Another thing is China kind of "herds" factory workers in a way the US cannot. For example, they limit housing options near factory towns so the space can be dedicated to factories, large-scale NIMBY-ism. If a company folds, workers' temporary mini-housing makes it logistically easier to move to a new town, but it's hard on families.

Thus, biz owners have a kind of de-facto slave class that's relatively easy to shift around as needed.

This is also a form of subsidizing industry. China has managed to combine capitalism and communism in ways that give it an advantage, or at least keep it a manufacturing superpower.

As mentioned elsewhere, spreadsheets are probably the wrong tool for the for that particular job. Just because one can make a giant sheet in a spreadsheet tool doesn't mean they should. It won't have sufficient indexes to quickly do JOINs or equivalent, for example. Nor proper caching of a data, having more of a file-centric design.

For one, if a handful of work-groups need Excel, that's not a reason for the rest of the company to use Excel. Most Excel uses will be mundane things. They can allow justifiable exceptions.

but the financial staff know Excel and they know it very, very well.

Software tools/frameworks I knew well were ordered tossed because the vendor or support structure faded. It happens. Why are financial people given that latitude when almost nobody else is? Change is annoying and creates a learning curve, but inevitable in the work-place. I knew cases where employees quit over frustration over replacement-ware, but management said "we are doing it anyhow, live or leave" (paraphrased).

And I'm surprised there are not products dedicated to big org financial analysis. There might be, but "we don't wanna learn something new" lobbying may be stopping it.

Excel probably has other scaling problems they didn't mention in the article but just learned work-arounds, yet they are likely stretching Excel to its limits risking more problems, familiarity or not. Oracle Essbase allegedly is a big-org financial modelling tool. I don't like Oracle the company, but Essbase & competitors may be a better tool for that particular job. See what other big orgs use.

There has been plenty of progress in using AI to control robotics; they use robotics-specific AIs for that, of course.

The fact that ChatGPT (or even LLMs in general) isn't particularly useful for robots shouldn't be a surprise, since robots (other than maybe C3PO) are about physical manipulation of objects, not about language generation.

They are going to lose the next election, maybe to Reform, if they don't turn things around. Pandering to Reform voters is pointless, they are not going to vote Labour unless they go full fascist. Meanwhile they are alienating everyone else.

LibreOffice doesn't have cloud sharing features that allow multiple users to access a shared file with different permissions.

LibreOffice Calc does allow multiple users to edit a spreadsheet on a network drive, but doesn't have a user permission system or integration with a single login somewhere. The other apps like Writer don't support collaboration at all.

That seems unlikely. The worst case I could find for high speed rail was 52.7g/km of CO2 emitted, with a capacity of around 1,300 passengers. That includes the emissions from the stations and so forth, and equates to about 0.04g/passenger/km.

For a typical A350 you are looking at 0.18g/passenger/km in economy class, and that is just the fuel, not the airport or the aircraft or the transport to get to and from airports at either end etc.

Odometers aren't all that reliable in general. A few percent at best. They don't account for things like putting different size wheels on the car either, and can be wrong if the wheel size is set wrong at the factory.

Doesn't excuse Tesla illegally voiding warranties.

I haven't been able to find a source for this 12,000 claim, but it seems likely that it's untrue.

My guess would be that they simply looked at every arrest where evidence included social media posts, e.g. if someone was assaulted and the attacker happened to have posted on social media about it, that counted.

I am no fan of the UK or the way it is going, but there were clear directions from the government a few years ago that social media posts should only be the basis of arrests in very specific and fairly extreme circumstances, e.g. where it is reasonably believed that there is an imminent threat of violence.

That was not a joke, that was part of a very long running campaign to incite violence against trans people.

Graham Linehan has just been convicted of smashing a child's phone when she confronted him about the months long harassment campaign he waged against her on social media, which included attempts to dox her.

He got off extremely lightly, all things considered. The only reason he beat the harassment charge was because the judge didn't think that the victim was sufficiently harassed, and the prosecution didn't prep her very well.

He's a bigot and a convicted violent criminal, and has gone straight back to harassing people.

The biggest problem for the government is that the welfare bill is expected to rise by around £90 billion/year by 2030 (OBR forecast), and half of that is pensions alone. The population is ageing and also turning against immigration of the young and healthy workers we need.

Mistakes were made going back to the 1960s and no government has the will to address them, only to kick the can further down the road.

The more expensive public charging is about on a par with a decently efficient fossil car. When it can get expensive (aside from rip-offs) is when you also have to pay for parking, which is common in London.

If you can charge at home then it is much cheaper, around 2p/mile, or free if you have solar.

It's not about fairness or who wears the road out the most, it's about what the economy needs. Because we destroyed much of our rail infrastructure, road is the only way to move most goods. If you tax it too much, it damages the economy. Same with work vans.

In the UK we have an annual inspection, but not until the car is 3 years old (from the point of first sale). They have said they will have a free odometer reading at the same place that does the annual check for the first two times.

The more annoying part is that you have to pay up front, i.e. estimate your annual mileage and then at the next odometer check you get a refund or pay more depending on if you are under or over. I can see why they did it, car tax is paid up front for the year too, and it allows people to spread it over monthly payments.