Who needs dumbphones?

Voice chat is so last millennium. The savings from eliminating one speaker seem to be minimal though, so no one makes 3G/4G PDA's.

Look, straight from first hit on Google, the turbine mentioned is rated for 600W at 12.5m/s. If you have average winds of 12.5m/s this turbine will work great, but then you are in a very lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view) location. In most places you are lucky to have half that on an average day, and since turbine power output is proportional to the cube of wind speed, that leaves you with 75W.

If you do have 12.5m/s on average you should put up a real wind turbine and start making money.

A thorium reactor will produce U-233. U-233 is fine for bombs.

600W is peak. The rotor diameter is a complete joke at 0.65m. You'll be lucky to get 100W average out of that thing, perhaps if you put it on a 50m tower.

They decided to extend the life of power plants instead of building new ones. Then they reversed the decision but still did not build replacements (mostly because power plants don't just get built overnight). It may have been a multi-step decision process, most large decisions are. The end result is the same: they shut down power plants without building replacements.

Luckily the cold spell was in clear weather (as is often the case), so solar power helped a lot.

It is highly unlikely that solar will take over enough of the market for that to be a problem. Even then, if electricity prices suddenly go very low at mid-day, many cars would be able to charge at that time instead. Also, if lack of base load capacity does become a problem, by all means add nuclear. If you have a stable load 24x7, nothing beats nuclear power except in a few lucky places like Norway and Iceland.

Of course you can. The $5000 speakers won't necessarily sound better, but they will sound different. Speakers are the one audio component which are still imperfect enough to really matter.

Most audio can be done digitally, amplifiers can be made practically linear, but speakers are a mess. Hopefully it will soon be over when active digitally-compensated speakers take over the market.

I don't think loudness is causing that particular problem. Most of that is Autotune, I bet.

People are only up half the time. Well a bit more, but load during the day is much higher than at night. Solar power is BETTER than base load in sunny areas, it actually does load-following.

Nuclear can do load-following, but since a nuclear plant costs approximately the same to keep at full output and at 10%, there is no point.

I happened to check that today. Lately the link UK France has been almost constantly saturated at 2GW from UK to France.

The problem is that nuclear reactors provide base load, but consumption is variable. This means that you are stuck with too much power at night and high peak prices. This gets even worse because people switch to electric heating since electricity is usually cheap. Then a cold spell happens and the nuclear power plants can't suddenly double their output. Right now France is DESPERATE for power, to the point that they are importing from Germany! Germany itself is desperate for power because they decided to shut down power plants without building replacements, but they are apparently still better off than France.