different, not merely a simplification, because I see extra threads in play that we've only touched on lightly if at all. Don't have the time right now to explore those, however.

    2144:

    Basically I agree with your assessment of the US, except for the last five words. They're still far to US-centered.

    In reality it's mainly the rest of the world who's paying for the infection. How many people did the US military kill in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Yemen and other countries (through drone warfare) in the last 20 years? (There's a reason that Charles Pierce called the Obama presidency "the deadly presidency" throughout its eight years.) And who is suffering under the unjust economical regime of the US hegemony? And it's not the US that has to fear a coup d'état manufactured by the CIA or even a full scale military invasion whenever a government comes into power that threatens to challenge the hegemonial status quo. I could go on, but I think the examples are making clear who is actually paying the price.

    2145:

    In reality it's mainly the rest of the world who's paying for the infection

    Don't forget the circle of "allies" who have to contribute to the various military misadventures or face varying degrees of retaliation. It's an invidious choice for a lot of them: commit war crimes or economic/diplomatic suicide. I still remember the "we're just a little country on the far side of the world that doesn't matter very much" argument when Aotearoa banned nuclear armed and powered vessels. That didn't stop US attempted to change our government, but it did somewhat reduce them.

    You see this quite dramatically with the various China-related tantrums, like the 5G debacle in the UK where they were told in no uncertain terms by their masters that only US spy equipment was permitted. God forbid anyone let the perfidious Chinese get the same access as the US/Five Eyes do!

    2146:

    Huawei equipment had a poor reputation 10 years ago, maybe more. (I was hearing stories, and wasn't even paying attention.) Example story (note the statement from Huawei at the end):
    Expert: Huawei routers are riddled with vulnerabilities - German security researcher says the Chinese government doesn't need to demand back doors on Huawei routers because there are already major holes in their firmware. (Elinor Mills, July 30, 2012)
    But yeah, their appears to be a pattern of 5 Eyes dislike for any non 5 (9, 14, whatever) Eyes hardware. (One interesting question is the actual security of iPhones.)

    2147:

    EC @ 2141
    Not necessarily - I simply DO NOT TRUST Khan ( He's an idiot, for a start ) & I also suspect that C-Dick was a deliberate fall-girl ( Set up to fail ) ...
    Problem: Her successor HAS TO BE female - who is available & suitable?

    2148:

    Violence is inherent to human nature. Always has been, always will be. Human nature doesn't change. It doesn't get better. It can't be fixed, cured, improved, or transcended. It can only be managed.

    RE: the United States of America and its imperialism--if the U.S. ceased to exist tomorrow, what would take its place wouldn't be a new golden era of peace, love, and understanding for humanity. Russia, China, and the other larger powers would rush to fill the void. And, other than sleepingroutine and Elderly Cynic, are any of you really willing to say with a straight face that a Russian-led or Chinese-led global order would, from a human rights standpoint, be an improvement? As bad as the U.S. is, all the probable alternatives are worse.

    International relations is anarchic and Darwinist. The strongest call the tune, and everyone else dances to it. There is no order or justice without violence, or at least the threat thereof, to enforce it. There is no civilization without compulsion.

    Is it right? No. Is it moral? No. Is it fair? No. Is it just? No. It just is.

    Inevitably, someone will rule. Someone will dominate. The only questions are who and how.

    2149:

    Violence is inherent to human nature. Always has been, always will be. Human nature doesn't change. It doesn't get better. It can't be fixed, cured, improved, or transcended. It can only be managed.

    To be blunt, bullshit. That's like saying the sky is color and color doesn't change.

    Violence is a complex phenomenon with a bunch of different dimensions, and separate rules for each. For example, the US President doesn't nuke Congress when he gets angry with them, not because he's not angry, but because he judges it's counterproductive.

    Focusing solely on violence, what does it mean? Does the biggest nuclear power call the shots? Hardly. Whoever installed IQ45 in 2016 arguably caused more damage to the US than a war would have, and did it without firing a shot. That's a bigger win than a nuclear war, and it's why everyone's looking at direct action, nonviolence, and hybrid war as the next killer apps. It's a way to beat the US without violence. Sure, everybody unzips and waves around the turgid hypersonic, ultra-consumerist war toys, but how many actually get used, and how many are moneymaking scams for their manufacturers?

    The biggest problem of interest is that the global order is that the current great powers depend on petroleum, and that's going away. What comes next may have nothing to do with a hegemony or empire by any of the major powers. After all, we've got plenty of examples of cases where polities fell apart and nothing replaced them. What that means in practice is that the survivors said "Screw this shit," abandoned their failed civilizations, and went onto something else that didn't involve civilization. That may well be what's coming, rather than Chinese, Russian, or American Dominion.

    2150:

    Y'know, I just started skimming the pedantry on megacorps, and here's a thought for a law: any company that can afford to hire an entire troop of fully armed mercenaries, even if they're deployed elsewhere in the world (Blackwater, Iraq, anyone), is required to either be nationalized, or broken up.

    2151:

    Reading it for the first (only) time as a ten year old it came across as a very clear moral tale, saying that "Colored People" (as they were then politely termed) are people too, and if you treat them decently instead of as disposable chattels, and give them the opportunities afforded to any other person you'll end up with worthwhile members of society, and really it's the right thing to do anyway.

    I suppose the difference in perception is that while my first exposure to "I, Robot" was also at the age of 10, I lived in USSR at the time, and the idea that it is an allegory for black people never occurred to me. Now that I think about it, I can see why you saw it that way, but I do not believe it was Isaac Asimov's intent. If it were, surely he would have mentioned it at least once. AFAIK, Asimov never claimed his robots were a metaphor for blacks or for any minority in general.

    Moreover, he did say what exactly inspired "I, Robot". Prior to Asimov, all SF which dealt with robots (including the play "RUR", which coined the term) was essentially variations on "Frankenstein" — humans in their hubris build servants, who turn against them. Asimov found it repellent, and became determined to create robots which actually make sense: "My robots would be machines designed by engineers, not pseudo-men created by blasphemers".

    2152:

    Y'know, I just started skimming the pedantry on megacorps, and here's a thought for a law: any company that can afford to hire an entire troop of fully armed mercenaries, even if they're deployed elsewhere in the world (Blackwater, Iraq, anyone), is required to either be nationalized, or broken up.

    Well...

    One "problem" PassWater* and friends can legitimately deal with is violence against US corporations outside the US, and even inside it. In this regard, they're just a scale-up of the armed guards on armored cars, or the security firms that guard nuclear plants (using military-grade weapons).

    I agree that using paid mercenaries is a problem, although the tradition of Letters of Marque goes back a ways.

    As for nationalizing them...? The problem is that it runs into a Republican party that, for the last 150 years or so, has often been as theory-driven as any communist revolutionary regime. So firms that are nationalized can be as easily privatized.

    What I'd propose instead is the following: --Use of Force rules have to be approved by the DoD, with sanctions under US law for failure (e.g. manslaughter or murder raps). This is obvious, because you don't want some wacko getting the US into a war by shooting the wrong brown guy. --They've got to be bonded up the wazoo, to deal with predictable legal issues, and this bonding has to be under US control. Again, if they switch from privateer to pirate, their insurance goes away, and they're left bare assed and liable. And in this day and age, that might be a wee bit of a problem when they go gear shopping and such. --A large majority of the shares (2/3 perhaps) have to be held by "people" (real or corporate) based in the US for tax purposes (ahem). --The CEO and probably other critical officers (COO, CFO) are not allowed to leave the US while employed by the company and (say) three years after they leave employment. This is to insure that they're available for questioning. If they skip out, the government pulls the chains and the company grinds to a halt.

    Perfect solution? Of course not. I can already think of a bunch of ways to game it. But it makes some obvious problems a bit harder to deal with. The other solution is that relaxing these rules looks bad for whichever party relaxes them. Let them be taken over by foreigners? Let the CEO go live in the Emirates? Who thought that was a good idea? That might make it more stable than merely nationalizing it. Probably won't, but it'll make some lawyers a bunch of billable hours figuring out ways around it.

    *What's Passwater called now, Xeesh?

    2153:

    whitroth
    "We" have already done that - our only Private Army are the Atholl Highlanders.
    OTOH, AIUI, Britain has a lot of "Military Contractors" who get around the prohibitions in various ways.
    There's even a Geo Macdonald Fraser short story about one such person. ( "Captain Errol" )

    2154:

    Heteromeles wrote:

    Sure, everybody unzips and waves around the turgid hypersonic, ultra-consumerist war toys, but how many actually get used, and how many are moneymaking scams for their manufacturers?

    However, that is a problem all of its own, because spending so much money on these toys is preventing the allocation of that money to actual problem solving.

    For instance, I'm telling everybody who would listen to me that I have no problem with increasing Germany's defense expenditure to 2% of our GDP—provided all of that increase is not given to the ministry of defence and the German army, but exclusively used for non-violent conflict resolution and civil defence. To be honest, I would instantly settle for a 50/50-split, because already that would ramp up spending for (and thus commitment to) non-violent alternatives to warfare and violence to a currently unimaginable level.

    2155:

    I'd actually go further and suggest that non-aggression is the quintessentially human trait. Non-human animals who hang around humans over time become less aggressive to each other and to other animals, as well as less aggressive to humans. Social dominance and aggression toward each other are throwbacks for us: we're successful as a species precisely because we can reason about that stuff dispassionately and reject it when it makes better sense to co-operate. That isn't to say violence hasn't been a part of history from the very beginning, but insisting it's the only organising principle is mere silliness.

    There are a few flavours of this silliness around. People coming from the Catholic or at least theological tradition like to talk about "the perfectibility of man", a weird sea lionish concept that is usually set via some sort of ontological argument about ideals. Mostly though we're dealing with people who read Hobbes but didn't learn about the context (spoiler: not meant to be taken literally). Or who learned about Darwin but never read him, or read much of the detail. And who, on the strength of that, say stuff Hobbes probably and Darwin certainly wouldn't go along with.

    2156:

    "5 Eyes"

    Speaking of which, I just noticed that the initial JASON report of November 2018 on the Havana Syndrome was originally classified

    S//REL TO USA,FVEY//LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE

    and each point of the findings and recommendation was classified

    S//REL FVEY//LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE

    and redacted in its entirety.

    FVEY is, of course, the 5 Eyes SIGINT coallition, composed of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. It would be interesting to know why they were included as such, rather than Canada specifically. (Canada is the only other country known to have reported Havana Syndrome cases.)

    https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21068770-jason-report-2018-havana-syndrome

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

    2157:

    The Huawei issue in the UK had nothing to do with 'five eyes', but was a simple matter of a Chinese tender being cancelled in favour of a USA one. Very like the Nordstream 2 issue. Yes, the security issue to do with chips is real, but there is no more risk to the UK from Chinese ones than USA ones.

    2158:

    the idea that it is an allegory for black people never occurred to me

    Likewise. Partly because I was too young/aspie to understand allegory, and partly because in my paperback copy there was an introduction in which Asimov said that he wanted to create robots that weren't threats. Don't recall the exact words (it was over four decades ago and that book is long gone) but it seemed a good enough explanation to me at the time.

    (Just as McCaffrey stated that she started the Dragonriders of Pern series because she wanted a story where dragons weren't monsters, and it grew from there.)

    2159:

    Damian @2133:

    I guess it's like the way I like to insist on the word "capitalist" being used to refer to practitioners of capitalism (small c) while Capitalism is what you get when you put your capitalists in charge of everything (which, spoiler, I think is a kind of totalitarianism). Spoilerino, it's called Fascism. Or used to be called back in the days regardless of modern usage.

    Hegemony is what you get when the capitalists who control your Capitalist state don't need the state to be an empire (or at least any more than it already is), but need their own empire to expand into. To people at the sharp end, it's not the same as being invaded by people with guns and weird priests, but it's still a matter of finding oneself exploited, sometimes brutally, for the benefit of strange people far away. This is literally a description of imperialism without actually naming the word. The process that was described by Lenin in his program works like "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", little over century ago. Kind of ironic that we come back to it as if nothing has happened since - that is the price of ignorance.

    ilya187 @2139: Don’t think, feel. Ah, very well said. As formulated several years ago, it is a primary message that globalist elites direct at their subjects to bypass logic and reason, in a similar manner to how fraudsters fool the unsuspecting citizens in giving them money and property.

    And, other than sleepingroutine and Elderly Cynic, are any of you really willing to say with a straight face that a Russian-led or Chinese-led global order would, from a human rights standpoint, be an improvement? As bad as the U.S. is, all the probable alternatives are worse.

    Somebody hasn't been paying attention to Putin's Munch conference speech (of 2007) for last 15 years. Not China, nor Russia have been looking for establishment of New World Order with them in the center of it, precisely the opposite solution to global problems has been proposed, multiple times, regionally and globally. The answer to such speech was, unfortunately, an armed conflict to 2008, a diversion against Russian security in vital region of Caucasus. And not only that, every other attempt towards more secure world since then, every attempt to stabilize the situation since then has been met with ignorance, panic, misunderstanding, and finally, hysterical saber-rattling, terror threats and bomb-throwing.

    The reason for this is relatively simple to understand from position of miserable, unscrupulous, money-grabbing, pearl-clutching, decrepit regime of US oligarchy and globalist capital. There cannot be absolute security for anyone for everyone at once because nobody will be able to do anything. And absolute security and dominance for the one country means absolute insecurity and misery for absolutely everyone else. Therefore, as long as domination and hegemony of US is there, absolutely everyone who opposes it will live under threat of indiscriminate destruction.

    Damian @2158: I'd actually go further and suggest that non-aggression is the quintessentially human trait. Non-human animals who hang around humans over time become less aggressive to each other and to other animals, as well as less aggressive to humans.

    Or you can also argue that less aggressive animals appear as a result of humans eradicating all aggressive population, selectively leaving only tame and submissive population. We should never forget about that, it's the same as distinction as between "peaceful" and "harmless".

    One should put clear distinction between violence and aggressiveness. I myself prefer the aggressive application to many things, including my own assumptions and thoughts, but that doesn't meant I propose or encourage indiscriminate violation of thought, reason or feelings. Life isn't only about cooperation, lest it becomes complacent, stale and colorless, useless in the face of many coming wonders and dangers. Many people don't like it, become appalled by this revelation, it's too bad they're missing the point of life itself.

    2160:

    Damian @ 2158: I'd actually go further and suggest that non-aggression is the quintessentially human trait [...] Social dominance and aggression toward each other are throwbacks for us

    Two books you should read:

    The big caveat is that "evolutionary psychology" is treacherous ground; it is way too easy to make up just-so stories about Ogg and Ugg in a cave as an explanation for almost anything. And of course any attempt to base a moral philosophy on this stuff is pseudo-logical bullshit.

    (I confess its been some time since I actually read those books, so I can't provide a detailed guide to where they step over the line, but Ridley in particular is prone to do so).

    The basic gist, though, is fairly plain and looks to me to be hard or impossible to refute; the human brain is an evolved artefact, just like the muscles or the intestines. It has evolved to be good at its job, which is to make as many copies of the genes that produced it as possible. We have no problem talking about instinctive behaviour in animals as being an evolutionary artefact, so why should the naked ape be any different?

    Of course the human brain is also very plastic and responsive to its environment, so trying to attribute some piece of behaviour (e.g. violence or its absence) to either "nature" or "nurture" is bogus: it isn't "nature versus nurture", its "nature via nurture": the two are deeply intertwingled, because much of an individual's behaviour and emotions are conditioned by upbringing, but at the same time much of that upbringing is going to depend on the individual's behaviour in response to that upbringing. (And of course people get it wrong a lot anyway).

    There is also the supernormal stimulus problem: some responses which are adaptive under normal levels of stimulus can be positively harmful when the response is abused. So trying to explain e.g. gambling as a valid behaviour ("People do it, so they must have evolved to do it, so there must be a benefit") is bogus: in the case of gambling its more likely humans evolved to try stuff and take chances. There is a positive reinforcement from a near miss, which makes sense for hunting (there I go, telling a just-so-story about Ogg throwing the spear and just missing the gazelle, so he tries again). Games of chance which exploit this tend to make people come back. Which is why scratch cards so often give you 2 out of the 3 things you need for a jackpot.

    So to get back to the point: violence and co-operation are both innate in humans because either, under the right circumstances, can lead to increased numbers of offspring. Hence people can be induced to do either by the right combinations of genetics, upbringing and current circumstance. In fact, co-operative violence is probably one of the most common modes, especially since armies have 5,000 years of experience at finding the right way to induce it.

    It's also notable that something like 8% of the men in the relevant part of the world appear to have Genghis Kahn's Y chromosome: sometimes being a violent psychopath really ups your reproductive success, assuming of course that it doesn't get you killed.

    You use the term "throwback". That is a very interesting choice of word, so I'm going to pick you up on it. Its based on the idea of evolution as "progress" from lower forms of life to higher ones, with us humans as the pinnacle of creation. (And at the time the term was coined that was "us white European men"). We are not "more evolved" than a frog or a chimpanzee, just differently evolved. But "throwback" meant an individual that exhibited features that were "less evolved". Your post seems to imagine a progress from violent primitive humans to peaceful "more evolved" humans.

    Of course its quite possible that humans are evolving in this way, but if so its going to be slow and erratic. Absent any genetic evidence (e.g. genes associated with violence being more common centuries ago) I'd be more inclined to suspect that we are simply getting better at forms of nurture that decrease levels of violence, at least in some parts of the world. Others remain serious horror shows.

    2161:

    On a community level violence has been declining for centuries, obviously with some ups and downs. Murder rates are in decline, violent crime is in decline.

    Additionally, war is in decline. Despite the headlines, the trend is downwards. Fewer wars with fewer people dying in fewer places on average compared to previous decades and centuries.

    Culturally and somewhat unevenly we are seeing a broadening conception of who is 'us' and who is 'not us'. I would call it an expansion of empathy.

    Uneven and with lots of resistance and many setbacks, but the arc has been bending towards peace and empathy for a long time. The challenge is to keep that trend going and minimize or prevent any countertrends.

