That's rather pessimistic. Just because an environment is harsh we don't give up, we overcome the problems.

You wouldn't need anything like a 1TWh. All you need is enough to smooth output of an intermittent source a bit and give you s little longer to ramp up other energy sources. On Japan a 250MW wind farm gets a 40MWh battery for smoothing.

the real capitalists are global. They benefit from us competing with cheaper labor. Marx predicted this but all anyone can remember about him is that a few dictators used his books for rhetoric.

As for Adam Smith, he actually as against this sort of naked capitalism. He wrote at a time of small merchant artisans. He didn't see the industrial revolution coming and if he had probably wouldn't have written the books he did. These days he's like Marx: all anybody remembers about him is what fits in with what they want.

Slaves were very expensive compared to immigrants. With immigrants you could treat them just as bad and when they got weak move on to the next batch. With slaves you had money sunk in. The south also had huge amounts of capital sunk into slaves. If you're selling someone's buying, and that costs money. It's one of the reasons they were so far behind the curve on the industrial revolution...

iOS makes you work harder than necessary to get things done. For example, there is no app tray. All apps just get dumped on the home screen after installation and you have to organise them yourself. There isn't even an alphabetical list unless you spend time making it yourself.

It seems really odd given how they try to make other stuff low effort. Finding apps is pretty fundamental.

So does anyone here believe Malaysian IT needs a union to help them?

Swipe keyboards take a little getting used to but it's worth spending a few days forcing yourself to use one because in the end they are so much faster. The stock Android keyboard actually has a really good implementation.

The Google Japanese keyboard is excellent too. Like the English keyboard it mines the interwebs for data, so knows a lot of acronyms and slang that I had to teach other keyboards.

Tesla give you a long warranty and tested their battery pack up to 750,000 miles. It seems pretty reliable. Worrying about battery replacement costs is like worrying about engine replacement costs in an ICE car. At worst used ones are already available for a few thousand, similar to a high end engine.

The sea level during the dino years was also rather higher. The great plains of north America formed UNDER a large inland sea. Nature will adapt to higher CO2 levels, as will we. The question is how expensive it will be. The assorted civilizations of central and south America mostly got wiped out by a warmer/dryer climate (the Spanish helped on occasion). If your retirement fund depends on dumping CO2 into the atmosphere then you will be motivated to argue climate change.

melting ice spreads out. The total volume of ice is less but the area of water covered is larger because the ice won't stick together in taller clumps.

EBay filters the HTML you can use in a listing. The idea is to prevent people doing exactly this, or say using JavaScript to change the description from "working" to "spares and repairs" after it finishes. The hack was finding a way to get around the filter and put this code on the page.

Get a Chromebook. Gmail integration, virus proof, cheap and low maintenance.

You are forgetting about the international rules governing these things. The WTO and IMF have both regulated currency issues when counties split before. The general principal is that if both countries have a stake they have to share fairly, or one can choose to walk away at its own expense.

The BoE belongs to Scotland too. If England wants it then it may be possible to negotiate that, but it would have to take on the debts owed as well. The rest of the UK can't just grab something that is jointly owned with Scotland.

The Poll Tax? That alone shows just how little the Tory party thinks of Scotland.

I'm not saying that there were not problems, but there was more than one solution. She decided to smash it all. Look at Germany now. Strong manufacturing and industrial base. Recovered from the financial crisis a lot faster than we did, with real jobs and real wage rises. The average UK citizen is still poorer than they were in 2008.

Also, some things don't have to be profitable. The NHS, basic utility services etc.