There is no passport control at the border of Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland. (And between most E.U. countries).

It always boils down to the question: Does it matter?

Does it matter if you have 9 or 10 dollars, if all you want is to buy an ice cone for $3.50?

Does it matter if there are 9 or 10 parking lots if you know 5 of them are occupied, and you want to park your car?

Sometimes, 9 or 10 is a question of life and death. Are there 9 or 10 people in the burning building, and have we account for all of them rescued from the fire? Sometimes it is totally irrelevant.

Same with Dark Matter. If we want to account for effects on cosmic scales, it is really important. For gravitational effects in our Solar system, not so much.

We could also call it "apparent gravitational effects, which don't fit our models right now, but would fit perfectly well if we assume about five times more mass than we can actually account for."

No, it's Nibbler poop, as we all know.

People have a very important source of knowledge which is totally missing from AI: experience.

A person knows what "hot" means, because it has touched a hot surface during its lifetime at least once and felt the pain. A person knows how a speed bump affects the car ride, and how lemon tastes. A person knows which shape fits into which hole, because as a child, it has played the game.

Persons learn all the time by formulating hypotheses about the world and then experience how it works out.

AI totally misses this feedback. Or as my father uses to say: AI talks about color like a blind person.

The Spain outage would have happened with Nuclear exactly the same way. It was not a problem of not enough power. It was a problem of too much power, which was not absorbed by the consumers, and caused a build-up of over-voltage, which could not be dumped anywhere. When the grid automatically switched off power sources to damp the swing, it over-corrected, leading to a power loss of more than 2 GW, which then caused the shut-down of large electricity consumers. With a fat nuclear reactor, you would not have changed anything. Still, the grid regulation would have overreacted, with the same consequences.

Where I live, a railroad crossing limits the top speed of the rail to 80 mph - definitely not high speed rail.

High speed rail is always grade separated. (How many non-grade separated roads you know which allow for a high speed above 80 mph anyway?)

Contrary to common belief, Britain has not very much rain. It just happens to rain often, but very small amounts. Rome for instance gets more rain per year than London, it just gets it in some very intense rainstorms, and is dry for other periods during the year.

Usually, you do. Our digestive tract has evolved to extract the energy from our food as good as possible, given the parameters. It's not easy to fool it into ignoring available energy, and the methods to do it aren't very healthy.

Actually, no. Transporting 13 kT of explosives to Hiroshima by plane and dropping it there alone would have amounted to a lot of energy consumption compared to transporting a single 4 metric ton device. You would need 3000 planes instead of one. Imagine the energy required to build 3000 planes and fly them all at the same time to Hiroshima! And 13,000 metric tonnes of TNT aren't cheap either. The US did not even had to mine the uranium for the bomb. They got it from Germany in April 1945, when they raided a nuclear research facility in Central Germany.

Additionally, the nuclear energy content of U-235 has not to be put into the uranium. It sits there since the Uranium was created during that supernova, which created the space dust that formed our Solar system 4.6 billion years ago. For Antihydrogen, you have to actually provide any energy that is then confined in the antimatter. It is more or less an antimatter based battery which you have to charge first.

The energy you need to create a single antimatter bomb will be some magnitudes larger than the energy needed to bomb you into oblivion. No one said creating Antihydrogen was in any way efficient.

I used to work for Sling TV, and you basically have that backwards. ESPN is the part of Disney's package that people are willing to pay money for. The shutdown and negotiations every year is just Disney forcing the various providers to pay for and carry their other channels. That's why Disney always holds these negotiations during football season, so if they have to shut someone down their customers actually care. Every year viewership on Disney's other channels (and non-sports channels in general) is lower, and the prices that the content producers require goes up. Scripted television is in serious decline, and Hollywood is using sports fans to prop it up.

As an example, If you don't care about sports you can get Disney+ without ads for about $12 a month. Disney will happily throw in Hulu for that same price if you will watch some ads. You can binge watch the shows that you care about and then switch to another channel. Heck, you can buy entire seasons of their shows ala carte. You can't get ESPN however, without paying at least $45/month, and that's with a package with no non-Disney channels and chuck full of ads. For the record, that's basically what the streaming services are paying Disney as well. When I worked at Sling the entirety of the subscription fees went to the content companies (primarily Disney). There is essentially no profit in cable packages. All of the profit has to be made up somewhere else.

People that aren't sports fans, especially if they are entertainment fans, tend to believe that scripted programming is carrying sports, but it is the other way around. That's why AppleTV, which has spent over $20 billion creating content for their channel has about as many subscribers the amount of people that typically watch a single episode of Thursday Night Football, the worst professional football game of the week. Amazon Prime pays $1 billion a year for that franchise, and it is a bargain compared to creating scripted content. Apple makes great television that almost no one pays for. The other content providers are in the same boat. You'll notice, for example, that Netflix's most expensive package is $25/month, and the revenue per user in the U.S. is around $16. That's ad free. The lowest promotional price you can pay for ESPN is basically twice that, and it always comes with ads. What's more, sports fans tend to actually watch the ads.

Sling is selling day and weekend passes to people because it knows that most of its customers only have their service to watch the game. No one is watching linear television anymore, but the content creators have built their entire business around the idea of having a channel that they fill up with content. Even with Sling's ridiculous prices they can typically watch the games they want to watch for less than maintaining a subscription.

I have spent most of my adult life in the sports world, but I don't watch sports. I personally believe that in the long run sports television is probably going to end up uncoupled from scripted television. I think that is going to be very bad news for people that like scripted television.

The thing about adopting evidence-based policy is that you also need to review and if necessary change policy when more evidence becomes available. The kind of situation you're describing would surely qualify.

I can explain it very easily. I don't want to talk to a machine. I don't want my car to listen to my conversation with the people riding with me. I don't want smart home assistants listening to my TV program. I don't want my tools telling me what to do. I don't want YouTube to automatically translate video titles.

Just because something is impressive does not mean I want it around me. That we can build a nuclear fusion device is impressive. But I don't want a hydrogen bomb exploding in my backyard.

Your whole argument hinges on the idea that long distance trucking happens within an European country.

And that's plain wrong. Long distance trucking in Europe mainly means transporting goods from the large harbors in the Mediterranean (Genoa, Piraeus) and at the Northern Sea (Rotterdam, Hamburg) to the large industrial centers and back. Additionally, trucks are transporting raw materials, furniture and similar goods from Eastern Europe to the West and machines and machine parts to the East. This means crossing borders all the time.