Is it that different to what some Western countries have? The US is a two party system. The UK is too, despite recent gains by smaller parties.

Speaking for the UK, the choice is between hard and soft Thatcherism. That's not much of a choice. A vote for anyone else is usually wasted, not counted at the national level.

That is deliberate policy too. No government will change it because they think they can win the next election and gain 100% of the power, rather than a more representative system that distributes it in a democratic way.

It would be nice if the money was invested in alternative forms of rapid transport, like high speed rail. I'd take the train if there was one.

Even when Chrome adds support, we'll have to wait ages before we can actually reliably use the format without having to implement fallback logic and fallback formats for legacy browsers.

AVIF is also painfully slow. And if I recall correctly, is outperformed by JPEG XL at moderate and low compression (but - again, if I recall correctly - AVIF wins at highly compressed images). Also, AVIF faces some patent threats. And misses a lot of JPEG XL's interesting features.

“hopefully China's massive PV manufacturing capacity will start flowing to the developing world”

You are so out of date, it’s not even funny. The developing world has been dramatically increasing its solar growth for the past five years. Here’s an article about Pakistan:
https://www.wri.org/insights/p...

Same is happening right across Africa

As has urban noise. There’s endless videos of the uncannily quiet streets, and it’s clear how much more peaceful life is.

Here’s an example

https://youtube.com/shorts/BfT...

If you had to choose between the schoolboy error of assuming growth continues to increase exponentially till 2045 and the schoolboy error of assuming that exponential growth immediately flattens out this year, the former looks a shit load more plausible than the latter, as demonstrated by the past 20 years of projections from the IEA in this famous chart from Auke Hoekstra. There may be a topping out and an S-curve, but there’s no signs of it in the data.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/20...

A practical issue with a circle is that it is not a circle until it is finished,

That's not the reason at all, AFAIK. The reasoning is, okay, we want people to be able to move from one place to some distance place in the city at the maximum comfortable speed, which is limited by G-forces. You have some guaranteed G-forces from first accelerating and then decelerating. But if it's linear, that's your only G forces. If it's curved, however, you also have radial G-forces.

The Line's train going from one end to the other (170km) nonstop is supposed to do it in 20 minutes, aka with a mean speed of ~510 kph. Let's say a peak of 800 kph. Now if we shape that 170km into a circle, that's 54km diameter, 27km radius. From the centripetal force formula a=v^2/r, that's 222,22...^2 / 27000 ~= 1,83 m/s^2, or a constant ~0,2g to the side. This is on top of the G-forces from your acceleration and deceleration. You can probably deal with ~0,2g in a train if everyone is seated without much discomfort, though it's double what's acceptable for standing passengers. But you can eliminate that if the city is linear (at the cost of increasing the mean distance that the average person has to travel to go from one arbitrary point in the city to another)

That's not to defend this concept. Because the city doesn't need to be 170km long; you can just made it more 2d and have the distances be vastly shorter (at the cost of just needing some extra lateral travel within the city). Honestly, if I were building a "designer" city from the ground up, I'd use a PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) system rather than trying to make it super-elongated.

I wouldn't be so certain that China's model won't come to dominate eventually, because we don't seem to be able to fix our democracies. There are clear flaws that are being exploited now, and the inability to adequately deal with climate change while China races ahead is both a moral and economic failure.

I'd very much prefer democracy to be the winning model, but it won't just happen by itself. Look at the rise of populist right wingers - people will vote away their rights and prosperity in exchange for nothing more than rhetoric, if they think that democracy isn't delivering for them.

My son took this exam in 2022. It was absurd - he was being taught about magnetic tape storage (for home computers!), instead of anything actually useful. It definitely wasn’t computer science either. No call by push value or P vs NP or complexity theory etc.

WebP only got an RFC (9649) in November 2024. JXL hasn't even got that far.

I hope JXL does catch on, but until Chrome supports it that will not happen. Maybe now that it's required for PDF display, Google will be forced to re-adopt it.

To be fair I think the reason they dropped support for JPEG XL is because the reference C library is crap, and last time I looked none of the alternatives were very mature. Hopefully things have improved by now.

What got me is that I don't see why this isn't readily resolved by active damping, the same systems that many tall towers now use to resist earthquakes or resonant wind forces. Big heavy weight at the top (or in this case the bottom) hooked up to actuators that make it move in an inverse direction to the sway.

Again, this is not to defend this colossal waste of money. I just don't see why there aren't ready solutions for this specific problem.

Agreed - but that said, there are space elevator alternatives, like the Lofstrom Loop / Launch Loop, which at least theoretically can be built with modern materials (and have far better properties anyway - not latitude-constrained, provides dV, vastly higher throughput, far more efficient, stores energy / can add cheap energy at off-peak times, etc). One could always "waste" money on them trying something new :)

But the growth is exponential. It is far from its peak this year.

The pace is likely to keep increasing and deployment gets easier, turbines get bigger, and costs continue to fall. Solar PV is so cheap it's being used as fence panelling.