    2162:

    Okay, lesson time. Apologies for picking on FUBAR007, but "International relations are anarchic and Darwinist" and the discussion of nonviolence sit in a bunch of my wheelhouses. So let's do a bit of deconstruction and straighten out the mess a bit.

    "Anarchic and Darwinist" comes across as a straight dog-whistle to "Nature red in tooth in claw." I'll get to the reasons for this in a second. The important bit is that Darwin never said it. It's from Tennyson's 1850 poem In Memoriam A.H.H.: "Who trusted God was love indeed/And love Creation's final law/Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw/With ravine, shriek'd against his creed."

    This goes back to a political fight in the 1920s that heavily infected evolution and ecology for decades. That fight was between capitalism on one side, and communism and especially anarchism on the other. Both sides politicized everything they could, trying to demonstrate that the other side was unnatural and/or ungodly, while they were natural and/or godly.

    The fight got to evolution and biology. Anarchist economic theorists, going back to Fourier's mutalism in 1822, and a century or so later it got defined as "A social system based on equal freedom, reciprocity, and the sovereignty of the individual over himself, his affairs and his products; realized through individual initiative, free contract, cooperation, competition and voluntary association for defense against the invasive and for the protection of life, liberty and property of the non-invasive" (ref). As biologists started turning up examples of apparent mutualisms in nature (such as lichens), the anarchists and communists publicized these as examples of why anarchism and/or communism were the way the world did work and the way human civilization should work.

    Of course, anarchy and communism also led to idiots assassinating a US president, starting a little war in Europe, and getting Russia involved in a rather bloody civil war, among other things. So the capitalists started cranking up the idea that evolution was all about competition and survival of the fittest, which Darwin definitely did say. This led in turn (through a rather questionable logic chain) to the idea of "nature red in tooth and claw," which became the American standard for how evolution worked and how society is notionally supposed to work

    (Note I'm oversimplifying here to save space, as there are whole books about this stuff. For one thing, I'm leaving out the whole trustbusting phenomenon that ended the American Gilded Age. That plays into competition theory too).

    Getting back to the biology. We're a century on from this mess. And it is a mess, because ironically, the anarchists were more right than the capitalists in this case, but that didn't stop capitalism from sitting on the science of symbiosis for a century. Worse it still strongly influences what people learn about evolution in the US, to the degree they learn anything at all, so most Americans imprint on a badly distorted view of how the world is supposed to work.

    Competition does obviously happen, but it's fucking hard to show, to the point where most ecology textbooks trot out the Tribolium flour beetle experiments from the late 1940s. Symbioses, which include everything from mutualism to parasitism, are ubiquitous and comparatively easy to show. The notion that your body has more bacterial cells than eukaryotic human cells is merely one example that turns out to be normal for most vertebrates and probably most animals. And plants. A majority of Earth's eukaryotic species are thought to be parasites (perhaps 70%, per Parasite Rex), and if you add in bacteria and viruses, that proportion soars. Long story drastically shortened, the idea that mutualism and other only occasionally violent relationships is normal is more-or-less correct. Indeed, my favorite, recent book on the subject (Thompson's Relentless Evolution) shows that interspecific competition can be treated as one of a panoply of nine possible organismal interactions, most of which are symbiotic or mutualistic.

    So is FUBAR007 right that ""International relations are anarchic and Darwinist?" Yes, but in almost precisely the opposite way than he meant. Most international relations are not explicitly or implicitly violent--they're trade relations, immigration and emigration, all that boring stuff that violence eclipses because it's so eye- and mind-catching.

    This doesn't mean that war doesn't matter. It means instead that war is unusual, both in nature and in human civilization. Unfortunately, this doesn't lead to the implication that everything will be okay if every side disarms. One of the disquieting things about true mutualisms is that, when examined closely, they're often based on mutually assured destruction pacts, where each side can rapidly and effectively punish the other for violating the parameters of the relationship (Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation goes into the tit-for-tat logic that can work very effectively in long-term interactions). That's why our guts have so many immune cells in them--to keep the bacteria that digest our food from digesting us. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of parasitic relationships is that one partner can take advantage of the other without serious penalty.

    To me, this kind of "mutually assured destruction" pact is likely to be a reasonable way to run international relations. So long as both sides can effectively stop or punish the other for messing with them, they can also trade and interact as much as they want within agreed upon bounds. I'd go so far as to say that this is also one (not necessarily the only!) way to form an effective government.

    I'd also add that effective punishment is not just violence. Effective non-cooperation (a form of nonviolence) can be just as devastating as violent opposition. The more important part of nonviolence, to me at least, is to foreground the vast majority of possible interactions and relationships that don't involve destroying people, putting violence in its proper and much smaller place in human affairs, and breaking the addiction that weapons and violence have in our minds. I'll admit that I'm in the minority in this view.

    Finally yes, nature frequently runs Red Queen coevolutionary races between symbionts, predators, and parasites. We've got arms races in civilization too, and if more nonviolent activists had a clue, they'd be doing Red Queen races as well to stay relevant, not just treasuring Gandhi and King.

    Here endeth the sermon.

    2163:

    sleepingroutine
    Um ... err ... Wikipedia Article on the Russo-Georgian War of 2008
    Russia invaded Georgia & displaced thousands of people, leaving behind two puppet states.
    How nice.
    Russia, now, appears to be acting just like the USA did 1910 - 32: Invading weak neighbours, bullying them mercilessly, conducting coups & take-overs, whilst lying their arses off.
    Back in the USA/SSR ( Thank you, Beatles ) particularly with Trumpolini, there appears to be a regression to this former model - again .. "how nice" - not.

    2164:

    sigh US invasion and conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq.

    Can we agree that there's not a lot of niceness out there, esp. when the wrong-wingers gain control of a government?

    2165:

    whitroth
    I should have added the Shrub to the mix, as well as Trumpolini ....

    2166:

    So is FUBAR007 right that ""International relations are anarchic and Darwinist?" Yes, but in almost precisely the opposite way than he meant. Most international relations are not explicitly or implicitly violent--they're trade relations, immigration and emigration, all that boring stuff that violence eclipses because it's so eye- and mind-catching.

    "Anarchic" is a reference to international relations theory, specifically structural realism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neorealism_(international_relations)

    I used "Darwinist" in its colloquial, idiomatic sense as a shorthand for brutal "survival of the fittest" as laypeople understand it, not the technical meaning from biological theory that you describe.

    The gist is that international relations doesn't work like individual human interactions within a society of norms and laws. There is no world government. There is no global social contract. There is no single, global actor with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. There's a constellation of treaties and international organizations that amount to handshake agreements. The UN is a toothless tiger by design; it can't compel the U.S.--or Russia or China--to behave.

    In the absence of a world government, the strongest countries shape and enforce what system there is. Since 1991, that's been the U.S. acting as a hegemon. Had the Cold War somehow gone the other way, it'd be the Soviet Union. In the coming decades, it's either going to be China or, more likely, a return to the pre-World War I status quo of multiple, competing regional powers.

    It means instead that war is unusual, both in nature and in human civilization.

    To be blunt, bullshit. See: human history, Neolithic to present.

    Being a pacifist, you want war to be unusual. It'd make for a lovely world if it was, but it's not.

    To achieve meaningful change, we have to deal with human nature as it is, not the way we wish it was. Most people are not rational, utility-maximizing, pacifist auto-didacts. There will always be stupidity. There will always be envy and resentment. There will always be violence. There will always be sociopaths. Any viable concept of social and political reform has to account for these elements and figure out how to manage them.

    2167:

    To be blunt, bullshit. See: human history, Neolithic to present.

    Who said I'm a pacifist? I value nonviolent action for the same reason that the people behind IQ45 do. And the Russians do, and the Chinese do, and the NSA does. Properly done, it works extremely well, sometimes in ways and places that violence does not work.

    I'm going to hold up a mirror to your attitude to make a point: you seem to be operating under the notion that, unless there is no war anywhere on the planet, therefore the state of humans is to be at war. Perhaps you got that from Heinlein's Starship Troopers?

    Hopefully you're not involved in a war right now personally. If so, that makes my point: most people, right now, are not at war. Most people, at most times, are not at war, and this includes the periods of both world wars. Therefore, I can equally, and with greater justification, claim that peace is the norm for human interactions and war is a rare aberration.

    Obviously we're both over-simplifying to make our points, but the bias towards violence is the real point, one that has been brought up by scholars of nonviolent action.

    If one looks at coverage of both violent insurrections and nonviolent movements, there's a fairly stark divide. When violent insurrections fail (as they do about 75% of the time), the news is normally that so-and-so has been defeated. When nonviolent protests fail, the reporting is generally that nonviolence does not work.

    Can you see the difference? There is a systemic bias, particularly in the US, to glorify violence and denigrate any other approach. You can choose to go with that bias or not. But if you do, here's the math behind it.

    The numbers actually say that nonviolence works about twice as often as violence does, when used for comparable ends: 52%-26%. (https://www.amazon.com/Why-Civil-Resistance-Works-Nonviolent-ebook/dp/B005SZEEXQ/). You can even see it in the US, where we had a violent Republican movement and a nonviolent democratic movement in 2020. Look who won that round. Or you can look at business strikes. The normal way unions deal with failed negotiations is to strike, not to assassinate the owners. Why not? It succeeds twice as often (or more, since assassination campaigns tend to backfire spectacularly).

    That's why I'm paying close attention to nonviolence. And in this context, you might want to ask yourself who wants you to think that violent solutions are normal. And why. Especially when violent actions normally fail twice as often.

    2168:

    Another recent example; word went out on communications forums used by self-described antifascists and allies to stay away from the Trump rally in Washington, DC on Jan 6, 2021. (Note: I haven't tracked who were the people who were putting out this advice.)
    Their absence frustrated Trump's riot organizers, who were presuming that there would be counter-protests and that they could turn them physically violent.
    The riot became pro-Trump rioters vs capital police, with the legislators and their staffs scrambling to relative safety, rather than also including Fox(Newsmax/OAN)-news-videogenic street fights between "patriots" and "antifa communists"/anarchists.
    And, along with the rioters, the riot organizers (perhaps including Mr. D.J. Trump) are now in legal jeopardy.

    2169:

    On a community level violence has been declining for centuries, obviously with some ups and downs. Murder rates are in decline, violent crime is in decline.

    Additionally, war is in decline. Despite the headlines, the trend is downwards. Fewer wars with fewer people dying in fewer places on average compared to previous decades and centuries.

    something which has been occurring in parallel is increasing usage of mainly carbon-based energy resources, and if we should happen to be entering a period of declining access to petroleum energy, we may be faced with predictable reductions in the earth's human carrying capacity (fertilizer needs natgas, tractors require diesel etc.)

    it's not entirely sure that those trends wouldn't go into reverse in such circumstances

    2170:

    Greg Tingey @2166:

    Russia invaded Georgia & displaced thousands of people

    We prefer to use term "peace enforcement". Peace has been enforced 3 more times since then - fortunately, it didn't require a major displacement. Unfortunately, all of these incidents are direct and undeniable consequences of NATO expansionism.

    Russia, now, appears to be acting just like the USA did 1910 - 32: Invading weak neighbours, bullying them mercilessly, conducting coups & take-overs, whilst lying their arses off.

    More important question, has anything changed since then?

    2171:

    I don't put much faith in trends, because the range of deadliness of weapons has grown.

    And that's actually a critical point: if we enter a period of resource collapse, tribes won't be running around with assault rifles for very long, because no one will be making ammo. Pretty soon, it will be muzzle-loaders, arrows, and similar.

    But that's not the trend that really matters, unfortunately: what's really changed are things like sanitation, availability of clean water, and increases in medical skill. Many American soldiers who were blown up in Iraq and Afghanistan are currently functioning civilians with multiple prostheses. In previous wars they would simply have died. And only recently has death from violence in war started to compete with death from disease.

    If civilization collapses, there won't be as much clean water or medical aid available, at least until populations fall low enough that the rivers and springs start running cleaner. That's going to make a huge difference in the lethality of warfare, but not due to combat.

    2172:

    "something which has been occurring in parallel is increasing usage of mainly carbon-based energy resources, and if we should happen to be entering a period of declining access to petroleum energy, we may be faced with predictable reductions in the earth's human carrying capacity (fertilizer needs natgas, tractors require diesel etc.)

    it's not entirely sure that those trends wouldn't go into reverse in such circumstances"

    Of course it isn't clear, nor is it clear that the world will collapse into homicidal mania the first time the lights flicker. What is clear is that war has been declining in frequency for centuries. It isn't gone, but most people will never experience war.

    Yes, there is likely to be some conflict as the world shifts out of carbon (one way or another). There was plenty of conflict about carbon. Some large scale military global or regional hegemons might have tantrums and blow some (more) shit up if they see their power waning.

    Things are likely to get difficult in the next 50 years, but of course they were very difficult in the last 50. The 50 before that were awful, and began with a pandemic on the heels of a brutal war. Etc. etc.

    As much as war and conflict dominate our attention in so many ways, they are not the default human activity.

    2173:

    whitroth @ 2137: "What's good for General Bullmose is good for the USA" (L'il Abner comic strip)

    General Bullmose was a parody of Charles Erwin Wilson, President of General Motors - nominated by President Eisenhower to be Secretary of Defense in 1953. Wilson chose NOT to divest himself of his General Motors Stock when he was nominated.

    During his (closed) confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Wilson was asked by Senator Robert Hendrickson of New Jersey:

    ... if a situation did arise where you had to make a decision which was extremely adverse to the interests of your stock and General Motors Corp. or any of these other companies, or extremely adverse to the company, in the interests of the United States Government, could you make that decision?

    Wilson's response was he could make that decision because he didn't believe such a conflict could exist:

    I cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. Our contribution to the Nation is quite considerable.

    Because the hearings were not open to the public, Wilson's statement was widely misquoted, by Al Capp among others.

    2174:

    Hmmmm ... that should be General Bullmoose.

    2175:

    Yes, there is likely to be some conflict as the world shifts out of carbon (one way or another).

    you say that like there were some straightforward alternative for it to shift into

    i haven't seen much evidence that a renewable energy system can be sustained without an underlying petroleum economy to support it it, for example

    doesn't sound like nuclear adds up either

    2176:

    sleepingroutine
    We prefer to use term "peace enforcement". - Oh, rather like "Liberating Sudetenland", eh?

    OTOH - I get the strong impression of overstated sabre-rattling, especially by the US over Ukraine. I really do hope Putin is sensible & that when the "joint exercises" with the thug in bullying charge of Belarus are over, that it all quietens down.
    We shall have to see.

    2177:

    sleepingroutine: Unfortunately, all of these incidents are direct and undeniable consequences of NATO expansionism.

    Or in the immortal words of Oliver Hardy, "Now look what you made me do!".

    2178:

    This is the old "Oil Drum" EROEI doomer argument. It is nonsense.

    The energy surplus on fission is far, far better than on any fossil fuel, and every part of the extraction chain can be electrified. The energy surplus on Fast Breeders is another couple of orders of magnitude better than that. This is an existence proof that we are not going to die from that problem.

    I am not saying we are going to survive long term, there are some whoppers of real problems out there, and the present trend of organized manufacture of dissent via disinformation makes all of them worse, but no, we are not going to have society collapse from lack of energy.

    2179:

    Sorry, there is a lot in this comment, and while for me there are just too many wild non-sequiturs to grapple with, I still find it encouraging. The reason is that you're expressing an understanding that the various positions we're talking about here all imply, or at least take a position in relation to, a telos, or at least the sense of one. You're clearly articulating such a teleological sense when you talk about the progressivism you perceive in my earlier post (I'll own up to that as clumsy language rather than as a worldview thing, but don't really care enough to offer any evidence).

    To be clear, I don't think you're doing badly. You've come out with some "credo" statements in this comment, and many of them are things I'd probably go along with if they were put in a way I liked better (and some of them are close enough already). But you're also poking at some things at a "well duh" level for me and I think some here.

    2180:

    The energy surplus on Fast Breeders is another couple of orders of magnitude better than that. This is an existence proof that we are not going to die from that problem.

    well people keep saying that, but i'm skeptical that in a contracting petroleum economy we're going to find the surplus to throw up the fleet of breeders we'd need to keep the lights on

    also if breeders are that great why isn't everyone falling over themselves to build them

    2181:

    "Now look what you made me do!".

    Nicely put :)

    2182:

    On the good v bad in human thing, an interesting overview from one side of the subject is Human Kind by Rutger Bregman. It is a little pop-sci but it's thesis is that we beat the Neanderthal by being better at co-operating as they had larger brains and greater strength. He applies this to a more optimistic view of humanity - he calls us Homo puppy as domesticated animals tend to have longer childhoods, exhibit features and behaviours that are less aggressive ...

    2183:

    Sure, energy shifting will be hard and uneven, and almost certainly not fast enough.

    I'm currently noodling on a short story about 20 years in the future, trying to imagine how energy shifts, supply chain collapses and intensifying climate change affect life a particular economy and locality (mine).

    Costs for many things will go up, a reality that usually leads to demand shifting and import replacement. It will also likely lead to reduced quality of life as currently defined. Fewer or no long-distance trips or cheap imported goods.

    What is much less likely, in my opinion, is some kind of global war. Western Rome was not overrun and slaughtered by hordes of 'barbarians'. It collapsed under its own weight in changing circumstances and some opportunistic groups were able to take control.

    2184:

    On the good v bad in human thing, an interesting overview from one side of the subject is Human Kind by Rutger Bregman. It is a little pop-sci but it's thesis is that we beat the Neanderthal by being better at co-operating as they had larger brains and greater strength. He applies this to a more optimistic view of humanity - he calls us Homo puppy as domesticated animals tend to have longer childhoods, exhibit features and behaviours that are less aggressive

    For various reasons, I've been looking at Denisovans and Neanderthals a bit recently. The following isn't to criticize you, it's to point out some interesting bits about human nature and racism.

    The racist part is the basic notion that a) we (especially white males, which I am) are better than Neanderthals, because we're alive and running the world, while they disappeared around 40,000 years ago, and b) our superiority can be told from their appearance as reconstructed from their bones. I mean, they look so different, that had to be why they disappeared, right?

