I live in the UK. At this point, most of the polite smokers have moved over to vapes. Those left are almost entirely rude wankers who don’t care where their smoke goes and who it affects. The smoking ban came in because 1 smoker can affect dozens of unwilling people.

I have zero issues with vapes. The effect on others is quite minor, outside a few fog machines disguised as vapes.

Most home storage is Lifepo4, rather than lithium ion.

It’s a bit more expensive, and only has 80% of the capacity. In tradeoff, it gains 3-5x the lifespan, and an inability to burst into flames.

Bigger brands tend to be more reliable in capacity and lifespan. Cheap ones are more hit and miss. It might be fine, it might fail after 3 years, rather than 10.

The UK is still a lot more multi party at the lower levels of government, compared to the US. Unfortunately it’s erring towards the US system, rather than away from it.

We are in a media bubble. Basically all our media is owned by a few rich arseholes and they bury a lot of anti right messages.

The BBC used to be remarkably honest and independent from government. The conservatives getting their claws into it was the beginning of the real problems. Even worse, the BBC’s impartiality has been so sacrosanct that a lot of older people just believe it.

A mild bit of light. The green party seems to also be making significant advances. Labour have often played the “don’t split the left vote” card on them. Now it looks like green is overtaking them in some areas. It just doesn’t show up well in a FPTP voting system.

The Brexit crowd have gone conspicuously silent about it. Their lack of crowing says a lot about it.

Even before Brexit, the tide had turned, and that’s only gotten stronger. Unfortunately, the government had their vote and hammered it through. (The fact there was an EU rule change, on tax transparency, the next day, and would have embarrassed a lot of rich UK toffs had NOTHING to do with the timing)

Unfortunately, the reform party is far too strong, and trying to drag us to the extreme right. Our “left wing” primary party (Labour) is now further right than the conservatives (center right party) traditionally sit.

It’s… frustrating.

Pis are excellent mini computers. Unfortunately, their long term reliability isn’t quite there. When I used one, I was getting a couple of lock up crashes a year. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s just enough to be REALLY frustrating to the (less technical) wife. The tipping point is when it goes from “nice to have” to “expected”.

I acquired a 2nd hand NUC, and it’s been bomb proof for a few years now.

Have you SEEN the price of pitchforks now?!? How the hell are peasants supposed to afford one?

I fully agree. The only thing to add is that a lot of the economic issues are due to the type of reactors used. The new designs could be a lot more economical. Unfortunately they get buried under the same red tape as the old bomb factory designs.

I suspect we won’t see a lot of them used until after fusion power renders them redundant.

Nuclear should be part of the solution. Unfortunately, most older plants are bomb factories, that happen to make power. No-one built the newer safe designs, till China got hold of the aborted UK designs.

At this point, most of the west doesn’t have the skilled personnel left to spin nuclear up quickly. We also no longer have the time to deal with building nuclear, as part of the near term solution to climate change.

I would much rather a FOSS option, that is difficult to tap into. The other option is people using proprietary setups that can be data mined without the user’s knowledge.

Its a classic “perfect is the enemy of good” situation.

They also likely have detailed plans and supplies set up for exactly this sort of action. It will be less “teenager with an AK” and more competent, trained soldiers fighting to protect his homeland from invaders.

The UK used submarines during the Falklands war.

The decision was made to sink an Argentinian warship. Critically, they didn’t attack the escort ship. They left it to recover the sailors. Apparently it horrified the British command when it ran, leaving sailors in the water.

A simple radio message “Move and we will sink you. Take no offensive actions and we will give you 5 minutes to launch lifeboats first.” Hell, even a sonar ping would have given them half a chance.

You at least do what you can to give them a fighting chance.

A radio message would have at least let them abandon ship in a (semi) orderly manner. Hell, even a solar ping would have got them into life jackets.

Normally, a sub wouldn’t risk this. They knew in advance, however, that the ship was not currently armed.

The problem with applying that part of game theory here is it makes several assumptions.

The biggest is that the bigger party are playing for maximisation, rather than just to “win”. That is very much not the game with trump.

The second is the assumption that there is only 1 game in play at a time. America could cause devastating economic damage, if it went full tantrum. Europe has noticed how vulnerable they are to that sort of action. They need to patch the holes before playing hardball.

Under these assumptions, taking fairly meaningless hits to buy time makes sense. Pull the wolf’s teeth, before challenging it to bite you.

My wife spent almost 2 weeks in hospital, after our child was born. The biggest expense was parking, at £25. £12.50/week.

Socialised health care is awesome.

Different parts of the government. Charles has all but kicked him out of the royals themselves. This would just be finishing the job.

Neither group has any real say in prosecution etc. This is just an additional ceremonial “Fuck you for making us look bad!”

The rule of thumb with servers is

• Performance
• Reliability
• Power usage
• Noise
• Size

The trick is to remember you don’t actually need much performance. A home server isn’t generally a powerful machine. What matters is that it is always there.

A raspberry pi would actually make a wonderful server. It’s power efficient, small and quiet, with enough grunt to do most jobs. Unfortunately, it falls down on reliability. Arm servers seem more prone to issues than x64 servers. Pis also seems particularly crash prone. Crashing every 3-6 months isn’t an issue for most pi usages. When it’s running your smart home, it’s a pain in the arse.

I eventually settled on a intel NUC system. It’s a proper computer (no HDD on usb etc), with a very low power draw. It also seems particularly stable. Mine has done several years at this point, without a crash.

Bigger servers are only needed when you have too much demand for a low powered option, or need specialist capabilities 24/7. Very few home labbers will need one, in practice.

It’s also worth noting that you can slave a powerful, but power hungry system, to a smaller, efficient one. Only power it on when a highly demanding task requires sorting.

I’ve fixed this several times with a bit of thick tape. It wasn’t actually the button that had worn down, but the plastic stub that pressed it. A bit of extra material kept each working for months/years after.

My current mouse has this fix over a year back, and is still working reliably.

In an ideal world, you have conservatives and revolutionaries. The revolutionaries want to make changes to try and make things even better. The conservatives act to maintain the status quo. When they balance properly then you get steady change, but slow enough to detect and fix cascading problems/failures.

In this situation, the centralists act as the balance point, being swayed one way or the other to set the path.

Unfortunately the only place this is actually close to accurate is Sci-Fi novels.