Richard Gadsden

Richard Gadsden

  • Commented on Worldcon in the news
    Re: legal personality and non-profits. People, especially when crossing between countries where the terminology of these things is very different, tend to get confused between these two concepts. They are different but related. There are various legal forms that an...
  • Commented on The coming storm
    Water in a desert? If you've got tons of spare electricity, and this only makes any sense if they do, then desalinating seawater is the least of your problems. You're going to have the desalination, electrolysis and Sabatier plants along...
  • Commented on The coming storm
    I'm a large person - tall and fat - and also not very flexible, so if I'm driving, I like a generous amount of room. I tend to hire something from the "Standard SUV" range from car hire places -...
  • Commented on The coming storm
    If Saudi builds a load of solar farms, then the smart move would then be to build plants to electrolyse water into hydrogen, plants to do atmospheric carbon dioxide capture, and then run a Sabatier plant to combine the two...
  • Commented on The coming storm
    The people I'm speaking to may be lying, or they may be being lied to, but I am hearing things indirectly from inside Labour that they are realising that if they win big (which looks increasingly plausible), then they will...
  • Commented on I should blog more, but ...
    British subject until 1948, after that we were "Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies" until 1983, and "British Citizen" since then....
  • Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
    Absolutely, but there is the requirement to have two doctors' signatures. An abortion done using grey market mifepristone was prosecuted relatively recently (in Northern Ireland, but still) because it wasn't authorised by doctors. Texas, etc are going to have lots...
  • Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
    AIUI you can only be extradited if the crime you are accused of is a crime in both nations. Abortion isn't illegal in the UK, so it wouldn't be extraditable. Abortion is a criminal offense in the UK. There is...
  • Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
    An essential add-on in the current century is that social media recommendations must not be algorithmically biased to maximize engagement or promote any particular ideology. More subtly: a complete ban on behavioural advertising would be a good idea. There is...
  • Commented on What happens now?
    The "royal we" is not strictly speaking on behalf of the nation, in that that represents an overly modern view of the nation as being the people in it. It's probably closest to the idea of the Pope speaking "ex...
  • Commented on Countdown to Crazy
    I think that what is in it for Putin is that it's a signal to any future proxy that Putin and Russia will protect them if it all goes to shit. If Trump ends up in prison in the US,...
  • Commented on Countdown to Crazy
    The reason DC isn't a state is that they originally had the capital in New York and later in Philadelphia and the state governments of New York and Pennsylvania kept trying to interfere with the running of the federal government...
  • Commented on Countdown to Crazy
    The House of Representatives (currently controlled by the Democratic Party) passed a bill - called HR.51 - which was then rejected by the Senate (currently controlled by the Republican Party) on DC statehood. What it did was cede all of...
  • Commented on I ain't dead
    One problem with Falcon Heavy is that the second stage is underpowered. It's great for getting a lot of mass into LEO, but it doesn't get that much even to GEO, much less to a TLI/TMI or other interplanetary transfer....
  • Commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
    Great British Bake Off / Great British Baking Show falls into the rarer third category of reality TV, which is neither incompetence porn nor competence porn, but learning porn. You can generally spot "learning porn" shows because the contestants talk...
  • Commented on CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE
    I think I agree with most of what you you wrote. I don't live in NI, but I spent a fair bit of time there helping the Alliance (I'm an English Lib Dem) in the 1990s (the youth wings of...
  • Commented on CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE
    The majority of the NI population are now non-aligned. More than 50%, per current polling, do not identify as Unionists or Republicans. They just want to get along. NI politics has been static for a long time - people either...
  • Commented on Social architecture and the house of tomorrow
    There is one way that global warming could trigger an ice age. If it kills enough people that we stop cutting down trees, we could see a significant drop in CO2 levels as a result. There is some suspicion that...
  • Commented on The Inevitable Brexit Thread (1)
    "Meaningful vote" is a trace of a previous row. The original version of the EU Withdrawal Bill allowed the Government to ratify a Withdrawal Agreement without having to go back to the Commons. The Commons kicked up a fuss, and...
  • Commented on Publishing: A Slice of Life
    The thing that came to my mind was "what series does Random Penguin currently have the unpublished manuscript to the next volume in?" Because having a copy of the next Harry Potter before publication was actually worth something. Note that...
  • Commented on Do my Homework
    Industry in space. The thing we tend to forget, because we think of space as cold, is that space is a really really good insulator. If you want to do a chemical process at a very very high temperature, then...
  • Commented on That sinking feeling
    Or, much simpler "The market can stay irrational much longer than you can stay solvent"....
  • Commented on That sinking feeling
    Where the fuck have those hundreds of Remain-supporting MPs all gone? OK, let's do an explainer on this: There are 317 Tory MPs now. Of these, there are perhaps 50 who are seriously pro-Leave (the "European Research Group"), 20 that...
  • Commented on The Pivot
    Re: Silk Road. China thinks very very long term. If they can open up and improve rail connections through "Central Asia" (the five former USSR republics east of the Caspian Sea) then there are three possible routes to the EU:...
  • Commented on Silence is ending (soon)
    Apology not required from this fan. Your father died. I'm amazed that you're standing up right now, much less writing a novel. Thank you, anyway, I'm sure I'll enjoy it. Meanwhile I recommend getting drunk and hugging your wife and...
  • Commented on Bread and Circuses (circumlunar version)
    While that's a part of it, it's mostly a case of an over-ambitious new technology. There was a load of electrification done in NW England in the last few years, and that was mostly done with merely normal overruns on...
  • Commented on Catching Up
    It's notable that although the Tories were "cleared" of the Battle Bus spending scandal from 2015 (sending busloads of supporters around to marginal constituencies but claiming it as national expenses), they didn't dare try it again and they were comprehensively...
  • Commented on The sudden eruption of news
    Some very sensible person on twitter that I can't find right now said that May was a typical Daily Mail reader that, for some reason, lots of people think is pretending to be a typical Daily Mail reader....
  • Commented on 2117 revisited
    I'm sure there will be electric puddle-jumpers for crossing water, and in regions where there isn't the population density to build fast land-transport infrastructure, or where the geography makes that impractical. And there will be electric bizjets for the very...
  • Commented on 2117 revisited
    Given the diversity in Spanish within Latin America and between Latin America and Iberia, and the similarity between Spanish and Portuguese, I'm not entirely convinced that the Spanish/Portuguese distinction will be the most relevant one in 2117. Portuguese is at...
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