    Well, not really. We've got Neanderthal genomes. We've also got genomes from wild animals and their domesticated cousins, notably dogs and wolves. We have a pretty good idea for the genetic basis of dog sociability versus wolfish wildness. The same genes and mutations show up in modern humans as a known defect, but it's not widespread, so we're not domesticated dogsbodies to wolfish Neanderthals. More importantly, non-(modern)-African humans all have a dilute mix of Neanderthal DNA in us, and it's not the same genes in every person AFAIK. There's no evidence that African people are better or worse than non-African people, despite centuries of racist ideology saying they were (whoops!) inferior to us Neanderthal hybrids. And that contradiction makes the point: there's no good genetic evidence that Neanderthals were genetically inferior to us.

    So why'd they go away as a distinct population?

    Well, Neanderthals seem to have disappeared ca. 40,000 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction), except for the population that maybe hung out around Gibraltar until 24,000 years ago, (That's 16,000 years, if you're counting). Anyway, the Phlegraean Fields, a biggish volcano that underlies the Bay of Naples, blew 500 km3 of magma ca. 39,300 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlegraean_Fields). Since Neanderthal populations were in the thousands to low tens of thousands, it might be that, through sheer bad luck, a majority of the population got wiped out by that eruption. Oh, if you dip into Gorham's cave, the dating on the Neanderthal layer is iffy--the range is 33,000-24,000 years.

    So simple bad luck is a possibility. But is it a reasonable possibility?

    Let me introduce you to a couple of characters: mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam. You've probably met these constructs. Mitochondrial Eve is thought to be the last common ancestor of all living humans (mitochondria descend maternally). Y-chromosomal Adam comes from the fact that the Y-chromosome doesn't cross over with the X-chromosome during meiosis, so it's inherited straight, but only by men, so the last common ancestor of all living men was this Adam. Were they a couple in the Garden of Eden? Not exactly. Mitochondrial Eve would have lived around 150,000 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve), while Y-Chromosomal Adan would have lived around 200,000-300,000 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam). And neither of these show up in Neanderthal genomes, because they split off hundreds of thousands of years earlier.

    Anyway, there are a couple of takeaways: one is that other humans were unambiguously alive when our last common genetic ancestors were walking the Earth, and all the descendants of those other people are gone, either in huge disasters or little ones. And perhaps such disasters happened more than once? Hard to tell, but fairly reasonable when you realize that having a planet with tens or hundreds of thousands of humans on it appears to be a phenomenon of the last 10,000 years or so. There's not good evidence of a lot of humans alive at any point in the ice ages.

    So that's the null hypothesis that needs to be dismissed before we talk about Neanderthals: they weren't different from us in any phyiscal or psychological way that really matters. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and got wiped out.

    As for sociability, Tyson Yunkaporta wrote in Sand Talk, it depends on how you interpret it. Neanderthals might have been "primitive" because they apparently got in close with the megafauna they ate, in that both male and female skeletons show a pattern of healed broken bones that's most reminiscent of rodeo clowns, who normally get gored and trampled while distracting bulls in the arena. Primitive and antisocial? Well, it's not clear how you kill an aurochs or mammoth without getting close, whether you're a male or female(!), so it might not be stupidly primitive, so much as unavoidable during that time period.

    But the more important point is that their skeletons showed patterns of serious, healed bone breaks. As Yunkaporta pointed out, that shows both that they took care of each other while they healed, and that they had enough food and other resources (this in an ice age) that having a broken leg or a bunch of busted ribs wasn't automatic death sentence, especially because other people would care for you for an extended time. That doesn't seem very primitive or anti-social.

    So maybe they essentially us, and most of them died when they had the bad luck to be near a major volcanic eruption? It's not a cool story, because it doesn't play to our racism or egos. Worse, it suggests were that our dominion over this planet is more tenuous than we want it to be. But it really could be true. At the very least, it has to be disproved before we can honestly speculate about biological correlates.

    2185:

    I'm currently noodling on a short story about 20 years in the future, trying to imagine how energy shifts, supply chain collapses and intensifying climate change affect life a particular economy and locality (mine).

    In the unsolicited advice garbage bin, here are some thoughts that might be less than totally useless:

    --The building sand shortage might turn out to be really interesting. I'm currently reading the environmental documents for a proposed sand mine. They're only planning on extracting sand for 10-20 years. In the past, sand mines were contracted for 50-100 years. This might signal that there's a real shortage, meaning that when people plan for a massive rebuilding phase to deal with climate change, basic materials like concrete and cement might not be available. Vince Beiser's World in a Grain has some global reporting on the sand problem, if it's relevant.

    The 2021 Pritzker architectural prize went to Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal (pdf link) (NY Times Link), not for building cool new buildings, but for designing affordable new spaces in existing buildings, especially boring ones. This gets labeled "restorative architecture." If we're long on stupid buildings and short on materials to tear the stupid down and build smart, then restorative architecture might be what we have to do. Any similarities with post-classic Maya cities are, erm, strictly coincidental.

    In a related vein, I've got to get my roof rehabilitated this spring. I had a fun conversation with the contractor, because it turns out he and I share a similar, very jaundiced, view of the roofs installed on homes for the last few decades. They're very artistic, but dysfunctional for solar panels (my perspective), prone to leaks (our shared perspective) and short-lived (his perspective as a roofer). He much prefers the old, simple roofs, because properly cared for, they can easily last for a century or more. All these complex lines, dormers, etc. mean that water and debris tend to accumulate in places where they can rot when it rains and catch embers when a firestorm showers the house, thereby burning the house down. They're expensive to build and expensive to maintain, and they're the norm for house construction at the moment (/end rant). This is just one example of stupid buildings. But if you talk to the developers, they'll start ranting that they know how to build what sells, they've been doing it for decades, don't tell them what to build (from real experience). And if you talk to the architects, they build eye candy first and function second, and the latter only if reminded to. And so it goes.

    Anyway, have fun. Hope your writing process sparks joy or something.

    2186:

    And this brings us back around to climate change, because some of the scenarios potentially put humanity in that position of being just one more natural disaster away from extinction.

    2187:

    Mitochondrial Eve is thought to be the last common ancestor of all living humans (mitochondria descend maternally).

    I don't think that's quite correct. Other women alive at that time also have living descendants — just there was a son in the chain somewhere. Mitochondrial Eve was the oldest common ancestor you can trace back daughter-mother-grandmother-etc, that's all.

    2188:

    As a matter of fact, my SO and I were planning to go down on the 6th of Jan last year, and then Mayor Bowser of DC was all over the media begging people to not come down.

    She was hoping to avoid a problem.

    2189:

    I don't think that's quite correct. Other women alive at that time also have living descendants — just there was a son in the chain somewhere. Mitochondrial Eve was the oldest common ancestor you can trace back daughter-mother-grandmother-etc, that's all.

    Yes and no. You're quite (potentially!) correct about the nuclear genome. I'm not sure we have the data to know, one way or another on that. We do, apparently, all have the mitochondria from one woman. That's the weird part, and it really does suggest there are some severe bottlenecks in the history of our deep past.

    Note that it's entirely possible that modern humans outcompeted Neanderthals, after living around them in Europe for, erm, 14,000 years. The problem I'm pointing to is that we seem to lack the data to dismiss the neutral hypothesis that Neanderthals were just like us within a rounding error, and they went extinct as a distinct lineage through sheer bad luck.

    2190:

    then Mayor Bowser of DC was all over the media begging people to not come down. Ah, interesting; missed that. I have heard reports (and have seen some caps) of calls for antifa types to not show up (for 6 Jan 2021).

    2191:

    Forget about material shortages.

    What will matter is labor shortages.

    Ask yourself:

    How many American truck drivers are Boomers (or when was the last time you saw a young truck driver)?

    How many have already retired (a process accelerated by Covid-19, 3 million Boomers retired early last year blowing a hole in the labor force that will take a decade to fill - they were mostly those people who could not work from home like truck drivers) and how many will be retiring over the next decade?

    And why have so few Millennials taken jobs as truckers?

    How do we fix this now permanent shortage of truck drivers?

    We can't.

    Which means demographically driven inflation is here to stay

    At least until we perfect and accepts robot trucks on our nation's highways.

    Or accept massive numbers of immigrants to do trucking jobs.

    2192:

    "Note that it's entirely possible that modern humans outcompeted Neanderthals"

    Modern humans (Cro-Magnon) + domesticated wolf dogs

    For the first time in the planet's history two apex predator's joined forces augmenting each others' abilities: human brains, tools, eyesight, projectile weapons combined with the dog's scent ability, hearing and speed.

    Neanderthal (who had bigger brains and stronger bodies), Denisovan, or whatever never had a chance.

    https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674975415

    2193:

    also if breeders are that great why isn't everyone falling over themselves to build them?

    I think we're stuck in a local minima.

    There's plenty of uranium, and it's really cheap. So there's no incentive to build a breeder which will be more expensive (even if it's only slightly) and more finicky to operate (even if it's only slightly) so that future generations can enjoy plentiful energy. I think it's patently clear than no one gives the slightest toss about the future people.

    So there's virtually no design work done on them, none built, so there's no experience built up with the care and feeding of them. Nor is there much information built up about how they can go wrong and how to make them better in future iterations. So conventional reactors keep getting better, and the difference between the two gets wider.

    It's a self reinforcing situation.

    Eventually (around about 1980) it will become essential that we start construction of thousands of breeder reactors, but we can't, because they can't compete with the cheap simple designs based on marine reactors from the 50's. That's particularly true for the first 1000 or so, and thinking beyond the first thousand is physically impossible for most people. And anyway, fossil fuel is still reasonably plentiful and stupid cheap, so what if it will kill lots of people as yet unborn. Future people can get stuffed. So we don't. We can't build thousands of normal ones because there would be no fuel. So we put off the construction for later. Again and again. Until its far to late to even design and test the reactors we need in time, let alone start building them (around 2005). Which is where we find ourselves now.

    2194:

    Greg Tingey @2179:

    Oh, rather like "Liberating Sudetenland", eh?

    Somebody has to learn better from history, since occupation of Sudetenland has been a joint operation perfumed by both German and Polish regimes, and followed by decisive action of Hungary in Slovakia, another known friend of a peaceful world.

    It is also worth noting that reaction of "democratic world" at the time is better described as "room temperature" since any active embargoes has been enforced only after the start of war.

    Paul @2180:

    Or in the immortal words of Oliver Hardy, "Now look what you made me do!".

    Absolutely correct, as I noted @1910, this has been the most fundamental principle behind NATO expansionism in Europe.

    2195:

    The BN series design philosophy works fine if it is an actual crisis.

    In short: The problem with sodium cooled fast reactors is that sodium catches fire at the drop of a hat. Especially on contact with water. Building a steam generator which is reliably leak proof is basically impossible.

    Solution: Inner loop has a heat exchanger with a secondary loop. The steam generators are heated by the secondary loop and are separated with each having its own fire bunker and shutoff-valves. When. Not if. When, one catches fire, you kill the valves to that one and shovel sand. No need to even turn the reactor off.

    There are better fast reactor designs on paper. But we can definitely build BNs. They exist. Thus, if it is that or power shortages...

    2196:

    The Russians are pouring concrete and bending metal on the BREST-300 fast-spectrum reactor which is lead-cooled. This eliminates the fire problems with sodium although it introduces some neutron economy issues and engineering problems that have been generally worked out for sodium-cooled fast reactors.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor)

    If it works out there are plans for a BREST-1200 (1200MWe) reactor, still speculative though (see also the BN-1200 concept designs).

    2197:

    Modern humans (Cro-Magnon) + domesticated wolf dog. Neanderthal (who had bigger brains and stronger bodies), Denisovan, or whatever never had a chance. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674975415

    Alas, a cool story from 2015, apparently slain by the science of 2021:

    Dog domestication and the dual dispersal of people and dogs into the Americas

    Abstract: "Advances in the isolation and sequencing of ancient DNA have begun to reveal the population histories of both people and dogs. Over the last 10,000 y, the genetic signatures of ancient dog remains have been linked with known human dispersals in regions such as the Arctic and the remote Pacific. It is suspected, however, that this relationship has a much deeper antiquity, and that the tandem movement of people and dogs may have begun soon after the domestication of the dog from a gray wolf ancestor in the late Pleistocene. Here, by comparing population genetic results of humans and dogs from Siberia, Beringia, and North America, we show that there is a close correlation in the movement and divergences of their respective lineages. This evidence places constraints on when and where dog domestication took place. Most significantly, it suggests that dogs were domesticated in Siberia by ∼23,000 y ago, possibly while both people and wolves were isolated during the harsh climate of the Last Glacial Maximum. Dogs then accompanied the first people into the Americas and traveled with them as humans rapidly dispersed into the continent beginning ∼15,000 y ago."

    Now looking at the wikipedia page, I don't expect this to be the last word. One basic point is that there's more dog/wolf diversity in East Asia than in Europe, so other things equal, we'd expect that to be their center of origin. Another is that we have better archaeological evidence from Europe, and while there is cool stuff like the canids from Belgian Goyet caves (Goyet is at 31,700 ybp), they aren't on the lineage of modern dogs. Maybe an extinct domestic lineage? Those do happen.

    Problem is, Neanderthals mostly disappeared from Europe and Asia at ca. 40,000 ybp, so there's an 8,000 year gap between the effect (Neanderthals disappearing) and the cause (canid domestication).

    We've also got lots of cool cave art from the period after the Neanderthals: hundreds of bison and mammoth pictures, cave lions, and so far, one wolf picture. So if we believe dogs had been domesticated for over 10,000 years by, say, 30,000 ybp, we're stuck with the problem that the available bones look a lot like wolves (weird wolves, but wolves nonetheless) AND more importantly, there's no artwork showing humans hunting with dogs, even though there's a fair amount of artwork that shows quite a lot of animals realistically.

    Since I dearly love symbioses and I figure that the dog-human relationship easily qualifies as one, my first thought was naturally that modern, symbiophilic humans wiped out every hominid that couldn't tolerate living in sym. Unfortunately, the dates don't match up, and Neanderthals mostly (or entirely) disappeared millennia before humans unambiguously hooked up with dogs.

    So cool theory, but the evidence doesn't surpass the null hypothesis that the Neanderthals died of bad luck and were replaced by moderns migrating in later.

    As for the Denisovans, we don't even know which fossils are their skulls. Homo longi??? We've just got scattered bones with DNA identification. The most recent date I can find for a Denisovan bone is 51,600 ybp. Almost certainly they lived longer in Southeastern Asia, but those fossils, if they exist at all, apparently haven't been found. Or if they have been found (looking at Red Deer Cave), no one's managed to extract DNA from them.

    Sorry about that.

    2198:

    " I had a fun conversation with the contractor, because it turns out he and I share a similar, very jaundiced, view of the roofs installed on homes for the last few decades. "

    Did the conversation include materials, in particular metal? Metal roofs have been getting increasingly popular in the US and would seem to be somewhat fire-resistant (design considerations aside). And reflectivity/absorptivity/emissivity can be adjusted by coatings to help with solar heating.

    2199:

    Did the conversation include materials, in particular metal? Metal roofs have been getting increasingly popular in the US and would seem to be somewhat fire-resistant (design considerations aside). And reflectivity/absorptivity/emissivity can be adjusted by coatings to help with solar heating.

    Oddly enough, it wasn't about materials but about shapes. Most of the houses around here have Spanish/Mexican inflected tile roofs (usually concrete dyed to look like terra cotta). I can't say that I've seen a metal roof on a house in town. I imagine the local building inspectors could get rather whiny about having a metal roof under a 30 kWh/day solar array, not that it's unsafe or anything.

    No, he and I were bemoaning the complexity of modern roofs, with all their dormers and gables that point every direction of the compass. All the valleys between the separate roofs are places where water can seep in and debris can lodge. While they are cool-looking, oddly enough they're not terribly cool, because they aren't aligned to either catch the sun (ridgeline runs E/W, with a big-ass solar array on the south side) or to avoid it (ridgeline runs N/S, with a big-ass solar array on the west side).

    2200:

    But we can definitely build BNs. They exist.

    That seems to be rather overstating the situation. Wikipedia says:

    In 2015, after several minor delays, problems at the recently completed BN-800 indicated a redesign was needed. Construction of the BN-1200 was put on "indefinite hold",[1] and Rosenergoatom has stated that no decision to continue will be made before 2019

    I me that sounds like they built 2, they weren't as good as expected and when the question arose, "should we build more like that, but bigger?" the answer is "hell no, not even more the same let alone bigger". Maybe they'll work it out, but it's clearly at the early beta test end of the design process, and building 50-100,000 of them isn't on the cards. Certainly not in 8 years.

    2201:

    Middle son is a "roof plumber", but he's currently foreman at a roofing company. They do everything from granny flats (tiny houses) up to shopping centres. He passionately hates tiles. He likes metal rooves. On the big jobs a truck comes that has a big roll of metal. The metal goes through rollers to make whatever shape you want, in whatever length you need. So there's no joints.

    There's no issue with putting solar on a metal roof. Thousands and thousands of them within a few kilometres of where I am right now.

    2202:

    Your comment made me check, and there actually are multiple metal roof contractors in San Diego. Turns out that, yet again, my imagination was insufficient. Thanks!*

    *Incidentally, I know perfectly well that metal roofs can be compatible with solar if the solar installers aren't idiots.

    2203:

    I have a metal roof and solar... I didn't realise there was even a rumour that it couldn't be done. Weird.

    2204:

    bemoaning the complexity of modern roofs, with all their dormers and gables that point every direction of the compass.

    They're still building those in Sydney today. Allegedly they're not allowed to build black roofs any more, but we're still in the pipeline stage where almost all new builds still have them. When I got my tile roof redone I went with corrugated iron because it's cheap and it works. For 20 years, anyway, by which time I expect it will have been knocked down and replaced with a house. Or eaten by hordes of escaped slaves/zombies/woman eating plants, or whatever other horror stalks the local hellscape.

    2205:

    Or pay people the right amount of money for them to imagine being a trucker is a good idea.

