The legislation in the E.U. takes exactly my stance, even if you don't like the analogy.

That's the same argument as "If you did not want me to break into your house, you would have moved in a underground bunker." Just because taking is easy, it still might be stealing.

But that does not mean that this code is still maintained, or that there are many people needed to maintain it or that new code has to be added. Maybe most of the legacy Fortran and Cobol code pieces have long been capsuled and are run as some kind of black box? Or they are replaced long ago by libraries of newer code in another language? Maybe, the last error message from them has been fixed a dozen years ago, and now, no one touches the code anymore, and extensions are written in separate containers?

Actually, they do.

Within one year, from April 2023 to Jan 2024, market prices per kWh dropped 50%, from about $200/kWh to $95/kWh. And this is no fluke powered by one-time events. A lot of progress in the last few years was indeed technological and came not from new chemistry. The Cell-to-Pack and Cell-to-Blade processes, which allow very large but still stable cells made the LFP cell viable for automotive application and Sodium cells at least for stationary use. Doting the LFP with Maganese, creating LMFP cell types can add another 20% of capacity within the same technology. Anodefree cells (where the anode will form itself with the first charge) will allow for even cheaper production. Organic cathodes might boost the capacity of sodium cells up to 600 Wh per kg, but are currently very expensive compared to iron phosphate - but if the organic compounds are cheaper to made, they will become competitive.

You won't find many of the new ideas in your everyday cell. But that's not because the ideas are not viable. It's because the current cell types are progressing themselves so fast, that they are still the most marketable option. But whenever the development slows down too much on them, the other options are ready to shine.

Because Sweden does not need them (yet). Thanks to its geography, Sweden has many pumped-storage hydroelectricity plants.

And still, White Phosphorus is deadly in doses of less than 1 ppm. Enumerating elements is completely meaningless when talking about toxicity. What matters is the substance which contains the elements. And two chemically closely related substances can be harmless and absolutely toxic. Botulinum toxin, often called Botox for short, is deadly in doses above 2 ppt (or about 150 nanograms for a grown adult), and all it contains are the very same amino acids, which make up about 15% of your body weight.

Same silly argument.

But still, it's a different place, and different people in charge. Intellectually knowing that flash flooding can happen and applying it to your immediate environment, where you never experienced it, or the last event was decades ago, are two very different pair of shoes.

Still, Renewables grow faster than Coal in China. 25 years ago, 80% of all electric power in China were generated by Coal, in 2024, it was less than 60%.

Phosphorus, especially in its modification called White Phosphorus, is one of the most toxic substances known to Man. Also, copper is pretty poisonous.

Luckily, posphorus is quite reactive (that's why it was used as an agent in matchsticks), oxidizes fast, and will form phosphoric acid when exposed to air, which indeed is not toxic. It is similar for copper, albeit some copper oxides are themselves toxic.

Especially everyone supervising the operation of the Mystic summer camp should be made aware beforehand that they are in a flooding area, which would be under water even with less rain (but not catastrophically so), and be alert to the weather forecast for a possible evacuation. But people forget, and 20 years no flooding feels the same as totally impossible, and flooding itself is often seen as getting wet feet. The idea of being washed away by 45 feet of water was completely out of the minds of people.

Germany, which is known for being well organized, had a similar catastrophic flooding in 2021 (184 dead) in the Ahr Valley. Also here, the Weather Service had warned about heavy rainfall and possible catastrophic flooding, but it did not register with the people responsible for civil protection.

That's a real problem with once-in-a-century events. People just can't imagine the possible damage, and are completely unprepared or even consider preparations as wasteful and an obstacle to business, development or personal freedom.

Axions are as elusive as WIMPS - they are only hypothesized and not detected yet. Yes, they make a lot of sense, but so did Supersymmetry, and now, particle physicists have given up on it, because they just could not detect any supersymmetric particles.

As I said: There are proposed paths, but they have even more work cut out for them. In fact, I called them more elusive.

And LIGO can't test the small Black Holes hypothesis. It measures gravitational waves in the wrong frequency band. The lowest mass it can detect is about the size of a neutron star binary (~ 3 solar masses). Advanced LIGO will be able to detect masses down to a single neutron star (1.4 solar masses), still too large for the hypothetic small primordial Black Holes.

The Minesweeper strategy is in fact the only way to do Science. Each theory in Science can be formulated as a negative, as events ruled out by the theory. That's how falsification works. If something happens which has been ruled out by the theory, then the theory has a flaw.

The "Time to move on" call is all nifty and fine.

The problem is: Where to?

We have no obvious path, and the ones proposed so far are even more elusive. Physicists would love to move on, and the ones leading a promising new way will be hailed as the Newtons and Einsteins of the 21st century. Currently, we are in the process to mark out all possible places to look, and we are crossing out the squares we have searched so far. Each square cleared is a success, because it narrows down the places to look even further.

No. Canada gets more than enough sunlight to make Solar viable. In fact, 90% of all Canadians live south of the southernmost point of Germany.