This is from the SHO:

"Every year the lives of approximately 1.19 million people are cut short as a result of a road traffic crash. Between 20 and 50 million more people suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability.

"Road traffic injuries cause considerable economic losses to individuals, their families, and to nations as a whole. These losses arise from the cost of treatment as well as lost productivity for those killed or disabled by their injuries, and for family members who need to take time off work or school to care for the injured. Road traffic crashes cost most countries 3% of their gross domestic product....

"...More than 90% of road traffic deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. Road traffic death rates are highest in the WHO African Region and lowest in the European Region. Even within high-income countries, people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to be involved in road traffic crashes."

So you have to imagine a world without cars, and some group puts this proposal to the various legislatures and health and safety organizations: lets introduce this new product and system. It will let people travel at will wherever they want whenever they want. Yes, it will be noisy, polluting, expensive. And it will kill about a million people a year, and injure over 20 million. But it will be all worth it!

There is no way this would get off the ground today. Its something we have grown up with and accept, but the piece is right to say it is an intrinsically totally unacceptable situation.

The real difficulty is making self driving cars work safely in the present chaotic and unpredictable street and highway environment, and I suspect this is something that cannot be done. And even did we do it, the occupants would still be at risk from accidents caused by human drivers. So we will be faced with a choice between keeping our present environment without self driving cars, or clean up the environment, which means making it much more controlled and uniform, and excluding human driven cars from it. If you cannot make the cars drive safely in our present streets, then if you really want to tackle the death and injury problem you are going to have to make the streets safe for the cars.

There are massive problems doing this. Because for a long time, even if you adopt such a program, there are going to be lots of human driven cars on most streets and roads. You clean up certain roads and streets and make them exclusive for self-driving ones, and they are safe for the self-driving. But what happens when they leave these safe environments and are back into human driven chaos for the last mile of a trip?

I don't know what the solution is. The problem of traffic deaths and injuries is much lower in the developed world than in the developing. But its still at totally unacceptable levels. On usual calculations of cost benefit and health and safety we would move as fast as we can to self-driving cars and get people out of the business of driving. But the project would be a huge one, and the costs enormous, and the way to do the transition very unclear.

So I suppose we will stumble on, trying to make self-driving cars work in our chaotic road and street environment, failing. trying to make our present human driven cars safer and lower the death and injury rate, and failing. All one can say at a personal level is, get a car robustly built for survival of accidents, avoid peak danger hours and routes, and hope the air bags work if they are needed. And yes, get the unsafe off the roads at a better rate than we do today. Not at all satisfactory, but I think that's the way it probably is.

Asahi is a great achievement. Its made Apple hardware generally possible and attractive, in spite of Apple. Its a bit like in the previous episode of this opera, running MacOS on non-Apple hardware ,but in reverse.

There are two components, the OS and the hardware. Apple always used to have an OS that people wanted, and so they would put up with hardware that was either inferior or (when they went to Intel) over-priced. If they would only have sold the OS to run on the hardware of your choice they would have sold a heap more of it. But being Apple, they would not.

In fact, you can argue that back in the early days they were largely responsible for the rise in Windows and the IBM compatible OEM industry. They would not license the OS. But they also would not or could not make enough hardware to meet demand. So the market, which wanted PCs of some sort, with some kind of graphical interface, bought the only thing they could get in the required quantity, Windows PCs. Because of the ease of entry into the hardware market pretty soon there were as many of them as anyone wanted. Apple having refused to supply, the market turned to someone who would.

This is now playing out in reverse. At the moment they have hardware that people want. It really does seem like very nice hardware. If they would just sell barebones systems or the same hardware running Windows or Linux they would probably sell heaps of it.

But being Apple, they will not. Being Apple, they insist on selling you the OS, whether you want it or not, if you are going to be allowed to buy their hardware. They are a bit more enlightened than they were in the earlier period, they are not actively doing things to the hardware to stop you running any other OS on it. But they are also not encouraging it, so it will remain a niche market.