    2206:

    Incidentally, I know perfectly well that metal roofs can be compatible with solar if the solar installers aren't idiots.

    Metal roofs are actually a better way to go with or without solar. Without solar you're looking (if done properly) at a much longer life than asphalt shingles. (Don't know about those weird tile thingies as I've never lived near them.) But initial costs tend to drive such decisions by consumers.

    With solar the advantage gets bigger. The metal is better at surviving and not leaking under the panels. I keep wondering how much fun re-roofing an asphalt shingle roof that's under a solar array.

    This from the various architect / contractors I know.

    2207:

    In a related vein, I've got to get my roof rehabilitated this spring. I had a fun conversation with the contractor, because it turns out he and I share a similar, very jaundiced, view of the roofs installed on homes for the last few decades. ...

    Without re-quoting everything.

    In the US the general population tends to equate complexity with "better". So all of those outside wall "jogs" make people think their house is more upscale than those without. Back in the late 60s my father did an analysis and came to the conclusion that every exterior wall jog (90 degrees) in a single story above average house cost $200. On a house where the total cost was under $20K. And that was if you could keep the roof line simple.

    Most of the roofs on houses these days is done via a computer algorithm designed to generate a least cost truss system that can be factory built then trucked in. This is cheaper than on site rafter built even for one off situations due to the labor reductions. But especially when the outside wall lines don't allow a simple roof line. So you get the crazy things you talk about with no attic space due to the maze of trusses. And the dormers, many times, don't even have a room behind them. (See previous paragraph.)

    As to the over all design, going back to, well, forever, people buying houses buy the eye candy over the structure. My father built houses that had solid bones and would last but people would buy the competition with crap plumbing and carpet but a really impressive chandelier in the dining room. Over and over again. And I've not seen anything different over the decade to change my mind about what most people buy. In my neighborhood and the surrounding area, the tear down replacements are full of outside wall jogs, 2 ft roof extensions for no purpose, dormers with no rooms, etc...that are selling for well over $1mil. And will have huge maintenance costs 10+ years out but visually sell sell sell. (Don't get me started about electrical outlet and networking jack placements.)

    Oh, well.

    As to architects, I have gotten most of my income from such folks for decades. They fall into camps. The ones you describe are not well thought of by the other camps. And such thoughts go in every direction. You can usually tell what kind of house they will design if you find out what school they graduated from.

    2208:

    Or pay people the right amount of money for them to imagine being a trucker is a good idea.

    I know this is a common theme here. And I'm sure there are a lot of truckers who don't make "enough" money.

    But there are also those who make lots of money.

    As someone who's bumped into the edge of such folks a few times I keep wondering what the difference is.

    2209:

    Don't know about those weird tile thingies as I've never lived near them.

    The house I grew up in has ceramic tiles. It was built about 1910. In the 1970's my parents took the roof off, built a second story, extended it the back, and put it back using the old tiles plus a few new ones due to the increased roof area. My mother sold it in 2009, at about a century old, and it was fine. Google earth shows the roof looking the same now with the slightly mottled look where the "new" 50 year old tiles don't quite colour match the 110 year old tiles.

    They're not perfect, one of my mum's friends had her house hit by hail. Every tile smashed and fell through the rafters to the ceiling, where they piled up until the weight collapsed the ceiling.

    But no one uses ceramic tiles anymore. Now they're cement. My current house is about 40 years old and the cement tiles are starting to split.

    2210:

    I entirely agree - it was poor language to say beat; perhaps out-survived is better.

    2211:

    Way back in the 80's I had a friend who was a lorry driver. He delivered new cars. Funnily enough these were treated as a perishable good in that they had to be delivered within three days of getting off a ship. This meant that the Union had the trucking companies over a barrel (mostly). Some guys working 10 hours a day seven days a week were clearing £100,000 - others working more reasonable hours were making £60k, from overtime mainly. The key of course was it was a highly unionised job.

    The mostly is that the companies used bankruptcy as a means of resetting the clock, and restarting negotiations, and firing union negotiators.

    2212:

    Ceramic tiles (essentially, flat, hard brick) are common in the UK; ours are 90 years old and still going strong. Unless the ceramic tiles you referred to were really flimsy/brittle, that hailstorm would have destroyed most roofing materials.

    2213:

    Metal roofs are Bad News in many climates. Steel rusts, and I don't care if it's galvanised. Aluminium becomes brittle and corrodes. Oh, yes, they are fine for some decades, but centuries? Lead and copper work, but are very expensive and prone to theft.

    2214:

    We lack the data to dismiss it absolutely, true, but there's a lot of evidence that they were significantly (if not drastically) different.

    2215:

    Perhaps I should have stressed: different not inferior. With two even slightly different populations, a random change (e.g. in the climate) is likely to hit one population harder than the other.

    2216:

    Ceramic tiles (essentially, flat, hard brick) are common in the UK

    In the US those would be called "slate". No matter what the material.

    What is called a tile roof in the US tends to be made of 1/3 or so cylindrical things. Alternating curve up curve down in the horizontal direction. And as other have noted they are made of a lot of different materials.

    Many "slate" roofs over here are made of all kinds of materials these day due to the cost of a real slate roof. Many are made of recycled plastics.

    2217:

    Steel rusts, and I don't care if it's galvanised. Aluminium becomes brittle and corrodes. Oh, yes, they are fine for some decades, but centuries? Lead and copper work, but are very expensive and prone to theft.

    In the US Lead would likely be a hard one due to environmental and OSHA laws.

    Copper is common. I have NEVER heard of anyone stealing such. Way too much effort for the reward I suspect.

    As to life look at this.

    https://www.statefarm.com/simple-insights/residence/metal-roof-pros-and-cons

    State Farm is a bit biased as they want roofs to last a long time so they don't have to pay for replacement after storm and wind damage. 40 to 70 years seems decent.

    Maybe the metallurgy has improved since you last checked. Or most of the US has a better climate for such.

    But back to the original point. All these crazy roof lines make it hard to seal up any roof on such houses for the long term. Here pine needle will accumulate in choke points and the acids they leach are not good for any roof system.

    2218:

    Copper roofing is commonly stolen in the UK. As I said, metal is OK for a few decades, but a lot of tile roofs in the UK are centuries old (mine is 90 years old and as good as new). Yes, most of the USA does have have a better climate for such uses - our nightly condensing atmospheres are hell on timber and metal.

    2219:

    but a lot of tile roofs in the UK are centuries old

    Tile (or what I think we call slate over here) lasts a very long time. But home improvement shows which run into them get caught in a situation where the "fix broken" and/or expansion of the house costs for such far outstrip a good quality metal and/or faux tile new roof.

    As these tend to be in the north eastern quadrant of the country I personally don't bump into them. And I don't remember any in Pittsburgh when I was there. But they may have been on the homes built by the steel industry middle management way back when and I just didn't live or orbit around those homes.

    2220:

    If done right, only after a century or few, and it's SOP to take off the tiles and replace them on the new roof.

    2221:

    Copper roofing is commonly stolen in the UK.

    How is it installed?

    Over here all installations I've seen are what is called a standing seam where shorter sections or even long sections are joined side to side with an interlock that compressed so for practical purposes the roof becomes one large sheet. Taking it off, except for a few trim bits MAYBE, would requires tools a crew and maybe a crane. Seems like the operation would be noticed before they got too far along.

    Now as to copper pipe. The local scrap yards no longer want it from individuals. Too much time wasted talking to police about stolen piping. I've got about 20-30 feet (in aggregate) stacked in a corner plus a lot of fittings that I will likely never use. Anyone need some?

    2222:

    It's done the same way, but maybe our thieves are more ingenious. A battery angle grinder with a metal-cutting wheel cuts it into convenient sections in no time at all.

    2223:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate is a hard metamorphic rock, which splits easily into thin slabs (if you work on a modern laptop, 2 roof slates would have a similar area and volume to your laptop).
    Roofing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tile is made from clay, similar in area but maybe 1/4 as durable.
    Modern "cement tiles" are cheaper, but less durable.

    2224:

    It depends on the tiles. Poor quality ones don't last more than a few years (how do I know?), but decent ones last as long as slate (several centuries). Slate tends to wear at the nail holes due to movement caused by wind, but otherwise doesn't wear out or rot in the lifetime of a human civilisation.

    2225:

    As I said most of what is installed in the US as slate for roofs these days looks like the stone but is made of something else due to weight and cost. I have some real slate stepping tiles. Those things are HEAVY.

    2226:

    "most of what is installed in the US as slate for roofs these days looks like the stone but is made of something else due to weight and cost"

    Ditto for terra cotta roof tiles. I think they're made of some sort of GRC.

    2227:

    We lack the data to dismiss it absolutely, true, but there's a lot of evidence that they were significantly (if not drastically) different.

    On average, certainly they're different from many modern averages, especially in appearance. In terms of cognitive ability? All eight billion living humans contain a fair(ly huge) amount of cognitive diversity. Were the Neanderthals entirely outside that space? The null hypothesis isn't yes (they must have been different, I mean, look at those animalistic faces), but no(they were likely to be weirdos by modern standards, but put them in the weirdo district of any major European city and they'd blend in to the diversity on display).

    If you want to do a deeper dive, have fun with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans.

    A couple of interesting takeaways. First is the racism angle. While Neanderthals were basically white, they're generally seen as animalistic, due to a century of racist anthropology playing politics with their skulls. But here's the weird thing:

    --The population of humans that's the most "modern," with the least admixture of Neanderthal and Denisovan genes, are the blacks in Subsaharan Africa.

    --The population of humans that's the "least modern," with the most admixture of Neanderthal and/or Denisovan genes, are some Philippine Negritos, Melanesians, and (IIRC) Australian Aborigines. Who are also...black.

    --Han Chinese and other East Asians have a bit more Neanderthal DNA than do us Europeans.

    If you're beginning to understand why I'm dumping on the racist angles of Neanderthals, this is why: Aside from racism being bogus bullshit, even if had any use, our European-level Neanderthal heritage dumps us on the lower side of the middle. If we think Neanderthal genes make people more mentally primitive, then white racists have to admit that black Africans are the smartest, most advanced people on the planet. If we try to say that Neanderthal genes were what made the European white race the smartest on the planet, then--whoops, no--the smartest people on the planet are in Papua New Guinea, Australia and nearby. And to be fair, more than one naturalist has said just that after working with the Papuans.

    Still, there are some interesting surprises in the modern human genome. Some geneticists went looking for the opposite: where in the human genome is there no evidence of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA? One big place is the X-chromosome, especially around genes associated with normal testicular development. The researchers use this to posit that Neanderthal-human hybrids may have fathered fewer children, although obviously some of them were our ancestors. I'd add (probably out of ignorance) that it might be possible that Neanderthals and Denisovans simply had fewer children. That could explain why they disappeared, either directly with competition from more fertile and numerous modern humans*, and/or by failure to bounce back after a major disaster.

    Anyway, have fun diving down the rabbit hole if you're interested.

    *Remember, being a dark-skinned tribe newly colonizing Ice Age Europe isn't necessarily conducive to having a lot of offspring surviving childhood. While it's entirely possible that moderns swamped Neanderthals over centuries, I'd say it's also possible that we're seeing two strategies here: Neanderthals didn't have many kids and didn't lose many of those, while moderns had more kids and accepted higher child mortality rates. And it turned out that, as we apparently see later on with agriculture, having more people around does tend to force out the less populous surrounding cultures.

    2228:

    "I can't say that I've seen a metal roof on a house in town."

    Huh. I'm surprised. Metal roofs have been popular in, e.g., San Antonio for a fair number of years. Here's a view on the street where we used to live:

    https://www.google.com/maps/@29.5677329,-98.5518943,3a,71.3y,132.12h,88.36t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sUSoW-MphTzRrFnH9Mrgvlw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

    2229:

    "Fathering fewer children". Interesting thought: I wonder what the median hip size was for Neanderthal women. Wonder if the heads on the infants were large, resulting in more deaths in childbirth.

    2230:

    The strongest evidence is statistical. Despite contact lasting a very long time, there was relatively little genetic or behavioural transfer. That is extremely unlike different groups of humans, and is statistically implausible unless you assume significant differences. Your X chromosome theory is one possible such difference, but there are other plausible explanations for it (*), and it's not impossible that the main differences were behavioural. If so, they would have had to be very stable by comparison with modern human behaviours.

    (*) For example, if homozygote Neanderthal X chromosomes were seriously disadvantageous in the contact of a basically modern genome, the Neanderthal X chromosomes would disappear fast (in paleontological terms).

    2231:

    I can't say that I've seen a metal roof on a house in town.

    As I sit at my desk in the burbs, I can see one out the window that is over 10 years old. And looks about the same as as it did when a year old.

    2232:

    The strongest evidence is statistical. Despite contact lasting a very long time, there was relatively little genetic or behavioural transfer. That is extremely unlike different groups of humans, and is statistically implausible unless you assume significant differences.

    There are a bunch of assumptions bottled in there. One is that there was no genetic transfer within or among Neanderthals. If you look at those articles I cited, they've got genomes from three different Neanderthal areas (Europe, Ukraine, and Altai), and there are three genetically distinct populations, two of which apparently contributed genes to modern humans. The problem is that DNA normally doesn't last, and there aren't a lot of bones, so we're extrapolating from a few data points.

    Second problem is Australia. The Neanderthal genetics papers tend to focus on the 40,000-50,000 year period, and assume that all modern x neanderthal interbreeding happened then. The problem with that idea is that the oldest dated rock shelter in Australia is ca. 65,000 years old, and the available genomes aren't precise enough to show whether the first Australians had any Neanderthal or Denisovan ancestors, or not. If they did, then the interbreeding started considerably earlier. If not...Australia's never been entirely isolated from South East Asia, so it's possible that hybrids swamped out the pure moderns that first colonized the continent. That scenario raises its own issues, of course.

    The third problem is the biggest: behavioral transfer. What material evidence lasts and what doesn't, especially during ice ages? Now that we're getting decent uranium-thorium dating from speleothems in caves (layers formed over old artwork), it turns out that there's a fair amount of abstract cave art that's old enough to have been produced by Neanderthals. Some of it is over 100,000 years old, most of it is younger. That said, we're mostly missing any perishable artifacts, and that's a problem. Fortunately, that's starting to change (a bit of braided string here, a bead-like shell there), but there's not enough evidence to actually test your question.

    That's the point of stressing a neutral model based on bad luck. Neanderthals get pummeled by people trying to understand them based on shreds of evidence mixed with a great deal of ideology. There's rationality in that mix too, of course, but the problem with any rational analysis is garbage in, garbage out, and that's why the ideology is so troublesome.

    That in turn is why I'm being annoying and positing that the Neanderthals died out due to bad luck. It gets at the problems with the current logic that a) they were obviously different, and b) they're no longer here, therefore c) their obvious differences made them inferior, and that's why they're no longer here. Some of the obvious differences disappear with more evidence (which is why I starred it), and the causal chain between the differences that still exist and their disappearance is speculative. Speculating is a fun game to play, of course, but it's worth realizing that we still can't say their disappearance was anything other than bad luck.

    2233:

    "There are a bunch of assumptions bottled in there. One is that there was no genetic transfer within or among Neanderthals."

    Please do not accuse me of statistical incompetence without good reason! No, of course, I was not assuming that - quite the converse, in fact.

    Furthermore, we have a lot more evidence of the lack of behavioural differences than artifacts. Let's skip dogs and consider migratory behaviour. Neanderthals never left their established area (which I agree was large) by much but modern humans spread ruddy everywhere (like Australia!) That includes migration back into Africa. Why didn't Neanderthals?

    "That's the point of stressing a neutral model based on bad luck."

    That is statistically implausible. You don't seem to understand how drastically undirected and directed random walks differ in absorption probabilities, even though there is a theoretically a continuum. The only plausible explanations include the 'bad luck' where the differences between the populations made a small but significant difference to their survival probabilities. No, I can't say what they were.

    2234:

    So far as a neutral model for Europe during the Pleistocene goes, the basic problem is that the entire human population for Europe during the ice ages is around 100,000-400,000 (https://www.pnas.org/content/112/27/8232)* and varies substantially. Moreover, it's differentially packed into Southern Europe.

    Remember, bad luck in this case means the Campi Flegrei supervolcano erupting a bit after 40,000 BCE, and it's the notion that most of the Neanderthals were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and died due to events initiated by the volcanic eruption.

    Europe, by that point, had already been colonized by modern humans since ca. 55,000 BCE. If modern humans were that much superior to Neanderthals, 15,000 years of coexistence should have been enough to make the Neanderthals vanish. We know that when new species show up (cane toads, for instance) profound changes happen on the scale of decades, not on the scale of millennia.

    So the neutral model of bad luck is that humans and Neanderthals were effectively equal, Campei Flegrei wiped almost all humans out of Europe, and it was repopulated by modern humans migrating out of Africa. A few Neanderthals probably survived for another 10-15,000 years in Spain before finally vanishing during the glacial maximum, with another 10,000 years of coexistence with modern humans to explain.

    2235:

    I think EC has a point, though: while differences in adaptation may not lead to a strong imbalance in terms of interspecies competition at a local population level (so co-existence is possible and maybe even selected for), at a macro level there are traits that lead a species as a whole to "make its own luck" as it were.

    Even where we've undergone a demographic transition, modern humans seem to have a strong drive to have as many children as possible and to go to as many places as possible. All the space stuff we're so interested in is pretty hard to explain otherwise.

    I wonder about the role of luck in general in evolution, not so much as a question of differential adaptation between species but in terms of the longevity of species. I realise the Red Queen hypothesis has something to say about that, but I'm not quite clear what it is saying (I've read the wikipedia article a couple of times now and maybe it's just that my mind is on other stuff but I haven't quite got it).

    2236:

    more than one naturalist has said just that after working with the Papuans

    As well as Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel.

    being a dark-skinned tribe newly colonizing Ice Age Europe isn't necessarily conducive to having a lot of offspring surviving childhood

    Do we know the level of skin pigmentation that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons had?

    2237:

    it's also possible that we're seeing two strategies here: Neanderthals didn't have many kids and didn't lose many of those, while moderns had more kids and accepted higher child mortality rates

    Oops, I missed that bit. So please don't mind me furiously agreeing (again).

