The language of "trade deficits" is exactly the wrong way around.

The rest of the world gives you *actual things which are useful* and you only have to give them a piece of paper (or even better, increment a number in a database) in return. I know who I think wins in that equation.

And all modern cars - petrol, hybrid, diesel, EV, etc result in quite a lot of particulates being produced in the form of rubber wear from the tyres. I think this is probably underappreciated in terms of human health impact but unfortunately there isn't a huge amount of research into this.

I think this is the result of two things

(1) range not being big enough to start with. People who bought an EV where 230 miles was "enough" range for their specific use case probably won't replace the battery if it drops from 230 to 140, because they're both "enough" for the purpose they bought that vehicle for - i.e. if 140 miles isn't enough, 230 miles probably doesn't move the needle enough for many people. If range started at 600 miles and dropped to 360 miles, I suspect there'd be a greater replacement rate.

(2) You can easily finance a new car but not a repair. So people would rather replace the car than the battery because the upfront cost is much more manageable.

Assuming that the balance of renewable energy production vs non-renewable production in the world isn't itself affected by the decision of where to site these plants (which isn't always true of course but unless you're building your own generation it's close enough) - this is the wrong way to think about it. Instead, it makes much more sense to locate manufacturing facilities in such a way as to reduce the transport-miles involved in manufacturing since this results in a reduction in the total system energy usage ("the global economy" is the system), which should result in lower CO2.

So, use inconveniently-located but very low CO2 sources like hydro to power things like datacentres, which can be sited more or less anywhere. For anything else, there's a trade-off to consider between the two. But in the mean time focus on reducing the CO2 emissions in power generation globally, by extending grids, and focusing new-build generation on lower-CO2 sources.

Fortunately, we already have a machine which can help us balance this trade-off - the price mechanism of the economy. All that's required is that the cost of the externality (CO2 produced) is correctly factored in everywhere in the world, via either a cap and trade scheme or a carbon tax.

I'm not an American and don't live there so I have pretty well no skin in this game. I have no idea whether the accusations are true, although my gut instinct is to say they're certainly not well-corroborated enough that they should ever have seen the light of day in such a public forum. But I don't think it's true that all the Democrats have achieved is greater polarisation - it seems to me it's actually some quite clever (and very cynical) politics on their part. Either he's not confirmed, in which case they get a bit more influence over future "political" decisions the court makes, or he IS confirmed, and they have motivated their base to turn out in the midterms. It's win/win for them. Just a shame about Ford and Kavanaugh, for both of whom it's lose/lose.

A roughly mainstream desktop PC spec in 2012 would have been quad-core AMD Piledriver or Intel Sandy Bridge, probably 4GB RAM. That's still more than enough to run Windows 10 and Office 2016. Laptops similarly. Contrast that to the difference between 1988 and 1994 (for example). This is entirely an issue with phones/tablets, and is down to (1) the relative immaturity of those devices and (2) a pricing structure for phone contracts which incentivises "upgrades" every two years based on contract renewal.

It's really not that difficult. You just say it must be possible to remove the battery without use of any tools or significant effort, by an average person (not a specialist), in less than [x] seconds. Then you delegate responsibility for signing off on whether its complied with to the exact same bodies who already are responsible for product certification - the infrastructure for product certification is already there, so it's just adding another rule to be complied with before the product gets certified. You give manufacturers enough notice (probably 2-3 years) to enable them to build it into their next product cycle and allow old devices to be grandfathered in but that's a short term issue. If the regulation is targeted, no manufacturer who cares about their reputation will dare oppose it given the obvious reasons for it and limited cost.

Yes, you'll never get absolutely everyone and the enforcement effort to get every last manufacturer and stop every last non-compliant import is not worth it - but if even 50% of the market complies, that's still a huge improvement on today's situation. In reality I think you'd get more like 90% of the market fairly easily.

At least in the UK, we already have this part. There are recycling bins where I can take smaller batteries in my local supermarket and at work (and in many other places), and larger batteries (eg car batteries) can be taken to the local dump.

I can't see how this can possibly work in eg Malta, Luxembourg and Cyprus, countries which are very small so will have almost no local content either back catalogue or current production. Just means Netflix etc will never do business there.

It goes beyond 'funding secured'. Potentially even more problematic is 'Investor support is confirmed. Only reason why this is not certain is that itâ(TM)s contingent on a shareholder vote.'

It's a bit more sophisticated than that. There's some good evidence that good professional investors can beat the market (and most amateurs) relatively consistently. Unfortunately there's also very good evidence that they typically take all of that outperformance (and often more) back in the fees they charge, so that if *you* invest with them then you (on average) won't be better off than if you'd just bought the lowest-cost index fund tracking whatever they measure themselves against you can find (which may or may not be an ETF).

Sell-side analysts (ie those not working internally in an investment firm to support investment decisions) are a very different thing to investors of course... they face conflicting incentives which often don't align with "best returns" (as a simple example being controversial can often be much more rewarding for them than being right).

And that's ignoring whether the benchmark index is even the right measure (for you) to start with of course.

In some ways, driving with Autopilot (and it will get worse as these systems become more advanced) is like supervising a learner driver. Most of the time (in the limited scenarios it can be fully engaged) it will act like a normal fully-qualified driver but every so often it will fail to react properly or just do something really erratic. If you're the human in charge of the vehicle in those situations, then the role you are fulfilling is more akin to that of a driving instructor than to that of a regular driver. Except actually its worse because you can't communicate with the "actual driver" like a human would and you may well be driving down roads you've never seen in your life before so don't know where the "danger spots" might be which people tend to get wrong.

There are very good reasons why most countries require full time driving instructors to pass additional tests and re-certify relatively frequently. I think it's worth considering whether we ought to apply the same standards to some types of semi-autonomous driving tecnnology.

This is a new use of language even in the UK though. Historically, we had "articled clerkships" for (professional) office jobs, and apprenticeships for trades. That use of language probably disappeared in the 1970s or 80s and it seems everyone has forgotten it.

Under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, in the UK lesser offences are indeed 'forgotten' in many important respects after a period of time (they become 'spent'). For example, it's illegal for most employers to ask about spent offences, and the offenders have the support of the law in lying about them if they are asked anyway. I don't see that this is particularly out of step with that principle.

Nor can you properly study it if you do bring the species back this way, since a large amount of what many animals do is thought to be heritable through group behaviour, environment and other non-genetic factors.