Yes, they will sell more Macs with the new hardware and MacOS than they did when they were selling overpriced Intel to people who were determined to run MacOS and so put up with the overpriced Intel hardware Apple insisted on supplying with it. But they are, as in the earlier case, squandering the real opportunity for huge volume sales of their superb hardware, if they would only cut it loose from the OS that none of the market except their fans wants.

Good for Asahi in this situation. They have some of us seriously considering buying Apple hardware for the first time in many decades.

At this point one hears the creaking of joints as the Mac fraternity start jumping up and down, and claiming that sourcing the OS and the hardware from the same source delivers something called better integration. Right. We are supposed to believe that the same OS running on PPC, on Intel, and now on Arm, using standard memory, disks, interface components, screens, keyboards...etc was in all of those iterations somehow mystically more connected to the components than an HP or Asus machine running Windows? Well, you can believe it if it helps you to sleep... but no-one else is buying it.

But we may buy the hardware, now we can get an OS that we want running on it.

Jobs always had the approach that Apple as the hardware supplier owned the customer, and that people making profits off selling Apple's customers their software were essentially ripping Apple off. So the collective dream at Apple has always been that as a developer you should pay for the privilege of being allowed to supply your software to OUR customers.

Apple also has always had the approach that they should own whatever connected to 'their' products, so you see the proliferation of special connectors and protocols. You also see stuff like soldered in memory, so you either buy it at the outset or do without. Again, its you will buy your memory from Apple, and you will pay whatever they ask for it. Or do without.

In the end this turns into an ambition for total control over whatever the customer did with 'our' computer. Or phone. Or music player.

There is a different point of view possible on this issue. Namely, that the customer has bought some hardware and should be free to load whatever they want to on it, connect it to whatever they want, and that they don't owe Apple anything for the privilege, neither do the people who develop the software or provide the other things that we connect.

The EU has taken the traditional anti-trust point of view that as much mixing and matching as the customer wants should be possible, and that if you have sold the hardware, you must not prevent your hardware customer from putting what he wants on it. Just as if you are GM back in the day, when they were really powerful, they could not oblige car owners to buy spare parts only from GM. Or various kinds of add-ons. And they could not charge the suppliers of these third party things a fee for the privilege of installing them in the customer's own car.

The interesting social question is why Apple users are generally so enthusiastic about having their ability to do what they want with their own product restricted.

It seems to be because they have bought into the Apple myth that its a different, more worthy, more politically correct company, and whatever it does must be applauded, and all criticism of anything resisted.

The EU however is a different beast. It has its own bad and illegitimate reasons for doing what its doing. But its doing the right thing for bad reasons, and its stance is amusingly similar to Apple's. It thinks it owns its market, and if you want to sell here, you play by our rules and probably pay for the privilege. Remind you of anything?

China per capita emissions are the same as the EU! But... In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Pedro Pedroso, the outgoing president of the G77 plus China bloc of developing countries, warned that the landmark deal made at last year's climate talks in Dubai risked failing. "We achieved some important outcomes at Cop28 but the challenge now is how we translate the deal into meaningful action for the people," Pedroso said. "As we speak, unless we lie to ourselves, none of the major developed countries, who are the most important historical emitters, have policies that are moving away from fossil fuels, on the contrary, they are expanding," said Pedroso.

Yet again this crazy idea that if the West would only reduce or eliminate its emissions all would be well. You notice here that Pedroso refers only to historical emissions. This is to save his readers from the inconvenient fact that its China that is doing one third of the world's emitting, that China burns and mines more coal than the rest of the world put together, and that China has no intention of reducing its emissions. And that China is rapidly catching up with the West's irrelevant historical emissions.

The fact is, if the West were to eliminate all its emissions over the next ten years, there would still be no lowering of global emissions. If there is a problem, its not with the West. Global Warming, if there is any, and if its being CO2 driven, is being driven not by the West but by China, India etc. And every COP that happens, attendance rises, and all of the rapid growing high emitters refuse to even consider reducing. This will carry on until we run out of COPs. And the Guardian keeps on running stories about how the important thing is for the UK or the US to make emission reductions which will have no effect on the global total.