    2238:

    Do we know the level of skin pigmentation that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons had?

    Here are the current reconstructions: https://www.livescience.com/64614-ancient-briton-faces-photos.html: Neanderthals are white,* and Cro-Magnon was pretty heavily pigmented. I starred the white because there are a couple of ways to be white, says the man with the Korean wife. My wife and I have essentially the same skin color under our clothes. I just tan far more easily, which annoys her. My understanding is that at least some Neanderthals are more like my wife than me, pale-skinned and not readily tanning.

    It's worth pointing out that well into tne Neolithic, people in England had relatively dark skin (see the Whitehawk woman at 5500 BCE).

    2239:

    One other factor to consider about the Pleistocene: it wasn't climatically stable. This graph shows isotopic proxies for annual air temperatures over the last 120,000 years, with modern time at the left to be annoying. The basic point is that Neanderethals were around for quite a lot of wild climate, and apparently they did okay, to the extent of not going extinct.

    The other thing to remember is that two wildly different human populations coexisting for 15,000 years is not a harsh struggle. Fifteen thousand years ago, most of our ancestors were either hunting mammoths or running away from them, and there was an ice age on. This is why I'm somewhat skeptical about facile answers about why Neanderthals went extinct: the climate was wild, and Neanderthals and moderns managed to not kill each other for an excessively long time by our standards. To me, that argues either for some factor so exceedingly subtle that we probably wouldn't notice it today. Or it argues for bad luck.

    Now how to define bad luck: the Campi Flegrei eruption of 39,280 BCE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campanian_Ignimbrite_eruption) was around three to six times bigger the 1815 Tambora eruption (the infamous year without a summer). It spewed a pyroclastic flow that covered around 30,000 km2 around the volcano and sterilized an area of about 100 km radius from the volcano. Ash fell as far away as central Russia.

    Ash deposits from this volcano separates the middle Paleolithic (mixed Neanderthal and modern) deposits from the earliest upper Paleolithic (modern human only) deposits at some archaeological sites, and also coincides in some archaeological sites with a long absence of human activity.

    This, incidentally, is my statistically dubious neutral model. As above, I'm primarily asserting that most humans died in Europe during and immediately after the eruption. Modern humans recolonized from outside the devastation, while Neanderthals perhaps only hung on in Spain, and the date for the late survival is problematic. This model assumes there's no meaningful difference between modern humans of the time and neanderthals, and that being around an erupting supervolcano is impartial bad luck for any human.

    2240:

    Troutwaxer @ 2208: Or pay people the right amount of money for them to imagine being a trucker is a good idea.

    The yearly turnover rate among long-haul truckers is 94 percent.

    It has a lot to do with misclassification of truckers as so called "independent contractors" (which they ain't, but it facilitates wage theft).

    2242:

    David L @ 2211:

    Or pay people the right amount of money for them to imagine being a trucker is a good idea.

    I know this is a common theme here. And I'm sure there are a lot of truckers who don't make "enough" money.

    But there are also those who make lots of money.

    As someone who's bumped into the edge of such folks a few times I keep wondering what the difference is.

    Basically it's whether they're unionized and covered under the Teamsters Master Freight Agreement OR "classified" as independent contractors.

    2243:

    Whitehawk Woman - 7000 years ago & really attractive. Who will remember us in 7000 years?

    H
    Try this link, instead? - for some reason the underscores in the link are being erased, thus failing it - uh?

    2244:

    The direct effects of that eruption left most of the Neanderthal area untouched, and a drop in global temperatures of 1-2 Celsius for 2-3 years is likely to be an extinction event for a sizable population only if it was already on the margin of survival. Yes, it may have been a major factor, but is implausible as a complete explanation. That would be different if there had been massive extinctions over the whole of that area, but the evidence is that there wasn't.

    The map Damian posted in #2244 shows the mirgratory differences clearly. For SOME reason, Neanderthals weren't as mobile as modern humans. That's a difference, whatever it may mean.

    Perhaps I should stress that a lower reproductive rate IS a significant difference (if that really were the case), and the simple X-chromosome also fails because the modern human X-chromosome didn't spread through the Neanderthal population as one would expect. It had to be more complex. Also, there are a LOT of other known differences:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction#Possible_cause_of_extinction

    My suspicion is that they had evolved into a form that was less well-adapted to change (nothing new there), so relatively small changes were enough to make them non-viable. Yes, there's bad luck, but there is ALSO a significant difference.

    2245:

    The relevance of skin colour is overstated, and this is misleading "Remember, being a dark-skinned tribe newly colonizing Ice Age Europe isn't necessarily conducive to having a lot of offspring surviving childhood."

    Northern Europe, yes, especially north-western Europe, but southern Europe has pretty bright winters and vitamin D deficiency is not the same problem. The insolation in the UK varies by a factor of over 8 even in the south, but that in Marseilles only by one of 4.5. I haven't found any decent UV data, but the difference is considerably more marked - it's damn-near zero in a British winter, but definitely not in a southern European one.

    2246:

    The latest theory on neanderthal extinction I have come across is maladaptive cannibalism:

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/how-think-neandertal/202112/the-role-cannibalism-in-the-extinction-the-neandertals

    This may at least have played a part.

    2247:

    I find that unconvincing, but would have to read the paper to be sure. That article didn't even hint WHY cannibalism would cause exclusion from resource-rich areas.

    2248:

    JBS @ 2245: Basically it's whether they're unionized and covered under the Teamsters Master Freight Agreement OR "classified" as independent contractors.

    Back @ 1856 I wrote:

    One failure mode of highly controlled labour markets is the development of a two-tier system; at the top you have workers in protected jobs with strong unions, job protection, good wages and conditions. And below them you have everyone else in short-term unprotected jobs being exploited. Everyone agrees that this is a bad situation, but the people in the top tier don't want to see their pay and conditions watered down, but nobody can see how to effectively extend all the nice protections to the bottom tier.

    This is a classic example of what I was talking about.

    2249:

    The direct effects of that eruption left most of the Neanderthal area untouched, and a drop in global temperatures of 1-2 Celsius for 2-3 years is likely to be an extinction event for a sizable population only if it was already on the margin of survival. Yes, it may have been a major factor, but is implausible as a complete explanation. That would be different if there had been massive extinctions over the whole of that area, but the evidence is that there wasn't.

    Okay, so let's continue your education in the Phlegraean fields, aka campi flegrei.

    This massive volcano encircles Naples, Puzzuoli, and Pompei, among others (it is the Bay of Naples in part). Vesuvius is a side vent. It's come up here before in the context of concrete, because the ash from around Puzzuoli was produced the Pozzolana (!) that made the really good concrete that went into the Pantheon. What makes it good for concrete? It has a high proportion of very jagged volcanic glass particles. Fine particles that apparently went all the way to Russia in 39,280 BC.

    The next thing to ask yourself is "what are the effects of volcanic ash raining down on the Mammoth Steppe that supported the animals the humans hunted?" And as you might suspect, it's a breathing hazard (exacerbated in this case by all the sulfur compounds the supervolcano also emitted). When consumed it causes gastrointestinal blockages in grazing livestock, and the ash and sulfur also makes surface water undrinkable (e.eg. https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanic_ash/animals_livestock.html).

    So your argument is that anything outside the pyroclastic flows did just fine, and that little climate change of 2-3oC did nothing. My counter is that the animals downwind died of starvation if not dehydration, and so did the humans who depended on them for food.

    Damian's map shows that most of the Neanderthal range is downwind of the eruption, in areas known from archaeological sites to have been within the ash cloud, known because it's a stratigraphic marker in excavations. The only Neanderthal population suspected to have survived was upwind on Gibraltar, and that only in one cave.

    Finally, about extinctions within the area: what else was native to that area only? This is during the ice ages, and the vegetation was mammoth steppe (the Tibetan Plateau is a modern analog, minus most of the big animals). To my knowledge, no one's done a DNA analysis on the mammoth or other animal bones from before and after the eruption to see if the ones after migrated in from Siberia or not, but most of the animals that live on such grasslands normally migrate. Humans are the best-studied case.

    2250:

    Don't be ridiculous. No, OF COURSE, that isn't my argument.

    The map in the following shows the deposits towards the east-north-east, and a huge area to the west and north with no deposits. Yes, of course, there would have been ash deposited more widely than the 0.5cm boundary but you are claiming that there was a small (but significant) amount of ash over a HUGE area in am entirely different direction (i.e. northern Europe from France to Ukraine). Also, the prevailing winds come from the WEST, so you have to assume a extremely unusual weather pattern. You have provided no evidence for such an implausible speculation.

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Campanian\_Ignimbrite\_Eruption\_ash\_cloud.jpg

    Furthermore, it is complete nonsense that Neanderthals were dependent on mammoths - there were a lot of other steppe animals, many of which were easier to kill, and which are well represented in the archaological evidence. And the known bone breakages do NOT fit with primarily mammoth hunting, as you do NOT kill those by getting up close and personal. Without some evidence that those were also very badly affected, your argument fails on those grounds, as well.

    None of this stops it being instrumental in extinguishing a species that was already dying out, but that's a different matter.

    2251:

    If you look at Windy.com right now, you'll see that the surface winds at least are blowing ENE up from Italy into Europe and out to Russia. I quite agree that the Jet Stream above it is blowing west to east right now, but the Jet Stream is also notorious for its eddies, so other directions are possible (it was blowing north to south here yesterday, now it's blowing northeast to southwest).

    And you may have confused mammoth and mammoth steppe. The latter is a class of vegetation that is rare now (minus the mammoths, too) but was the biggest biome on the planet during the ice ages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth_steppe. I never claimed that only mammoths died and Neanderthals only ate mammoths. My argument is that eating powdered volcanic glass in anything other than trace amounts is incompatible with long-term existence for a wide variety of species, and until the area under the ash fall got washed clean by storms, the area under the ash fall couldn't have supported much of anything.

    2252:

    I agree - the Whitehawk woman is drop-dead beautiful.

    5,000 years from now? Well, I can talk about 11,000 years from now....

    2253:

    Hypothesis, not theory. And sure sounds like another "we're not cannibals, the evil people on the other side of the river are cannibals...."

    2254:

    I posted another suggestion as to what happened to Neanderthals, and it seems to have been ignored, so let's try again.

    Do we have any idea whatsoever about childbirth maternal/child survival of a) Neanderthal; b) Cro-Magnon, and c) hybrids?

    Now, for a long time, based on old reconstructions of Neanderthal, I wondered if they were the ancestors of trolls, elves, etc. But with the link to the pics... go ahead, tell me how different they look (or would act) with any group of modern humans. I wouldn't notice one in a crowded street.

    2255:

    Do we have any idea whatsoever about childbirth maternal/child survival of a) Neanderthal; b) Cro-Magnon, and c) hybrids?

    There are a number of Neanderthal bones from babies through teens. You can start to find the research at https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210706-the-secret-lives-of-neanderthal-children. The tl;dr is that Neanderthal infants come out looking pretty similar to modern newborns, and some develop at different rates than do moderns (and some apparently do not).

    I can't speak to childhood survival, because that's one of those mother x child x family x environment messes that's hard to sort out with little data.

    Now, for a long time, based on old reconstructions of Neanderthal, I wondered if they were the ancestors of trolls, elves, etc. But with the link to the pics... go ahead, tell me how different they look (or would act) with any group of modern humans. I wouldn't notice one in a crowded street.

    I agree, and I think the elfin/trollish features of Neanderthals were deliberately hyped by artists, probably thinking along the same lines. Various Neanderthal features still crop up occasionally in modern humans (like the occipital bun), so if you google a bit, you can find pictures of what they look like in life. You can also find various "Neanderthal in a suit" art displays up.

    2256:

    Windy.com shows the Italian winds blowing north until they are blocked by the Alps, but let that pass. I live here, and it is very rare for their to be an air current from the toe of Italy to the north-west of Europe or Germany. That map showed clearly that the winds were in another direction entirely, too. Your claim that a significant amount of ash covered essentially the WHOLE of Europe (possibly excluding the far north) is meteorologically implausible, to put it mildly, and you have provided no evidence for it.

    No, it's you who were posting mammoth nonsense, though possibly as a joke. Anyway, it was misleading. You said "Fifteen thousand years ago, most of our ancestors were either hunting mammoths or running away from them, ...".

    As far as I know, the evidence is that there was no mammalian or avian wide-scale extinction or even population in western Europe at the relevant time and, yes, there IS some archaeological evidence.

    That theory simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

    2257:

    I was at school with someone who looked like the old-style Neanderthal reconstructions. He wasn't awfully bright, either, and his initials were AP ....

    2258:

    EC #2250: It's a poor article, I think the author maybe didn't understand what the researchers were saying. It certainly fails to explain the research properly.

    Whitroth #2256: See above, I think that is from the writer. Cannibalism is common in humans it is just not the norm unlike with neanderthals, though it does become more common in tough environments such as the environment the neanderthals lived in. Which of course explains how it went on to become part of neanderthals culture and then possibly become a problem.

    2259:

    No, it's you who were posting mammoth nonsense, though possibly as a joke. Anyway, it was misleading. You said "Fifteen thousand years ago, most of our ancestors were either hunting mammoths or running away from them, ...". As far as I know, the evidence is that there was no mammalian or avian wide-scale extinction or even population in western Europe at the relevant time and, yes, there IS some archaeological evidence.

    Ah yes, another out-of-context quote to keep the argument alive. That was pointing out what 15,000 years looks like. As you're quite perfectly aware, people tend to uncritically read the 15 and ignore the thousand. This tendency makes it seem perfectly reasonable to hypothesize that, if Neanderthals couldn't have many children, then they could coexist with modern humans for 15,000 years while they went extinct.

    Anyway, to help forward your argument, here's a map of the ash field (you are right) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campanian_Ignimbrite_eruption#/media/File:Campanian_Ignimbrite_Eruption_ash_cloud.jpg and more information from the Caucasus: https://www.academia.edu/download/50892767/Significance_of_Ecological_Factors_in_th20161214-20753-83ih6h.pdf

    2260:

    Stafford Road man is a mate of mine. They've got his address wrong, though; he used to live in Stafford Road, but he lives on a boat now.

    2261:

    "Europe, by that point, had already been colonized by modern humans since ca. 55,000 BCE. If modern humans were that much superior to Neanderthals, 15,000 years of coexistence should have been enough to make the Neanderthals vanish."

    Maybe it just takes a whiley to get going. Humans and hairy apes have been coexisting for untold thousands of years (and occasionally eating each other), but it's only "now" that the non-hairy ones are seriously threatening the hairy ones' continued existence.

    "My argument is that eating powdered volcanic glass in anything other than trace amounts is incompatible with long-term existence for a wide variety of species, and until the area under the ash fall got washed clean by storms, the area under the ash fall couldn't have supported much of anything."

    In that case we surely ought to see a bunch of herbivore skeletons from around the time of the eruption with ruined teeth (probably ruined in a characteristic way), and probably also stunted malnourished juvenile skeletons, then nothing for a time until things sorted themselves out, while contemporaneous populations of the same species outside the ash fall zone don't show anything like this.

    I have no idea whether or not we actually do see those things, but I'm sure someone does, and it ought to provide a simple enough check.

    2262:

    I have issues with that.

    For example, why do you not read about cannibalism among the Inuit?

    2263:

    In that case we surely ought to see a bunch of herbivore skeletons from around the time of the eruption with ruined teeth (probably ruined in a characteristic way)

    I'm not sure what proportion of skeletons don't fossilize, but it's well north of 99.9%. Possibly 99.999% That's even more true in uplands, where most of the animals would have died and where stuff erodes away, rather than wetlands, where stuff collects. So absent a great deal of luck, even a mass extinction doesn't leave much evidence. Seeing the skeletons from an event like this would be very unlikely, unfortunately. If you notice, most of the human remains and archeological evidence from Europe in that time are from caves? It's not that they only lived in caves, it's that caves disproportionately preserved more than the environment outside did.

    As for the rest of it, we've got three separate Neanderthal genomes, and they were only as hairy as modern humans. Unfortunately, this is what I mean by racism creeping in to arguments about human extinctions when we're not thinking about it. That's one reason I post contrarian theories, like the Italian supervolcano (which I happen to think is more correct anyway): the vitriolic responses tend to make unconscious biases visible, and that's useful for those who care about such things.

    2264:

    One of the things that the migration map has me speculating about is maybe a survivorship thing or even more a question of how we focus on and define distinctions. Since we know modern humans and neanderthals coexististed and the DNA evidence is that they interbred, maybe it's just what where modern humans arrived and there was a local neanderthal population, over time the two intermingled and homogenised. That's not to say modern humans "overran" or "assimilated" neanderthals, just that we're tuned to think of the result as a modern human population with neanderthal DNA, so we are tuned to think that the modern humans displaced the neanderthals. If that's the case, then seeing surviving populations of 100% neanderthal remains only in isolated areas makes sense. And explains why bad luck would lead to extinction.... of 100% neanderthals, but not of the populations that interbred with modern humans, which we happen to define as modern humans.

    I'm aware there are studies about the proportions of neanderthal versus modern human DNA found in particular specimens, and that might contradict my speculation. I'm also aware that neanderthal DNA found its way into an incredibly disparate range of modern humans, but that does not contradict it.

    There's an interesting parallel in that dogs and wolves have interbred so many times that there's a similarly homogenous scattering of dog DNA among wild wolves and (modern) wolf DNA in dogs, spread across the world. There's this interesting piece in The Atlantic from a few years back, which unfortunately does not appear to include any concept of commensalism or even autonomous mutualism that must have preceded domestication by thousands of years, but still provides another angle on this.

    2265:

    Some bones do get preserved, though, and it's recent enough that they can have just hung around rather than getting fossilised (after all, we find whole mammoths in bogs and the like). Some of them indeed could be among those very human traces in caves, left over after people had eaten the soft bits around them. The wear marks on teeth are likely to be distinctive, and over such a wide area there ought to be traces of consequences of depopulation and recolonisation, such as large predators also going missing, and an increase in the amount of plant remains such as pollen and seeds from more of them not getting eaten. If we can find evidence of human migrations, then it's a bit implausible that we couldn't find evidence of population shifts in other more numerous large animals.

