I mean the UK has 6% of its energy over the year come from solar, and 30% from wind, and installations are only accelerating, so this amount of installed solar is far from unrealistic.

Installing storage approximately doubles the LCOE of solar energy, so this is also feasible from a cost point of view as we get rid of dispatchable gas turbines.

Basically if we solve storage, we can get rid of nuclear, but not before.

I am not saying we should get rid of nuclear. I am saying we should keep some nuclear, also once we have got less gas and more storage. Does this resolve some things in this discussion for you?

Not really enough information. I will assume that by “installed solar power” you mean peak generation when the sun is shining, and that instead of peak use, you mean 40% of average use, i.e. let’s suppose that at an average moment the country consumes 100GW and, if the sun is shining, generates 40GW from solar.

Assume further the sun is up for half the year and the sky is clear for half the year, meaning the total amount of your yearly electricity you can generate with solar is 10% assuming typical weather. Then you would be able to reliably power the country with a combination of nuclear totalling 90% of average use (90GW) and enough storage that you can ride out cloudy periods.

No, COVID is very low in the US - just as in the early days when there was little testing available, you can track what the disease is doing by looking at hospital admissions data.

I did mention people who are particularly vulnerable, and if that includes you then the rest of what I said doesn’t apply to you. I find it’s more efficient to talk about the likely case and mention the exception in a single message than to first ask “are you immunocompromised” and then reply separately.

I would go a step further and have creative grants to people. It would work in a way similar to the BBC and similar broadcasters, where a body gets government money and then picks creative projects it thinks are worthwhile, with a remit that goes beyond the lowest common denominator. UBI ensures that this system doesn’t have a monopoly on creative output.

I don’t understand what you’re asking, sorry.

I dunno about the MAGAs, but I think at this point, with COVID very low in the USA, most people are wearing masks because it sends a signal about where they stand on COVID, not for their own protection. Obviously there are some people who are particularly vulnerable, who can’t have the vaccine for example, for whom mask-wearing will remain important forever (and would likely have been beneficial before the pandemic) but I don’t believe that’s the majority.

The reason is that mask wearing in my home country went down to zero after most people were vaccinated and the virus became uncommon. But here mask-wearing was never politicised, so without an anti-mask group to oppose it never became a symbol for those who did wear them.

Glad we can agree this is not about new offences.

In the UK there is no specific crime of identity theft, with offences generally being prosecuted as fraud. Fraud requires that the person committing the fraud intend to make a gain of money or property, or to cause someone else to make a loss of money or property.

There’s no real way to frame this as being bad for children except inasmuch as people over the age of consent (which is 16 in the UK) should be free to access as much porn as they please.

Solar and nuclear work just fine together. Nuclear is expensive (and most cost effective if kept running all the time, rather than switched on and off) but it reduces the cost of solar (lower proportion of solar means you don’t need as much storage) and hedges against bad weather.

To Brits it is pornographic.

The act in question doesn’t create offences for children; it (mainly) creates offences for service providers.

1. I don’t think reviewing tests which indicate an ectopic pregnancy and writing that a patient has an ectopic pregnancy, that an ectopic pregnancy is a medical emergency, and than an abortion is therefore medically necessary, takes an afternoon. Doctors are busy, and this does take time, so this is a possible - even plausible reason for her to have thought they were dithering, but I also think that medical staff are usually communicative about what’s going on.
2. Certainly they are not, but I think in the period before the doctors go and talk to the lawyers there is ample room for confusion caused by public perception.

In the Florida law, yes, if it’s beyond the (impractically low) gestational age threshold.

This is not that surprising given the position of pro-lifers who think that life begins at conception. The UK just progressed an assisted-dying bill which would legalise the ending of the lives of terminally ill people; even with their consent, two written opinions are needed (in the bill, which is not yet law) to do this.

But yes, it’s a lot of hurdles for something that should in general just be available as a medical procedure.

This casts all people who vote for conservative parties as sheep who will blindly agree with whatever their leader says on a given day. For some that’s true, but most people recognise that unexplained U-turns are a sign of bullshit.

An amnesiac media laser-focused on the 24h news cycle lets the cult develop by not reminding people of what they believed the day before yesterday. Most people don’t like being confronted with this even if they can explain it away, and more focus on it would be an improvement.

And you know that how, exactly?

Florida law allows abortion in the case of ectopic pregnancy or other situations where the mother’s life is in danger. If the events she’s presented are true it’s hard to think other than that the hospital staff were not clear on the law, and no doubt public discourse (which naturally centres around the strictest laws) has had an effect on that.

But it’s also possible that the “reluctance” was just a delay during which her doctors were getting the necessary two written opinions that it was necessary.

You’ve got to wonder about a system which allows a chorus of people saying it would be terrible to become involved in a war in the middle east to do a complete 180. Why aren’t their own words being quoted (by congress, by news) back to them?

We have gone from cruise control to cars being able to drive themselves quite well in about a decade. The last percentage points of reliability are of course the hardest, but that’s a tremendously pessimistic take.

Just pattern recognition it is not the neural net everyone assumes it is.

Tesla’s current iteration of self-driving is based on neural networks. Certainly the computer vision is; there’s no other way we have of doing computer vision that works at all well and, according to this article from last year it’s true for the decision-making too.

Of course, the whole task of self-driving is “pattern recognition”; neural networks are just one way of achieving that.

Comparing huge multinational countries which serve every country to the half of countries with the smallest energy usage is not terribly illustrative.

And my comment only used social media as an example. The point is, big websites have more draw than small websites, leading to a self-amplifying effect.