tonyedgecombe

We didn't have to turn the dial up to eleven though.

That land use has to compete with other uses such as agriculture, leisure and wildlife so the smaller available area is important if you want to make that sort of comparison.

Discussion did take place. There is only so much you can do though.

I’m glad it worked for you but in my case it didn’t.

Ultimately people who continually drag the conversation around to politics just aren’t very nice to be around.

I had to tell my parents to stop talking about politics because it was making me dislike them.

They weren’t informed citizens, they were just regurgitating whatever they happened to read in their newspaper that day.

If you pushed them on anything they said they didn’t really have any understanding beneath the headlines they had read.

It would be better for them if they could disengage from it but they don’t seem to want to.

There is nothing good coming out from their engagement.

Having a couple of hundred bucks a month is fine when everybody around you has the same. It's hard to ignore when people around you have ten or a hundred times as much as you, especially when they start to shape society around themselves.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

When those forkers are large corporations then it probably should make most people think twice.

It's the descendants that don't leave that cause all the problems.

I think we should stop pretending the NHS doesn't have quality and availability issues, which are validly pointed out in the OP article.

I don't think anybody is pretending it doesn't. We just need to ask why it has got so bad since Covid and why we seem to be struggling more than similar European countries.

This isn’t some problem that has developed over time. It was shit from day one.

Two cold starts a day and a vehicle larger than a WW2 tank. Sounds believable.

Companies do bid against that strike price and if it is too low then they don't bid.

I generally agree with the article but there are a couple of issues.

France has roughly the same population as the U.K., but almost 50 percent more homes.

France also has four times the land area compared to the UK.

The Economist ties Britain’s energy scarcity to its overly rapid and haphazard push for decarbonization; having banned coal, and with natural gas now extremely expensive due to the Ukraine war, the UK has been forced to rely on hideously expensive offshore wind power.

The dash for gas came about well before decarbonisation was on the agenda. It was instituted by Thatcher after the coal miners strike and because we had an abundance of it in the North Sea.

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

The NHS is struggling because we have an unhealthy population. A lot of that can be put down to behaviours we have adopted from the US (poor diet, car centric lifestyles and lack of exercise).

It's just lack of competitive pressure. I bet if you investigate you will find there are only a couple of suppliers that have the bowling alley market sewn up between them.

There is a whole world of signalling that many of us are completely oblivious to.

The population is still growing because people are living longer. There aren't many places left in the world with above replacement birth rates.

At the start of the last century the UK had a million people working in the coal mining industry. Now it is effectively zero.

That reduction happened over a long period but it wasn't without its problems. Even now there are old coal mining villages that have never really recovered economically.

But without more info, that seems like a pretty awful assumption.

I don't know why you think that, pretty much everything we buy devolves to energy in some form or another.

We did do that for banking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_Kingdom_bank_rescu...

The UK car industry had been doing quite well until Brexit.

It was Socrates that was skeptical about writing. We only know this because his student Plato wrote it down.

How do you know that what it produces is correct?

I’m wondering if by the time you have been explicit enough in your prompt you might as well have looked up what you needed.

The expression is always terse so it’s not as if you are saving much typing.

And then there is the situation about junior engineers. There are actually two different points in there: a) you cannot trust the effort behind your junior’s code anymore, and b) seniors have no incentive left to teach juniors.

If you are bringing in juniors with the expectation that they won’t produce any value for some time then it might be better to block them from using LLMs.

Do this and you will get a better understanding of where they are in the process and they will probably learn the ropes more quickly.

I don't think so although I can't find the report I read right now.

The excuse for bloat used to be that programmer time was expensive and that it was cheaper to throw more hardware at the problem. I wonder if this will reverse with the advent of AI.

I'm not sure that's really true. The banks that hold Berkshire's money don't just stick it in a vault, they lend it out to people who want to finance a home or car or to businesses that use the money to grow.

It's the same people. Before 2008 they used to go into banking, now they entered tech instead.

Dividing it by country is misleading. The real divide is between the rich and poor. It's hard to create any emissions when you are only spending a few dollars a day. Meanwhile if I take a flight across the Atlantic then that is another five tonnes of carbon in the atmosphere no matter which country I start from.

US imports represent approximately 14% of GDP, exports is about 11%. So net imports represents about 3% of GDP. Assuming emissions are roughly proportional to spending the US is exporting 3% of its emissions.

most people just want the car.

That didn’t happen on its own. It took a huge amount of marketing and lobbying to get where we are today.