    The mention of hair was nothing to do with the possible hairiness or otherwise of Neanderthals (and if those pictures are accurate they looked perfectly normal in any case). It was a reference to the most conspicuous distinguishing factor between large ape species that exist today, ie. that the species known to cats as "food ape" has much less hair than the other species do. The point was that today's ape species have coexisted for untold thousands of years but only now is the species known to cats as "food ape" becoming a serious threat to the existence of the others, so that is a counterexample to the notion that it is implausible for ape species to coexist for thousands of years and then one suddenly causes extinction of the other.

    2266:

    Thanks Damian,

    I think there are at least three things going on.

    One is that the stone tool cultures intermingle. The undoubted Neanderthal culture is the Mousterian, and it disappears around -40,000. The undoubted modern human is the Aurignacian, which shows up around -43,000 and lasts to -26,000 or so. That's the one with all the cool cave art, but the Mousterians and Aurignacians make stone tools differently, among many other things.

    Then there are all the other, more controversial cultures that mix the Mousterian and Aurignacian: Bohunician (-48 to -40), Châtelperronian (-44.5 to -36), Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician (-43), Szeletian (-41 to -37), and Emiran (-60 to -40) from different caves in Europe and the Middle East (Emiran is from the Levant). These are all described as either having both Mousterian and Aurignacian tools, or having hybrid tools, like Aurignacian flavored tools made with Mousterian technique. These "assemblages" could indicate either or both of two things: intermingling, or alternating use of the same site. The findings reported last week from Grotte Mandrin in France (a modern human baby tooth at -55,000 years old) seems to be the latter, with evidence of moderns and Neanderthals alternately using the same came, but not at the same time. But both alteration and mingling could be true.

    That leads to the second point, which is that if the Campei Flegrei supervolcano is the primary cause of Neanderthal extinction, it probably wiped out a lot of mixed individuals too and moderns too. That's why I suggest the area under the ash-fall was recolonized by primarily by moderns and probably also by hybrids who survived the eruption on the northwestern fringe.

    If Neanderthals and hybrids had naturally lower birthrates than modern humans did, this is one of the few times in the ice age when it might have mattered. While we normally think that high birth rates are a good thing in primitive societies, not every society wants every women to have a lot of kids. The Australian Aborigines are one example, where some groups have these ornately complicated rules about who can marry whom, purportedly (from Aboriginal authors) to keep the birth rates lower. This was done in areas that couldn't support too many people, and where everyone (including pregnant women) was nomadic, moved fairly frequently, and their material culture was limited to what they could carry, leave behind (big stone tools) or cache for use when they returned. The soils may have been better in Europe than in Australia, but with the climate fluctuating wildly, people had to walk a lot to find areas that were having a good year, and had to depend on enormous home ranges and low populations (as in Australia). Not having a lot of kids was probably not a problem, until the need was taking advantage of a newly fertilized landscape opened up by a massive eruption.

    The third thing is that I don't think selection against Neanderthal (and Denisovan) alleles ended with the ice age. Modern humans have had to deal with many other selection pressures on our DNA. These include disease (a Neanderthal allele purportedly makes some people more vulnerable to Covid19), food changes (Neanderthals were obviously lactose intolerant and not as good as us at processing gluten) and so on. Modern selection pressures usually don't get factored in to the story of how much or little we inherited from them, but it probably matters. Incidentally, about 20% of the uniquely Neanderthal genome is still extant in all modern humans, but modern humans (outside of Sub-Saharan Africa), generally have 1-3% uniquely Neanderthal alleles in their personal genomes. I should point out that Neanderthal alleles are also found in even lower percentages in subsaharan Africa, probably due to millennia of modern traders.

    As for dogs and humans, read Relentless Evolution if you want to sort that out. Imagine, if you will, Earth divided into landscapes where dogs and humans have different relationships. In some areas, dogs are feral and in a mutually antagonistic relationship with humans. In others, dogs scavenge human leavings and warn people of strangers, but are still antagonistic. There are areas where dogs work for humans, either as guard dogs or as close partners. And there are homes where toy breeds are effectively social parasites, taking the place of children. Dogs are still more-or-less one species, but that's what a coevolutionary landscape mosaic looks like: parasites, competitors, commensals, and mutualists, each in different populations doing different things. Domestication (Where humans control reproduction) overlaps on a few of those areas (humans breeding social parasites and mutualists) but it doesn't cover the whole range (e.g. humans creating relationships with mutts whose breeding was not controlled by humans, etc.). Anyway, for whatever reason, there's no good evidence that humans and dogs started living in sym before around 30,000 ybp, at least at the moment.

    2267:

    For example, why do you not read about cannibalism among the Inuit?

    I'm not very familiar with Inuit legends, but the Wendigo is common legend in boreal forest communities:

    https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/windigo

    Knud Rasmussen, in his informative travels, was told of many instances of cannibalism by various Inuit peoples

    https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/cannibal_part_four/

    2268:

    Posted too soon, meant to include this one too:

    The Saunaktuk remains exhibit five forms of violent trauma indicating torture, mutilation, murder, and cannibalism. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40316364

    2269:

    I'd point out there's a more general problem: skewed body records. Picking up (again!) on an Aboriginal analysis of western ideas about them (Yunkaporta's Sand Talk. It helps that he's both aboriginal and a credentialed academic)...

    One problem is that "sky burial" is a fairly common mortuary practice. The basic idea is that living human entities are composites: there's the body, there's whatever gives it life, there's whatever makes us unique, and there's the part that causes harm to others. Most societies have labels for these, and generally, the part that causes harm is presumed to remain with the body after life and personality have left the body. Yes, Christians have this too, and it makes sense when you think about the problems of multiplying bacteria. Anyway, one solution is to leave the body to be scavenged and decompose, away from other people. Saves the chore of burying them. This was actually widespread until the missionaries got to people about it being blasphemous (if you're religious) and unsanitary (if you're scientific).

    Problem is, societies that do sky burial aren't going to leave behind the bodies of most people, and especially the bodies of most "normal" people whose bodies were returned to the elements. They're going to leave behind the bodies that got accorded special treatment (prophets, authoritarian nut jobs, etc.) because they were criminals who died in hiding, or people who were sacrificed or killed for anything from warfare to cannibalism.

    The resulting skeletal record is going to skew heavily toward freaks, geeks, psychos, prophets, criminals, and crime scenes. And, oddly enough, it does. We then take this as their normal, and talk about how deprived and depraved those primitive people are. A modern SFF equivalent would be if the only bodies we left behind were staked vampires, everybody else being cremated. Looking only at the remaining bodies, you'd think we were nothing but vampires, and that the ashes were what happened when we saw the sun...

    Story, oh yes. We don't know how Neanderthals normally handled bodies. Should you still assume that the remaining body record gives you an accurate sampling of the full range of human physical or genetic fitness. Probably not.

    2270:

    What I don't understand is WHY they claimed exocannibalism from choice was counter-survival. There are plenty of human societies where it was common that did very well. I think that that claim is the result of a dubious model.

    On the more general point, my guess is that everybody is searching for a woozle(*). In plants and animals, it is very common for species and societies that have a stable lifestyle for a long period with no major challenges (to that lifestyle) to lose adaptability. It is then common for a succession of small challenges that would not affect a more vigorous species much to cause them to shrink or disappear, and sometimes they just fade away for no apparent reason. If this was the case, there need not have been any particular cause.

    (*) It didn't exist, for people unfamiliar with A.A. Milne's works.

    2271:

    EC #2273: It quite possibly is a bad model, we can't tell from the article. I would say though that a population that cannibalises its in group neighbours will probably lose out in competition to an incoming competitor as it reduces it's own numbers. This is probably what the model was about. This would be especially true if this was just one factor in their extinction.

    Whitroth #2265: You seem to be treating this as some kind of moral issue, it is not. It is a fact that neanderthals were cannibals, the only question is its connection to their extinction.

    2272:

    Well, yes, but I have never heard of such extreme cannibalism among ANY species (humans not excepted) - it's not evolutionarily advantageous under any circumstances that I can think of. Making the assumption that it was SOP among Neanderthals from the basis of a few bones is a hell of a stretch.

    2273:

    I have never heard of such extreme cannibalism among ANY species

    African clawed frogs seem to do alright. IIRC that was the beast Jack Cohen used as inspiration when designing the grendals in Legacy of Heorot. Adult frogs eat tadpoles, including their own. When the frog in a pond dies the biggest tadpoles survive and (as frogs) battle it out to see who gets the pond. (Grossly oversimplifying here.)

    Viviparous sharks are often cannibalistic in the uterus.

    2274:

    That's not really comparable. Different reproductive strategy.

    The issue is a K-strategy reproductive species where cannibalism is common enough that it is a major (or even the principal) check on the species' population size. That I have not heard of, and can't believe it was true for Neanderthals.

    2275:

    How Neanderthals handled bodies - I could swear I've read of Neanderthal burials, with the body covered in a red paint, and that they've found Cro-Magnon the same.

    2276:

    Huh? Moral issue? Not hardly - what I've read, over and over in a long period of time, is that when explorers find a tribe and talk to them, it's pretty much always "we don't do that, they do that".

    The other things I've read is that where it is done, from what they've dug up, it seems to be a ritual thing, not a food thing.

    2277:

    How Neanderthals handled bodies - I could swear I've read of Neanderthal burials, with the body covered in a red paint, and that they've found Cro-Magnon the same.

    Some burials, absolutely. Was that what they did with all their bodies? That's the trickier question that Yunkaporta pointed to. One thing noted in paleolithic burials of modern humans (per Graeber's Dawn of Everything) is that there are often structural abnormalities in the skeletons buried and honored. Graeber's interpretation is that these burials were anomalies for "prophets" or similar, not the best of the best. They're not like the later burials of authoritarian leaeders.

    Given what's been seen in Neanderthal burials (genetic abnormalities, structural damage, cannibalism), it's easy to propose the Neanderthals were subhuman and monstrous. That may be true, but it's equally possible that these were unusual people interred under unusual conditions, and that most Neanderthals were much closer to modern humans.

    2278:

    Whitroth #2279: Yes a moral issue, as you say in your own comment. You are treating people saying neanderthals were cannibals as a moral failing on their part. It is based on evidence. Based on that evidence there are two types of cannibalism, endo-cannibalism which is what you are talking about and exo-cannibalism which is the eating of outsiders usually for sustenance as opposed to ritual.

    2279:

    On the more general point, my guess is that everybody is searching for a woozle(*). In plants and animals, it is very common for species and societies that have a stable lifestyle for a long period with no major challenges (to that lifestyle) to lose adaptability. It is then common for a succession of small challenges that would not affect a more vigorous species much to cause them to shrink or disappear, and sometimes they just fade away for no apparent reason. If this was the case, there need not have been any particular cause.

    I think we can come to a similar conclusion while disagreeing on the path there.

    On my end, the problem isn't the lack of challenges. Ice age Europe was a challenging environment, less because it was cold, and more because the climate was extremely and unpredictably variable. To deal with it, humans of any type had to be nomadic, moving regularly to deal with seasonal changes, droughts, wet years, and so forth. This in turn limited their technology to "manuports" (stuff they could carry), tools and supplies they could leave or cache for when they came back (stones last for centuries, so leaving stone tools at a work site you'll visit in another decade is no big deal), and stuff they could make from whatever was lying around. One critical part of this is that they didn't wander randomly--they undoubtedly songlined, moving from known campsite to known campsite to keep from dying of environmental exposure.

    The Neanderthals took this to a MacGyverish extreme by keeping their kit very simple. Their flintknapping Levallois technique is "primitive," compared with later techniques, but in a very particular way. It's highly efficient for turning flint tool cores into edged tools, and it seems to do so with fewer knapping tools (apparently hammerstones and batons, if I read it right). This contrasts with the full modern flintknappers' tool kit, which includes hammerstones, batons, antlers or similar for pressure flaking, even copper-tipped tools or their equivalent for fine work. Both modern humans and Neanderthals made Levallois tools, but moderns switched to using a bigger panoply of tools to knap with, while the Neanderthals kept it simple. The "genius" of keeping it simple is that you don't need to carry so much, and it's easier to find the stuff you need on the landscape. The "genius" of making it complex is that you get more specialized, often better tools, but at the expense of carrying a bigger toolkit with you.

    In this regard, I can't blame Neanderthals for being conservative about their tools. After all, they had systems that let them deal with the climatic complexities of ice age Eurasia for thousands of years, and do it successfully. It did turn out that modern human, more complex systems were viable too, and there was apparently experimentation (trying to make modern tools with Levallois techniques, for example). But sticking with what demonstrably works isn't necessarily stupid. If we'd done that, we wouldn't be dealing with climate change or an extinction crisis, for example.

    Still, what I think killed them, especially in the context of a supervolcano, was failure of the songlines. Too many of them got stuck in the middle of a huge famine zone caused by the volcano, and died before they could find a way out of it, even with all the rotting megafaunal carcasses around. That's not really a fault caused by cultural stasis, and for all we know, modern humans died alongside them in equal numbers. The telling part is that modern humans, moving into that same environment later on, didn't redevelop the Levallois technique, so that bit of Neanderthal conservatism wasn't particularly needed in the end.

    One thing I'd add is that the songlines might also explain why both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon had bigger brains than we do. Ice age Europe was sort of like modern Australia on steroids: there was a lot of food, if you were at the right place and time, and a lot of ways to die if you weren't. Tool complexes in the earlier Paleolithic extended right across Europe, so it's likely that the people making those tools were regularly traveling thousands of miles, possibly every year. Doing so without maps and with an unstable climate takes a hell of a huge memory and substantial adaptability, and that may be what their big brains were for. The interesting part was that they had enough food to feed those brains, as well as time to take care of each other when they got injured. That speaks well of them.

    2280:

    H
    * But sticking with what demonstrably works isn't necessarily stupid. If we'd done that, we wouldn't be dealing with climate change or an extinction crisis, for example.*
    Sorry, but "Not even wrong" - if we had stuck with what demonstrably works, we would still be using coal-fired power stations & not trying to electrify everything in sight. { Not that some arseholes are dragging their feet }

    2281:

    Well only if we define "works" in a way that doesn't preclude "is going to kill us". We might argue about how demonstrable our climate models and knowledge about carbon and heat absorption are, but ultimately we know as well as we can know that continuing to burn carbon doesn't "work". It would be like saying that a car with no brakes or steering still "works".

    2282:

    And another voice of.......reason......has passed. P. J. O'Rourke. He was conservative (small c for a reason), and in the same way that Tory/Conservative were the good guys against the 'Liberals' all those years ago (I've had long chats with my Irish family about the Liberals and Ireland, in the day). P J wrote a book about - scuse me while i spit out the bad taste - TRUMP.....how the hell did we end up here...and like Charlie PJ was an author who could have you laughing out loud while tearing people a new one.

    2283:

    I will accept that the eastern Neanderthals may have been wiped out because of the volcano, but the western ones would have been largely unaffected. Yes, 2-3 bad years, as for the rest of the world, but it would NOT have been a famine zone. And we are talking about a huge area, including Spain, France, Britain/Doggerland, Germany and more.

    2284:

    I will accept that the eastern Neanderthals may have been wiped out because of the volcano, but the western ones would have been largely unaffected. Yes, 2-3 bad years, as for the rest of the world, but it would NOT have been a famine zone. And we are talking about a huge area, including Spain, France, Britain/Doggerland, Germany and more.

    Area, agreed. The first issue is population. The demographers have a fine time speculating, based on skeletons and genomes, but the numbers they come up with tend to be on the low side: 5,000-70,000 in this study: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/673725 I'm agnostic about the precise number, but I don't think we're talking about millions of missing Neanderthals. At the low end, they're in snow leopard range, except that humans live in bands, not as solitary cats. At the high end, they're in lion range.

    The second issue is whether Neanderthals got together periodically or not. That they had a fairly uniform, stable technology across long distances and times suggests that they probably did meet up periodically, which means that more of the small population gets clustered in one area. This could be something as simple as heading either south into the Balkans or west to the coast when the weather got bad on the steppe, or it could be something more complex, like a corroboree where a lot of shy people got together to party and catch up.

    That leads to two non-exclusive pathways to getting into a demographic vortex that ends in disappearance: there could have been not enough Neanderthals left in the volcano safe zone, and/or most of Europe's neanderthals were partying in the ash fallout zone, and got wiped out.

    2285:


    "Moral failing"? Let's try again, NO! I'm saying that they're saying it with insufficient data, and a biased viewpoint. Nothing "moral" about that.

    2286:

    I have to agree. I'm not aware of any nomadic tribes that wander aimlessly - they follow a regular course. The only time that changes is due to bad weather, or invasions (see "Huns", "Mongols")

    2287:

    Oh, get real! The most eastern part of France is 1,000 miles from the edge of the ash cloud and Spain and Britain are double that. while it isn't theoretically impossible for them to have migrated thousands of miles for a knees-up, no known animal or human society migrates anywhere near that distance without an overwhelming reason for it, not least because 5 miles a day is a very good speed.

    Yes, it is possible that the population in western Europe was small and sparse enough at the relevant time that it was not a viable basis for recovery, but that indicates the western Neanderthals were already an endangered population. Which they demonstrably weren't for most of their timespan, or they would have died out earlier.

    2288:

    no known animal or human society migrates anywhere near that distance without an overwhelming reason for it, not least because 5 miles a day is a very good speed.

    Coming from a member of the "Sun Does Not Set On The" British Empire, that's hilarious. And if out-of-shape me can go 20 miles in a day in the mountains with a 40 pound pack, I'm pretty damned sure fit Neanderthals carrying less crap could too. Anyway, the semi-local Mojave Indians used to run from the Colorado River to the Santa Barbara coast to get ornamental seashells from the Chumash (they'd run back too). That's about 200 miles, about one-third through the Colorado desert, the rest up and onto mountain ridge tops, which the local Indians preferred for trails because grizzly bears preferred the lowlands and would have to hunt the Indians from the highly visible, downhill side. And then there are my friends who hiked the Continental Divide (3,100 miles) in six months, or about 500 miles/month. "Overwhelming reason" seems less likely than "for fun and bragging rights" as a motive.