The thing to read on this is Rupert Darwall's recent piece for Real Clear Climate, here:

https://assets.realclear.com/f...

The UK is a great case history. The UK has reduced its emissions 2008-2019 from 545 million tons to 365. During that same period world emissions went from 31.5 billion to 36.7 billion. Yes, that is BILLIONS, and the UK reduction really was MILLIONS. Tell me again, why did they do this? Was it really because climate?

The world is not going to reduce emissions until it runs out of coal and oil. The non-Western countries are not going to reduce their emissions voluntarily before then. They are going to keep growing their economies and keep emitting.

If you really do believe there is a climate crisis and pending catastrophe, well, its coming, there is nothing in the West anyone can do to avert it, so spend your efforts on preparing for it and dealing with it and protecting your own citizens from the consequences.

Because that is the only thing you can do.

Can Pumping CO2 Into California's Oil Fields Help Stop Global Warming?

No. Because too little will be removed from the atmosphere as a result to have any effect at all on Global Warming. Or anything else.

People are always wanting to do things 'because climate' without stating what the effects on the climate will be. In the current case there are about 37 billion tons a year, and rising, of global emissions.

How much are they going to pump into the oil fields? The answer should be in tons/year.

As usual, no-one is saying. Tells you all you need to know.

Sounds a bit like an ipod touch, where as long as you have wifi you can do all of the things mentioned...

So lets see, why don't we add mobile broadband to an ipod touch, then we could do all that good stuff everywhere...? Maybe even add mobile voice too, then we'd have a dynamite product.

Wonder why no-one has ever thought of that.

"Dude. You conservatives won. As a species, weâ(TM)ve done literally nothing about carbon emissions."

Well no, actually it was the Chinese Communist Party who has won and is winning. Because they are the leading emitters, more than a third of global emissions. They are the leading coal miners and burners (more than the rest of the world put together). They are the ones who are installing more coal generating plant than the rest of the world put together.

So unless you think the Chinese Communist Party is 'conservatives', you have it totally ass-backwards. What has happened is that the far left Maoists have won, they are busy growing emissions as fast as they can, while paying vague lip service to the idea of somewhere in the indefinite future lowering emissions. Well, not exactly LOWERING them, not as such, more like lowering them as a function of GDP, which turns out to mean in fact, well, actually it means... increasing them.

Meanwhile the West, including the US cram full of evil conservatives, is doing its level best to reduce. And because they are the only ones trying to reduce, and only account for around 25% of global emissions and falling, it turns out that despite the best efforts of these evil US conservatives to reduce global emissions, what is actually happening is they are rising.

Ain't life complicated?

All sports with repeated head impact lead to dementia. Soccer from heading, though there are some collision concussions. Check out the health conditions of the English World Cup team members. Its a big deal in soccer. Then Rugby, lots of cases there from collisions. Boxing of course, the punch drunk syndrome. Football. Ice hockey.

Both rugby and soccer have developed increased risks recently for different reasons. Soccer because the lighter and drier ball has led to more heading, and because in the professional game the number of fixtures has increased, as well as the intensity of training sessions. Rugby its because systematic programs of weight training have led to increased bulk and strength for teams already selected for bulk, and there too you have in the professional game greatly increased numbers of fixtures. The physics of collisions means that as weight increases the force of the impact rises faster.

Some people in the UK have proposed, hard to say how seriously, eliminating heading the ball in soccer. The authorities have limited the amount of heading by young players, banned it below certain ages. The problem is that the weight of the ball is the same, but the mass and strength of the muscles of the neck is much lower, so the impact and movement of the head is greater. Same applies to a lesser extent to the women's game.

Better monitoring is leading to more exact knowledge on how many impacts there are, and sensors can measure their force much more precisely. But in football the collisions are a main element of the game. You probably could eliminate heading from soccer without losing much of the dynamics of play. In Rugby it should be possible to enforce tackling rules which greatly reduce head impacts. But boxing or football its hard to see how that can be done while keeping the sport recognizable. Boxing is basically head banging.

