laurencerowe

and an EU adapter (which, off the record, also works for UK outlets so it covers anywhere I normally travel to).

What type of adapter is this? EU and UK plugs are very different.

James Braidwood established one in Edinburgh in 1824.

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

Unfortunately it can’t since their cell size will never be sufficient for more than a small number of customers in an urban area. Mobile data cells here are a few blocks radius rather than the 10-20 miles in rural areas where Starlink really shines.

I had the same problem in San Francisco with Comcast. The only alternative was wireless service (which was somehow much slower than my iPhone) or slow fixed wireless as my street doesn’t get fiber. Ended up getting my partner to resubscribe to Comcast as a new customer.

Unfortunately Starlink will never be able to make substantial inroads into urban areas since their cell size is far too large to serve a high of density customers well.

Wasn’t booting other operating systems supported from early on (two months after release of M1)? It was reverse engineering the graphics hardware that took time and effort.

Sometimes companies demand you print/sign/scan a document.

I am very pessimistic about the economics of nuclear power but Finland is basically the best case scenario for it.

You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.

There's no point in synchronizing the Nordics / Britain / Ireland with CESA grids since they are interconnected with HVDC rather than AC.

Being part of the same grid doesn't matter so much as the amount of interconnection available. Finland has a higher proportion than Spain since France has stalled on building more interconnection capacity as this will likely reduce the amount they can sell their excess nuclear generation to Germany.

Solar and batteries will be extremely expensive if you have no other backup but you could probably get to 80% quite cheaply with solar and around 12h of storage.

Geography absolutely matters since seasonal dips in solar generation is basically impossible to fix cost effectively with storage at more northerly latitudes as storage only makes financial sense when you can cycle it daily rather than yearly.

The contiguous US is much further south than Northern Europe so it has an easier time of it. But you ideally want wind too since it is anti-correlated with solar.

The Chinese demonstration plant is only 2MW thermal / 300KW electrical with the one currently under construction expecting to up that to 60MW thermal / 10MW electrical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR_(Chinese_reactor_project)

The difficulty with molten salt reactors is that molten salt is highly corrosive. It will be interesting to see if they are able to make them cost effective.

All of the EPR builds in Finland/France/UK have seen enormous construction cost (3-4x) and time (decade+) overruns. France expects its EPR2 builds to cost about 30% less but even if they manage to hit that target it will still be extremely expensive.

My electricity bill is roughly 1/3rd 'CleanPowerSF Electric Generation Charges' vs 2/3rds 'Current PG&E Electric Delivery Charges'. The big problem is that PG&E covers most of rural California so its urban customers have to cover the high costs of compensation and prevention from delivering to fire prone rural areas.

Living in San Francisco I've not seen the taxi exemption for California anywhere. New York City taxis are exempt like most of Europe.

My kid is too young for a booster city. It's pretty impractical to take a child seat or booster with you unless you plan to hire a car the other end. When I travel back to see my family in Europe I take the train from the airport. So we bus and Bart to the airport even though it would be much easier with luggage to take a taxi.

My kid is 2. New York City and most EU countries (including Spain, Portugal, UK, France) allow children to ride in taxis without a car seat.

This makes it far more practical for people to live without a car - hard to imagine in most of the US I know. As most such trips are low speed around town (e.g. getting to and from a train station or airport) it seems a reasonable trade off.

You of course need a car seat in a private car.

I think this is more a design problem with US road infrastructure. City streets are much wider than in other countries which encourages drivers to drive more quickly and allows them to pay less attention. We'd have far fewer pedestrian and cyclist fatalities if we didn't require streets to be so wide.

Other than Alaska it’s almost certainly cheaper to just over provision solar panels and curtail excess generation in the summer months as solar panels are cheaper than batteries and grid connections.

To completely decarbonise we probably will need to eventually make liquid fuels for long distance air travel. But it may make more sense to do that nearer the equator to maximise the return on the capital investment by running it constantly rather than only during the summer.

Driving is very safe at city speeds for those inside the big metal box. Less so for the pedestrians and cyclists on the outside.

Inside San Francisco, using public transit except for directly between BART stops is incredibly slow. For almost all journeys e-bikes dominate the speed discussion, and cars are second. The biggest constraint for us that made us take public transit is that our child was too young for a bike and we'd still only take it to Union Square.

Buses are fairly fast where bus lanes exist. With the kid I now take the bus far more often rather than walking 15 minutes to the Bart station and spending an extra 5 minutes each end navigating Bart’s incredibly poorly located lifts at each end.

I bought an e-bike once the kid was 2 and it has been pretty great. It would be absolutely wonderful if San Francisco created a network of real separated bike lanes or slow streets.

Robocars most certainly exist. They’re probably about 5% of car traffic in San Francisco. I’ve not taken one yet (taxis/ubers/Waymos are mostly impractical with a young kid in the US as you must use a car seat unlike in most European countries) but as a pedestrian they seem mostly a safer than other drivers. As a driver I expect they will eventually induce gridlock but the city can always create more bus lanes.

Cars in the US cost pretty much the same before taxes as in Europe. If Ford can build this truck in the US for this cost there seems little reason it couldn’t build it in the EU for a similar cost. Whether it will offer this body style or not is of course another question (Ford have stopped selling all regular cars in US, only offering crossovers, SUVs and trucks.) This is rather different to the perceived threat of cheap imports from China.

The UK has had substantially less wage inequality than the US for a long time. The UK “wage squeeze” is median/minimum wage which has gone from the 1/3 to 2/3 since ~2000 as the minimum wage has been raised. But the relevant difference here would be around 90th percentile/median which is 1.85 in UK vs 2.4 in US and even higher in California.

Best of all go during the summer solstice when there is free public access. It’s really quite fun.

During the the 1980s and ‘90s there were regular clashes between new age hippies and police stopping them from reaching Stonehenge during summer solstice before public access was allowed.

Augmenting intermittent renewables with nuclear doesn’t really make sense since nuclear is all fixed costs whereas gas generation is mostly fuel costs which makes it economic to run part of the time.

It might not be quite that good in less sunny countries. Similar modest overbuilding of wind and solar in Denmark is simulated to get to about 90% with 12h of storage. This is still good enough though.

https://xcancel.com/enn_nafnlaus/status/1565923581246091264

The problem is that nuclear reactors are huge so you're never going to build that many of them compared to wind turbines (thousands) or solar panels (millions).

France plans to build a series of six reactors for its EPR2 programme with each reactor scheduled for completion 1-2 years apart, but that is only expected to reduce costs by 30% compared to the (hugely expensive) EPR.

Small modular reactors hope to improve things but it's far from clear they will end up any cheaper. Historically making reactors bigger makes them more efficient. The Rolls Royce SMR is just under 1/3rd of the size of the EPR so even if successful any cost reductions are not likely to be dramatic.

By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes.

This really depends on the amount of battery storage installed. In California we now see battery discharging through to the morning.

https://engaging-data.com/california-electricity-generation/

The UK hit a record of 42% peak solar generation around midday one day last month.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-h...

I found making single line changes in Bun’s zig code led to very long compiles compared to doing the same in Rust code. It was a while ago though and maybe I was doing something wrong.

In my experience Bun in Zig compiles more slowly than Deno in Rust.