    2289:

    That is ridiculous to the point of stupidity. Migration includes women carrying babies and small children, and requires the group to hunt for food on the way. That takes time, especially in unfamiliar terrain.

    2290:

    Whitroth #2288: Just do some googling, you don't know what you're talking about.

    2291:

    Having been bushwalking with my family as a child, I venture to suggest that 30km/day is a reasonable walk on flat ground for fit modern city-based humans. My baby sister was very proud to have done that carrying a pillow on her back... when she was five.

    I don't know about the UK, but Australia was traditionally more of a garden or park, with ample food and water over most of the inhabited area. So twas not often necessary to cover long distances every day. When you're surrounded by abundance most of the time it's easier just to amble along and aim for the next convenient sleeping site, rather than rushing.

    So rather than compare them to modern bushwalkers, it might be better to ask: how fast, and how far, can a modern family travel inside a shopping mall? Five miles a day might be on the high side.

    But if there's a volcanic eruption behind you? A group that's used to walking as their only mode of transport is likely to be able to average 30km/day for a week or more. Likely more like 50km the first day if they needed to. And remember, our "rough terrain" is their "every day, all the way". That micro-navigation is a skill, one that's hard to describe or teach but if you learn it as a kid it sticks with you.

    Simple example: most moderns walk on their heels. And sound like buffalo as a result. Shoeless walk on the front balls of their feet, and are much quieter. Teaching someone to do that requires muscle development as well as habit-training. It can be done, but it's hard. And that's just step one of "how do you walk in the bush".

    2292:

    EC: https://www.quora.com/How-far-did-nomads-travel-at-a-time-in-Eurasia-How-often-did-they-travel-How-quickly-did-they-travel-with-groups-of-around-30-50

    "A group of travelers moving on foot or with a modest number of animals, like a merchant caravan or group of religious pilgrims, goes around 10–12 miles a day."

    "For example this 4.2 thousand km route from Astrakhan to Karokorum was travelled continuously through the year by nomad traders, merchants and diplomats as per Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and Guillaume de Rubrouck records (13th century)."

    "When travelling with herds and families the speed was about 30–40 km/day on average since there were usually long stops for herd feeding and people rest."

    2293:

    Simple example: most moderns walk on their heels. And sound like buffalo as a result. Shoeless walk on the front balls of their feet, and are much quieter. Teaching someone to do that requires muscle development as well as habit-training. It can be done, but it's hard. And that's just step one of "how do you walk in the bush".

    Actually it's easy. I was one of the idiots special people who read Born to Run and got carried away with barefoot walking. In my case, my normal hiking area has a layer of cricket/softball size cobbles in it (the remnants of when the Colorado River flowed through during the Miocene or whenever). When you walk on cobbles in boots, your ankles can't flex properly, so your knees flex improperly to keep you balanced on the cobbles and you get into knee problems.

    So I went to wearing watershoes with a thin, flat insole to keep the thorns and broken glass from cutting too deeply. It took about a week to adapt to walking on my toes. Of course, I knew I was supposed to from the book, but heel-pounding on bare pavement or rocks provides an abundance of rapid negative feedback too.

    One big reason we heel-pound is that our shoes are designed for it. This goes especially for boots, which, if high enough, can make it very hard to not hit heel first. Heeled shoes don't help either.

    Water shoes aren't perfect by a long stretch, but they work well enough when it's not too cold or too hot, which here is almost the entire year. The don't have much grip in the sole, but once you can move your ankle and toes properly, that doesn't much matter. You balance with your ankles, and your knees heal.

    Oh, and my wife learned too. Once you commit to it, the first week is a nuisance and then it becomes much easier.

    2294:

    But sticking with what demonstrably works isn't necessarily stupid. If we'd done that, we wouldn't be dealing with climate change or an extinction crisis, for example.* Sorry, but "Not even wrong" - if we had stuck with what demonstrably works, we would still be using coal-fired power stations & not trying to electrify everything in sight. { Not that some arseholes are dragging their feet }

    Coal? I'm talking ditching the neolithic revolution for a bad idea. After all, the steady climate that favors farming will only be around for 40,000 years even without climate change. Their simple little technology lasted, with minor improvements, for most of 100,000 years. If you want your people to exist in the real longue durée, the kind where dates have six digits, not two or three, metal and agriculture simply aren't going to cut it. They're too fragile and resource intensive.

    2295:

    Totally agree about heel striking. It made a huge difference to my comfort doing re-enactment when I learned to walk on the balls of my feet - when wearing heel-less flat thin leather soled shoes it also means your foot doesn't slide when you put it down. For me it came from learning correct footwork as part of studying the period combat techniques, which require you to be on the balls of your feet.

    Modern shoes encourage a longer stride, reaching out to put your heel down with your lower leg angled forwards. Stepping so your lower leg is vertical and the ball of the foot hits the ground with no lateral componant to it's vector means it won't (or at least is much less likely to) slide away from you if the surface is slippery. It is, as noted, also much quieter - I noticed when I was in teh office that my footsteps went from echoing climps on the floors to almost silent if I was practising stepping while moving about. It even reduces the wear on your shoes!

    2296:

    I have issues with your distances, on top of your mixed units.

    I've read that 30 mi/day was considered a forced march for the Roman Legions. You've got pilgrims being slower than whole families... and at the same time the bit on families talks about longer breaks.

    2297:

    Efficient bush and wilderness walking is definitely a learned skill. I worked in the bush for 10 years as a treeplanter, and later a treeplanting foreman.

    In that work you are putting out a lot of energy, some analyses have put it equivalent to running a half marathon every day. In that context small savings in energy output add up quickly. Some of that comes with improved fitness, but a lot comes with body memory.

    When I became a foreman and had to train new people it took me a short while to realize that most of them needed some conscious advice about how to move across the land efficiently.

    For example, the apparently default action when passing a fallen log is to step onto the log, lift oneself up, then step down the other side. Doing so with a 30-50 lbs of trees in your bag can be tiring, particularly on a clearcut (which is usually an immense mess of logs and brush).

    Stepping up and over a thousand logs/day is going to wipe you out very quickly and is unsustainable. Stepping over without lifting yourself up onto every log is level one efficiency and saves a lot. Level two or three is consciously or unconsciously planning your route to minimize the number of logs you cross over. Treeplanters are paid per tree, so all of this happens at close to a run if possible.

    I can easily see how a Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon human could move rapidly over terrain with a high efficiency, especially if they have been doing it all their lives. Yes, even with equipment and children in tow.

    I would think that the nomads on the Silk Road for at least 1500 years would refute the notion that humans couldn't migrate over long distances within a period of a few years. My understanding was that some of those cultures also had regular or semi-regular cultural events where they would all meet up for marriages and other events at certain points, in certain years.

    Another factor to consider is that multiple events might have conspired to wipe out the Neanderthals. While their range probably extended a long way at some points, I don't think the archaeological record is strong enough to say they were at the peak of their range right before they collapsed.

    Competition with Cro-magnons, environmental changes, cultural bad timing (i.e. everyone meeting up for the jamboree at volcano time) could all have combined to badly weaken Neanderthals. Maybe the refugees were violently resisted by resident Cro-magnons.

    I guess we can never know all the specifics, but I have little doubt that Home Sapiens and Neanderthals could have migrated over large distances as a matter of course.

    2298:

    Walking is more complicated than that: back in my late teens or early twenties, I divided people up into four categories: those who walk loudly and heavily, those who walk heavily but not loudly, those who walk loudly but not heavily, and those of us who walk quietly and lightly.

    That is, the people who flap their feet, and come down heavily, not only on their heels; those who come down heavily on their heels, but don't flap the rest of their foot, those who flap, but don't land heavily on their heels, and those who neither come down heavily on their heels and don't flap.

    I had always walked quietly, but got into trying to come down on the balls of my feet (and I wear boots, you may, if you wish, call them "western style" although none have pointy toes, about six months out of the year.

    2299:

    The thing is that the larger number of people in your group, the shorter the distance they can travel in a day. It's not about muscle or endurance, but about how you organize several thousand soldiers to make it through the day, including keeping enough distance from each other, stopping for meals, making camp, breaking camp, etc.

    2300:

    Yes, 10-12 miles a day is the classic figure - IF obtaining food can be done without taking days out or diverting (e.g. for water). Hunting in unfamiliar territory is time-consuming, not every hunt succeeds, small children need rest days, there are other delays over a long period, so (as the second reference indicates, ignoring the typos) you have to scale that down. The figure of 5 miles a day is a fairly standard one when mountains, swamps and undergrowth are not a problem.

    Even if it were 10 miles a day, that's still implausible for any except the closest populations, because only some of the year was suitable (e.g. not winter). 1,500 miles each way is 300 days.

    Yes, it's THEORETICALLY possible that almost all Neanderthals had triennial jamborees by the Black Sea and were unlucky, but that's piling unsupported speculation on speculation. William of Occam would not have been amused. It's more likely that the western Neanderthals were already an endangered subgroup, but that's still adding a new speculation.

    https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/h_l_mencken_129796

    2301:

    I have walked barefoot essentially all my life, and am an obligate heel-first walker.

    2302:

    If you want your people to exist in the real longue durée, the kind where dates have six digits, not two or three, metal and agriculture simply aren't going to cut it. They're too fragile and resource intensive.

    Very very few individuals nowadays seriously care about "their people" existing six-digit years from now, and I am quite certain not a single individual during Neolithic (or Mesolithic) gave it any thought.

    2303:

    Oregon trail. 15-20 miles a day. And most everyone walked.

    2304:

    My wife might weigh as much as half what I do, but sounds like a herd of mecha-elephant war-machines when walking around the house. I am close to silent.

    2305:

    Very very few individuals nowadays seriously care about "their people" existing six-digit years from now, and I am quite certain not a single individual during Neolithic (or Mesolithic) gave it any thought.

    Indirectly, I suspect they did. Sustainability, at its most basic level, is making sure that you leave enough for next time so that you and your kids don't starve. It's best documented for the Australian aborigines, but in general, it involves taking care of your country (the land you know how to live in) rather better than most modern farmers take care of their plots.

    Incidentally, I agree that very few people nowadays think about these issues and at these scales. If civilization crashes this century, that will probably be a major reason why. This is rather harder to learn than barefoot walking. Many (most?) of the people who do think about these issues are currently suffering from depression, made harder to treat by a dearth of psychologists who understand the problem. Speaking from experience.

    2306:

    I meant consciously gave it any thought. As in "what I do now will ensure my descendants a hundred hundreds lifetimes from now..."

    Also, while Australian aborigines clearly came up with practices which worked on the scale of millennia, I very much doubt they could explain why they worked, let alone what failed paths were attempted before settling on successful ones.

    2307:

    I meant consciously gave it any thought. As in "what I do now will ensure my descendants a hundred hundreds lifetimes from now..."

    Agreed, in that sense. They weren't trying to set records for longevity, they were trying to live sustainably, which includes a huge portion of taking care of one's country and one's business.

    I see it a bit differently, from an outside design perspective. We know, based on evidence, that what they did worked for endurance. We also strongly suspect, again based on evidence, that what we're doing now will not work on anything approaching a long term. While I'm not advocating dismantling civilization for a new stone age, I think people who bash those who lived in the paleolithic for being stupid might want to think about what they accomplished versus what we wish we could do right now.

    Also, while Australian aborigines clearly came up with practices which worked on the scale of millennia, I very much doubt they could explain why they worked, let alone what failed paths were attempted before settling on successful ones.

    I assume you've read some basic Aboriginal mythology? It's often odd stuff, sort of like reading roadmaps, and for much the same reason. One thing to note is how often legendary figures are turned to stone for their crimes. That's a metaphor for how their justice system worked: if you screwed up in a memorably bad way, they memorialized you by naming a landscape feature after you ("turning you to stone"), and using that feature to tell your story, so that everyone who knew that feature and its story knew who you were and how you screwed up, so that you could do some good by serving as a literal object lesson. How long do those stories last? Patrick Nunn argues in his book The Edge of Memory that such stories lasted for hundreds of generations. He bases this assertion on aboriginal stories that accurately described shorelines now covered by rising seas, using the date of last exposure as determined by geologists. So to answer your question, if someone screwed up badly enough for the survivors to turn the screwup into stone, the story of the failure might have lasted as long as the stories of those who lived righteously.

    2308:

    I see your point, but "unsuccessful paths" are not spectacularly bad decisions by an individual. Rather, it is any cultural practice which works for generations... until it does not. At which point people practicing it quietly disappear, while those who follow a more successful practice may not even be aware of their neighbors' end.

    2309:

    Stepping up and over a thousand logs/day is going to wipe you out very quickly and is unsustainable. Stepping over without lifting yourself up onto every log is level one efficiency and saves a lot. Level two or three is consciously or unconsciously planning your route to minimize the number of logs you cross over.
    It is fascinating that you needed to teach this, and great that you did.
    As you described, economy of motion combines practice with common situations/movements, and real-time planning for novel situations; when one notices somebody moving optimally or close, to minimize energy expenditure or exposure to observing eyes or whatever, one is observing some combination of expertise and real-time planning.

    2310:

    "It is fascinating that you needed to teach this, and great that you did. As you described, economy of motion combines practice with common situations/movements, and real-time planning for novel situations; when one notices somebody moving optimally or close, to minimize energy expenditure or exposure to observing eyes or whatever, one is observing some combination of expertise and real-time planning. "

    It was more of a lightbulb coming on when I realized that the rookies were struggling over terrain that I was blasting through really quickly. I then had to think hard about what I was doing differently and reverse engineer it into something I could try to relate to other. I'd spent thousands of hours doing it and it was about 100% unconscious, and it had never occurred to anyone to teach it to me.

    Shovel placement was another revelation for me. When instructing or advising new workers I'd demonstrate where and how to plant a tree. One of them watched for a bit and then asked 'How did you know where to put your shovel every single time without hitting a rock or root?'. I didn't have an immediate answer as I'd never noticed. It's just that I had planted hundreds of thousands of trees.

    2311:

    It was more of a lightbulb coming on when I realized that the rookies were struggling over terrain that I was blasting through really quickly.

    I've hung round with people bushwalking/tramping/hiking a lot, often quite educated people who habitually analyse what they're doing. Recreational thinkers is how I describe it.

    Watching someone who's about 1.6m and 45kg carry a 20kg pack up a mountain for 5-6 hours and arrive at the top fit and happy serves as an example to a lot of that sort of people. But trying to explain it in words is pretty much pointless. You can say "apply Taylorism" but that doesn't help.

    Walking behind someone like that and trying to imitate them while you work out why they do every little thing is exhausting, but pays off when you start to understand what they're doing. Especially if they're happy to talk to you about the process. It seems kinda silly but it really can turn "4 hours is hard" into "8 hours is straightforward".

    And that is much easier than doing the same with someone like me who is 1.8m tall and has a normal walking pace best described as "brisk" :)

    2312:

    David L @ 2306: Oregon trail. 15-20 miles a day. And most everyone walked.

    Essentially the speed of a Conestoga Wagon pulled by Oxen. Also settlers traversing the Oregon trail could carry supplies along and weren't forced to forage for food along the way.

    I don't believe the Neanderthals had either and a migration would have probably moved much slower. I'd guess no more than 5-10 miles per day.

    AFAIK, Neanderthals had no domestic animals, not even dogs ... and that may have a significant factor in Homo Sapiens out surviving them, because Homo Sapiens DID begin to domesticate wolf/dogs 1 around the time the Neanderthals were dying out.

    So maybe instead of thinking about why Neanderthals died out, think about why Homo Sapiens survived? I'm sure Homo Sapiens domestication of dogs (or vice versa) was one of the keys in the transition from hunter/gatherers to herders. The first domesticated animal carries the seed of the idea that OTHER animals might be domesticated.

    Herders can move faster & cover more ground than hunter/gatherers who must be constantly foraging while migrating.

    1 I've seen some argument that the domestication was the other way around, that the common wolf ancestor of dogs & modern wolves may have significantly contributed to the domestication of Homo Sapiens.

    2313:

    timrowledge @ 2307: My wife might weigh as much as half what I do, but sounds like a herd of mecha-elephant war-machines when walking around the house. I am close to silent.

    I make a lot more noise moving around now than I did when I was younger. My joints & bones make noises, and I grunt & groan from the pain.

    That squeaking noise coming out of my shoe AIN'T COMING OUT OF MY SHOE.

    I made a significant amount of noise wearing my tools when I worked for the burglar alarm company, but that was the tools. I remember a number of instances where I freaked people out because I'd put my tool belt down to walk into another room to check something carrying only a meter & a screwdriver and the occupants didn't hear me coming.

    My LBE & ruck were all taped up to prevent making noise when we moved. We used to have to put all the equipment on and jump up & down to reveal anything that was going to make noise and then tape it so that it couldn't clank or rattle ... although I did frequently make a significant "OOFING" noise whenever I had to pick up the ruck & settle it in place.

    2314:

    AFAIK, Neanderthals had no domestic animals, not even dogs ... and that may have a significant factor in Homo Sapiens out surviving them, because Homo Sapiens DID begin to domesticate wolf/dogs 1 around the time the Neanderthals were dying out.

    I already wrote a lengthy response to this at 2200, pointing out the minimum 10,000 year gap between 39,000 ybp, when the Neanderthal Mousterian tool culture gave way to the modern human Aurignacian culture, and 33,000 ybp, the reliable age of the oldest doggish wolf skull recovered. Genetic evidence from modern dogs suggests that domestication might have been even later (23,000 ybp, and in Siberia). Also, there's considerable Aurignacian cave art (bisons, bears, mammoths, lions), with only one timber wolf shown and absolutely no dogs in the hunting scenes.

    So right now, there's no good evidence that any human had any domesticated animal at 40,000 ybp. When, where, and how many times dogs became domesticated is still quite up in the air. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_domestic_dog)

    2315:

    I see your point, but "unsuccessful paths" are not spectacularly bad decisions by an individual. Rather, it is any cultural practice which works for generations... until it does not. At which point people practicing it quietly disappear, while those who follow a more successful practice may not even be aware of their neighbors' end.