The moral for a parent must be, steer your boys into track and field. Girls even more so. And if they want a martial art, Brazilian ju-jitsu.

"....this article is complete fluff...."

Yes, spot on. Not a single number in it. Its the Guardian. The Guardian is in a perpetual state of moral panic over one imaginary threat after another, while persistently ignoring real threats and really bad things that are actually going on. Right now its in the grip of global warming hysteria so everything possible has to be reported on with some angle to do with that. Its kind of hilarious that it should call out other people for having a moral panic on AI. Pot and kettle!

Its staff and writers are innumerate liberal arts graduates, so its devoid of any critical quantitative analysis of any of the issues it covers. It doesn't know the difference between advocacy and reporting. Its basically the house newspaper of the British Labour Party, and will tailor its approaches to whatever is currently the party line, but its not just the Labour Party, its what might be called the 'Hampstead tendency' in that party, which is marked by an oblivious self-righteousness, a deep dislike of Britain, and a thoroughgoing internationalism, starting with a sort of slavish infatuation with the EU.

The most hilarious recent example of it in the grip of a moral panic was when it temporarily interrupted its constant haranguing of its readers over the systemic racism, sexism and general wickedness of British society to admit to something its staff had only just noticed: that back in the days of the American Civil War it had definitely not been on the side of the angels, owing to the fact it had then been the Manchester Guardian. Manchester, you see, was the home of textile manufacture and cotton imports, and guess where cotton came from? Could that have had anything to do with its furious denunciations of President Lincoln?

Whoever knew this terrible thing had happened? An appalling revelation. Nearly as bad as the staff's equally recent discovery that the UK had once had an empire! So we had a period of self flagellation on the front page of the web site for a couple of months, before it reverted to once more denouncing everyone in sight for any kind of political incorrectness or historical misconduct, and went back to the endless lamentations about the climate crisis and 'global heating'.

It was once a newspaper. But its turned itself into an organization with a quite different focus: it thinks its mission is to improve the world by getting the right policies adopted. Reporting is secondary, and is only done in a way that serves its primary objective.

"My point is, right now, any country saying "we're not going to bother with the Paris accord" tends to get short shrift from their own people and other countries. It's been tried by the USA, and it didn't go nearly as well as hoped."

Wrong. Dead wrong.

No-one in China is making any noises about Paris or COP, no-one will, and no other countries are making any reproaching noises at China. China and India and the world outside of the West don't care one way or the other about CO2 emissions. Their people and their political classes do not believe in the climate crisis. They are all going to go on their way.

While making sure that COPs never sign up to any hard reductions or anything binding.

Read the wording of the COP resolution. Its just like all the other meetings, except this one took 100,000 people to all get together and agree nothing of any significance. But they are all looking forward to the next one.

None of these gatherings have had any effect on the trend or amount of global emissions, and none will. Its time to get real about this. If the present trends will produce a crisis, get ready to deal with it, because if they will, its certain to hit.

Per capita emissions are irrelevant. The climate does not care how much per person.

All that drives the climate is the total tonnage emitted. China currently doing over 11 billion tons a year, more than twice as much as the US.

None of these gatherings have accomplished any change in the growth of CO2 emissions. They have been totally ineffectual. From Paris on. Just look up the global total of emissions and plot the COP dates on them. No effects whatever.

Its time to accept the fact that outside a small circle of the political classes in the English speaking countries, maybe Germany too, no-one believes there is any climate crisis, and no-one has any intention of reducing their emissions. They pay a sort of vague lip service to the idea, but China, India, Indonesia etc have no intention of reducing their emissions.

There's a reason for this. Suppose we concede there is a climate crisis, and that Net Zero in electricity generation is a reasonable response to it. That's a big concession, considering how little of total emissions are due to electricity generation, but still, concede it and then ask whether its practical.

The UK is the canary on this. Their plan is to move everyone to heat pumps for heating and to EVs for transport. This will roughly double electricity demand, maybe triple. At the same time they are intending moving all electricity generation to wind and solar. That means, in the winter months, wind. The Royal Society has estimated what this will require by way of storage. It is huge, they proposed excavating 900 caverns, sealing them, and using them to store hydrogen. They have gone back some decades and discovered that the UK (northwest Europe actually) has periodic season long wind droughts. So the amount of storage to deal with intermittency of wind is huge.