    I see what you're getting at, but again, the archaeological evidence seems to say that the low density human population in the paleolithic didn't have small territories, and that they traveled quite a bit. Graeber makes a big fuss about this in Dawn of Everything. In the view of him and his archaeologist coauthor, one of major trends for people over the last 10,000 years has been shrinkage of territories.

    That said, you would be right in the idea that something wipes out a family or clan, and if people go to find them months later, there's no evidence to show how they screwed up. I don't see how any society could avoid that. People die mysteriously or disappear even now, and there's no reason to assume it didn't happen in the past.

    That's kind of where I was going with the whole supervolcano thing. It's the big, obvious "out of context" problem at the time when the Neanderthals disappeared, so it's worth postulating that it played a role.

    2316:

    It is fascinating that you needed to teach this, and great that you did. As you described, economy of motion combines practice with common situations/movements, and real-time planning for novel situations; when one notices somebody moving optimally or close, to minimize energy expenditure or exposure to observing eyes or whatever, one is observing some combination of expertise and real-time planning.

    It is the same with all kinds of things. I grew up around small to medium farm equipment. And power tools like table saws, grinders, etc...

    More than the details of any one tool, tractor, whatever, most people who do not exist around such things just don't have the habits in their muscle memory that keeps them from loosing fingers or such. It has to be taught.

    2317:

    2315 - I'd go as far as to say that "carrying supplies" was one of the main functions of the Conestoga.

    2316 - I have a similar issue at work; I "sneak up on people" meaning that I have quiet footfalls.

    2318:

    _When, where, and how many times dogs became domesticated is still quite up in the air. _

    Hell yeah. To me the factor that people seem (to me) to pay too little attention to (if not outright ignore) is that it's really overwhelmingly likely that humans and dogs had some sort of (or as you have pointed out earlier in this thread, most likely a broad range of) co-evolutionary relationship(s) for thousands of years before anything we'd recognise as domestication (could have) occurred.

    To me there's a whole complex of questions about whether and why people think agency is important on the part of the humans as well as on the part of the dogs. And what sense we can make of that, moving ahead into a landscape where our traditional positions about things like sentience and personhood might be more problematic than we are ready to handle.

    2319:

    All over London, semi-tame foxes are regularly taking food deliberately left out for them by the humans.
    Some of those foxes are getting closer & closer to being hand-tame, & a few already are - a vixen on our plots about 4 years back would walk over my legs to get at the "offered "doggie-bikkies" & once tried to extract the bag from my trousers pocket (!) Put that together with the Russian "official-taming" experiments & we will have another regular domesticated animal in less than 50 years.

    2320:

    Are these London foxes showing the same color variations as Russian tame foxes?

    2321:

    we will have another regular domesticated animal in less than 50 years.

    Domestication to me includes the ability to suppress their "wild side". Especially when under the command of a person.

    Trained dogs can do this. Trained other animals cannot.

    2322:

    Not that I'm aware - they're normal Reynardish colours

    2323:

    However, it is NOT true that you can't learn such things without being taught. Most of my skills are largely or entirely self-taught, and that is one, but there is no doubt that there is a hell of a difference between someone accustomed to carrying a pack, and someone not so accustomed.

    It's actually very like walking barefoot and not hurting my feet - the hardness of my soles is less important than not stamping my feet down regardless.

    2324:

    Cats, horses and cattle all do. I don't see foxes being domesticated in 50 years, not even to the level of cats, because of that aspect.

    2325:

    ilya
    Not yet - the Ru breding programme is a deliberate acceleration.

    David L
    Excepting Cats, of course, who train their supposed "owners"

    2326:

    Cats, horses and cattle all do. I don't see foxes being domesticated in 50 years, not even to the level of cats, because of that aspect.

    With regards to the silver foxes that were the subject of the silver fox breeding experiment yes, there are domesticated silver foxes. You can find where to buy them online, e.g. https://aepetsgo.com/ae_troops/russian-foxes/

    As for British foxes, or Californian Island foxes, they're of course a different story.

    While again, I'll recommend Relentless Evolution if you want a good basis for understanding what's actually going on, here, I'll use the four terms biologists normally use, even though they get their shorts knotted around them because they're insufficient (which is why you should get and read that book):

    Habituated: animals that tolerate or seek out a particular human or humans. My mom's been feeding her local ravens for about 30 years now, and the local raven family almost always brings that years' chicks to her yard to learn to feed off the ground. Raven chicks learn to fly (badly) before they learn to pick food off the ground, and my Mom's descriptions of young ravens trying to eat stuff for the first time are along the lines of a kid learning to use chopsticks. And there's a big Facebook group of people who've spontaneously done similar things with corvids. This is normal human behavior. Most wildlife biologists hate it and strongly recommend people don't do it, except when a biologist habituates a group of animals so that they can study their behavior without disturbing them (cf Jane Goodall). You can also google "The Law of The Tongue" and others for examples of humans forming long-term working partnerships with dolphins and orcas. While I agree that it can be really freaking dangerous to habituate some animals, as noted above, this is normal human behavior. I'd argue for learning to do it right, and advocating against it in the frequent situations where urban people are too clueless to want to learn to do it right.

    Tame: you make a wild animal into a pet, normally by finding it as a baby and raising it up. This is also normal human behavior. A number of Amazonian cultures refuse to try to domesticate forest animals ("they belong to the gods of the forest") but have no problem with tame animals in their villages. It's one way they learn how the animals act. Again, the wildlife biologists strongly recommend that you never do this, but it certainly happens. Many problems arise from human cluelessness, of course.

    Domesticate: You control the breeding of a species group, and they normally bond with humans. This is what was done in the silver fox experiment (among other things), and those foxes are domesticated. This usually manifests in animals having fairly obvious (and in mammals, stereotypical) morphological changes (color morphs, curled tails, floppy ears, etc.). Right now is the golden age of domestication, as humans are domesticating everything from bacteria (E. coli), insects (fruit flies, ornamental beetles), any number of pets of every clade, native plants...

    Feral: domesticated "species" (see Relentless Evolution for why this often deserves quotes) living wild.

    Where the biologists (and especially bureaucrats) get their shorts knotted up is when a human relationship with another species falls through the cracks between the definitions. One example is dingoes (e.g. https://theconversation.com/dingoes-and-humans-were-once-friends-separating-them-could-be-why-they-attack-115917 and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016718517302312). Dingoes are an offshoot of the pariah dogs of Southeast Asia. As such, they straddle the lines between a domestic breed (and they were bred--their ancestors were wolves), feral (as most of them are), and wild (as they're treated by white Australians). Aborigines often used to tame dingo pups, but they spontaneously return to the wild when they hit sexual maturity. Here the problem is the label, not the complex relationship. Where it gets into a real problem is that bureaucracies run on labels, and this tends to lead to really crappy land and wildlife management.

    2327:

    Cats have been domesticated to not harm their owners, owners' children etc.; wild cats behave very differently. That's probably the only respect in which they are, though. I should have mentioned that my disbelief that 50 years would be enough refers to fed but not bred London foxes, not the much more systematic Russian project which does seem to have done the job in that time.

    2328:

    Our posts crossed. Yes, I was being unclear, and agree with you. People don't realise how fast systematic breeding can cause significant differences in plants and animals, if the traits are latent in the genome! No fancy technology needed, though knowledge of Mendel's results, Darwin's conclusions and simple statistics helps ....

    2329:

    Our posts crossed. Yes, I was being unclear, and agree with you. People don't realise how fast systematic breeding can cause significant differences in plants and animals, if the traits are latent in the genome! No fancy technology needed, though knowledge of Mendel's results, Darwin's conclusions and simple statistics helps ....

    Certainly agreed!

    The other thing is that it depends on the animal. A domestic fox is not dog, and it's going to act differently even if it's got a domestic coat, floppy ears and a curled tail. Habituating garden foxes to the humans on the property isn't even taming them. It's just being neighborly.

    Cats are an example of this: they've got an innate socialization period (IIRC, around eight weeks). That's when you can imprint a kitten to love being handled by humans, though cuddling, play, feeding, and so on. Miss that period entirely and you've got a feral cat who's going to take years to learn to trust people and tolerate being patted on the head. Dogs obviously don't work that way.

    Also with cats, we're not breeding them properly for what we mostly want from them. All too often, the ones that breed are the feral street cats, while the ones that love being with humans get neutered or spayed and never breed. That doesn't make the species genetically more human-tolerant. If we had any sense, we'd work harder to spay the feral cats and breed more love bug kittehs. Then we'd have the proper baby-substitute, furry little social parasites that are so much fun to have around.

    2330:

    Oh 2022! indeed
    Tell me it ain't true, but it appears - from several sources that:
    Some/many civilians are being/are going to be "evacuated" from the Donbass into Ru proper. And there's a major exercise tomorrow.
    What a wonderful excuse for a very convenient "mistake" &/or false-flag & off Putin goes .... I note the Ukrainians are saying "It's not us!" louder & louder.
    Anyone got a take on which "side" ( if either ) Al-Jazeera is backing, or are they about as honest as it's possible to get?

    2331:

    TEST
    Vixen - taken on old low-res phone - about a metre away

    2332:

    Why do you claim that it can't be what I said in #681 in the "Quantum of Nightmares: spoiler time!" thread (and elsewhere on this blog)?

    That sort of behaviour is what caused the Kremlin to start supporting the separatists in the first place and, as I said, has been used 'successfully' by the USA in Syria. We know that the USA and UK have been supplying heavyish armaments.

    Yes, it's bad news, but who is trying to do what is unclear.

    2333:

    EC
    It could be - but it equally might not be.
    A lot of Ukrainians made the mistake of joining Vlasov in WWII in the mistaken belief that Adolf was nicer to know than Stalin, after all.

    2334:

    paws4thot @ 2320: 2316 - I have a similar issue at work; I "sneak up on people" meaning that I have quiet footfalls.

    Most of the time I'd have my tool belt on and you could hear me coming by the rattling of all my keys & other stuff. Occasionally I'd be working standing in one place - an equipment room - and would take the tool belt off. And then I would need to go to the other end of a circuit to check something and it didn't make sense to put the belt back on when I only needed a screwdriver & my meter ... so I'd leave the belt & just carry the screwdriver.

    When I did that, I didn't make much noise & sometimes it startled people when I came into view without the sound of the grand clatter preceding me & announcing my presence.

    2335:

    2329 - Personal account. We had a garden surrounded by high fences and hedges. A young crow landed in said garden, and we fed and watered it for about 2 weeks, after which we got up one morning and it was gone.
    2 weeks later I was going for a walk and saw a young crow which watched me walk past about 6 feet from it. Then a lady with a child in a pushchair got to about 30 feet from it, and it took off. My conclusion was that it was prepared to let the people who had looked after it get much closer than usual.

    2336:

    Crows and a few other birds show off the charts inteligence compared to most other birds and many mammals. Especially considering their brain size.

    2337:

    On foxes: I was in Hyde Park this summer and saw tourists hand-feeding the local foxes while picnicking. I've also heard reports of people deliberately going to feed foxes in the car park of our local leisure centre. This is pretty clueless: foxes bite when frightened or annoyed, and there is a risk that the foxes will discover that a bite makes people drop food.

    On crows: this.

    2338:

    I like it. The crows.

    And they may be smart enough so that if smoking declines they will figure out another way to get food.

    Purple Martins on the other hand.

    And harking back to Heteromeles at 2329...

    In the eastern US they are depend on humans for nests/housing. To the extend they no longer build their own nests. And they like to return each year to the same locations. And people encourage them as they eat a LOT of insects. Especially mosquitos. And this has been going on to some degree since before the Europeans showed up.

    Personally I've thought of putting up a Martin house or few but don't want to until my housing situation is more permanent. I doubt anyone I sell to would keep the houses up.

    2339:

    Yes, these long-term relationships are always a tricky to set up. I'd suggest doing it anyway and leaving a note for whoever follows you.

    My mom, incidentally, has a whole little routine and call she does to let the local ravens know she's put out food for them. All the local birds know it. They rush the yard to get a share before the ravens get there, if the ravens aren't already there waiting. Right now, she's even got a special little side call for the wren that lives in the yard, so that it can pop out and get some food before all the bigger birds chase it off.

    In return, the ravens copy my mom's call when they want her, either when she's late with the food or there's something in the yard that worries them (like a coyote). And for years, every visitor who shows up gets a raven fly-by. Most of them don't notice. The ones that do usually go bug-eyed.

    I'm debating what to do when she finally leaves that house. Probably I'll write up what's going on, so that the new owners don't think the lot is cursed, but most likely they won't continue the practice.

    At the heart of it, what my mom's doing is quite simple. She got sick of all the clearing that was going on around her, so she decided to turn her yard into a wildlife oasis so they could continue to raise their kids. To us, the wildlife are neighbors and are treated as such. And they return the favor.

    2340:

    Dude! Your mom sounds like a badass!

    2341:

    I would suggest the Neanderthals never died out. What you have is a tiny population of Neanderthals, and a very large population of modern humans in Africa, successive waves of new arrivals over the millennia and some enthusiastic interbreeding. So you have the Neanderthals surviving and successfully reproducing, but disappearing as a distinct population as their genes get swamped by those of the incomers. Of course those genes that helped them adapt to the climate were retained in the new mixed population - hence my white skin!

    2342:

    In a somewhat opposite note, when we're dog sitting for my daughter we ring some camel bells before we let them into the back yard. They are fast enough (65+ pounds) to catch rabbits, chipmunks, and squirrels who are not warned. When let out they are at full speed and launch off our deck like planes from a carrier.

    Most of our outdoor creatures have learned the bells mean to sit up and pay attention. The smarter ones head for the side fences.

    2343:

    Yes, these long-term relationships are always a tricky to set up. I'd suggest doing it anyway and leaving a note for whoever follows you.

    Our house is a tear down. So the odds of a developer dealing with such a thing over a season is practically nil. Assuming they even leave it up.

    And PM houses require work to keep out the "riff raft".

    2344:

    I would suggest the Neanderthals never died out. What you have is a tiny population of Neanderthals, and a very large population of modern humans in Africa, successive waves of new arrivals over the millennia and some enthusiastic interbreeding.

    Except for the "very large population" part, that is what happened. It probably started millennia before Campei Flegrei and continued until the last morphologically distinct Neanderthals were gone.

    2345:

    I did mean large in Paleolithic terms, compared with ice-age Europe

    2347:

    David L @ 2346:

    Yes, these long-term relationships are always a tricky to set up. I'd suggest doing it anyway and leaving a note for whoever follows you."

    Our house is a tear down. So the odds of a developer dealing with such a thing over a season is practically nil. Assuming they even leave it up.

    And PM houses require work to keep out the "riff raft".

    That's my situation too; Zero dollar house sitting on a $300k piece of dirt, and all the house flippers keep calling me because they think just because I'm getting old I'm going to be stupid enough to let them steal the property out from under me with some ridiculous low ball offer.

    I'm losing the battle to keep the "riff-raff" (critters) out ... but what are "PM houses"?

    2348:

    what are "PM houses"?

    Purple martin houses, I think. The riff-raff are bugs, rodents, and probably less desirable birds

    2349:

    Yes. Purple Martins. But other birds, especially European starlings and house sparrows can show up a few weeks earlier and take over the spaces and have to be evicted at times. The Purple Martins are prodigious eaters of mosquitos and thus well regarded as neighbors.

    https://www.thespruce.com/purple-martin-houses-386646

    https://nestwatch.org/learn/all-about-birdhouses/birds/purple-martin/

    By the way, if you folks across the pond want them we now have a about 150 million you can take back.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_starling#North_America

    2350:

    jebus, wikipedlo says "The house sparrow and European starling are known to kill adult martins, take over the nest and remove eggs or remaining young."

    and nearly all the pm human "landlords" are over 50 cos de yoot are too busy fiddling with their iphones or something

    2351:

    Starlings are vicious little fuckers. They kill each other by grabbing the other bird's head with one foot and squeezing a claw in through each eye to meet in the brain, which is quite splendidly gruesome.

    Had no idea spadges were similarly inclined, though.

    2352:

    I don't know if I first came across this here or somewhere else, but for those who haven't heard it before, Mitchell & Webb on the true meaning of birdsong.

    Starlings are vicious little fuckers. They kill each other by grabbing the other bird's head with one foot and squeezing a claw in through each eye to meet in the brain, which is quite splendidly gruesome.

    I found this surprising; most animal fights are much more about posturing to persuade the other one to back down; actual fights to the death are very rare. But a quick look around the Net found this (see pages 295 and 296), and also more photogenically, this.

    2353:

    Apparently in the US (maybe just eastern US), owls and crows hate each other. And will attack when they find each other. But since they live on opposite sides of the clock they tend to not meet up.

    2354:

    Great Horned owls (very large North American owls) will kill roosting crows, and eat their heads or just their (large) brains. They are silent nighttime death.
    Crows will sometimes find a Great Horned owl (or owls) during the day (they can be hard to spot) and call in a mob (with recognizable vocalizations) to harass it/them until the owl(s) leave(s) the area. Had the mobbing happen with a pair of Great Horned owls that nested and raised (3?) chicks in one of several very large willow trees in my yard. The parents did not leave; they just suffered the harassment until the crows gave up. Took a while for me to spot the owls; the weird/disturbing noises at night when they fed the chicks were the only obvious sign that they were there.

    Crow mobbing behavior is also sometimes invoked for other large birds of prey, though they generally leave vultures alone.

    2355:

    I found this surprising; most animal fights are much more about posturing to persuade the other one to back down; actual fights to the death are very rare.

    Not as rare as people used to think:

    https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/28/495798448/what-meerkat-murder-tells-us-about-human-violence

    19.4% of all meerkat deaths are caused by another meerkat. That's the highest rate of intraspecies killing of all mammals. Puts "The Lion King" in a very different light!

    Also note that numbers 2 through 6 are all primates.

    Specials

    Merchandise

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