At the same time as they phase out gas in favor of heat pumps they are talking about piloting something else with hydrogen, that is converting the gas grid to hydrogen. There is a proposal at the moment to do pilots on a couple of medium sized cities.

No-one knows where they are going to get all this hydrogen. The fantasy is that you install enough wind to not only supply normal demand, but also surplus to generate hydrogen to fill all the caverns.

Then there is the amount of work needed to make the gas grid, and the home pipework, safe to handle the hydrogen. Then there is the fact that you are doing all this work at the same time as you plan on eliminating demand for the gas because of the heat pump program.

These are not stupid people. The fact that they are only managing to come up with hare-brained proposals containing lots of impossibilities and inconsistencies is very striking. Any observer looking at their floundering around has to conclude that its not going to happen.

This is not lost on China, India etc. They obviously do not believe there is any climate emergency. But they certainly are watching the UK and other Western countries in what they privately see as idiotic attempts to combat an imaginary problem, and what they see is that it isn't happening. That you just cannot take emissions down with the measures being proposed. That you cannot run countries on electricity from wind and solar. That, as the Royal Society pointed out, you cannot afford or install enough batteries to deal with intermittency.

They have no intention of even trying. So they come to the conferences, they pay lip service to the idea of a crisis, and then, when it comes to discussing emission reductions, they water down or veto. This has been going on ever since Paris and it shows fair to keep on going on for the indefinite future. Since the non-Western countries are accounting for 75% of emissions and almost all the growth, the conclusion is inescapable.

Have all the conferences you want. Emissions will not be affected and will continue to rise. Get used to it. And if you think this is going to produce a climate crisis, well, act to protect your people. Because nothing you can do is going to lower emissions. 30+years of trying have failed. Its time to admit it and act accordingly.

"....China turns to nuclear power to try to meet carbon emissions goals....."

No, this is not why. They are not trying to meet any carbon emission goals. They have no goals, other than growing the economy and making it sanction proof.

Where does this crazy idea come from, that the Chinese are fully sold on the climate emergency and are leading the world in emission reduction? The truth is exactly the opposite. In the first six months of this year they approved more coal generation than the total capacity of the UK or Germany or France. And that was just additional.

They mine and burn more coal than the rest of the world put together. They are on track to be emitting 15+ billion tons of CO2 in the next ten or 15 years.

Where do people get this wishful thinking about China from?

This is the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy in a different form.

Let's say its January 2020, and occasional stories are appearing about some cases of a new influenza in China.

We ask a bunch of people and organizations to predict what this is going to lead to. The answers are all over the place from nothing in particular, to millions of deaths.

One of two of these turn out, 10 years later, to have been spot on. We conclude that these guys knew at the time they made their predictions what was going to happen, and so we hold them accountable for what they did with their knowledge.

The fact that you predict something and it then happens does not mean you know it was going to when you predicted it. Predicting means forecasting the unknown.

Wrong. China does close to 11 billion tons a year. Compared to the US 5 billion.

"People like you keep saying emissions per capita don't matter. They are actually the only thing that matters."

They don't matter because what supposedly drives the climate and drives climate change is the gross tonnage emitted. So it does not matter if you do 10 or 100 or 1,000 tons per capita. What matters is if you do 11 billion tons or 1 billion. World emissions supposedly have to come down from around 37 billiontons a year to under about 5 billion. China does not reduce, it ain't going to happen. What their per capita emissions are is neither here nor there.

Its physics. Its not ethics, history or literary criticism. Its not about fairness or population size. It is entirely about how many tons a country is emitting. That's the physics of the matter.

So its very curious that so many who are firmly convinced that there is a climate emergency for which emission reduction is the only remedy are none the less unwilling to urge China, the world's largest emitter by a mile, to reduce.

Why is that, inquiring minds ask.