Seems more like political problems. They have been trying to build large wind farms and export cables for years. If they can't even manage that, they have no hope of building nuclear.

It's a tragedy really. They have massive amounts of space for this stuff. A lot of sun, and good on and off shore wind resources. The domestic solar market is actually doing okay, because it gets less political interference and there isn't all that much that can be done to stop people putting panels on their homes.

I would be surprised if software updating an aircraft is that simple. It probably needs to be controlled and tested after the update, with records kept by maintenance staff, and notifications sent to pilots.

This is a company IT initiative. IT can damn well unlock it. Had a customer with lots of Word and Excel users refusing to switch. The owner told them as of X date, MS tools would be removed, and Libre Office installed. They could train for the transition, or be fired for failing productivity metrics. Strangely, all were able to transition to Libre within the time frame. Their "huge spreadsheet" effort took me all of half a day to move to Postgres and PHP with data retention and history.

Due to a fundamental lack of understanding of what acting like a Christian is.

Biden went around congress to fund a different genocide. Pretty words, but living up to them is another matter.

The two are not mutually exclusive and it is not a zero-sum game. In fact, the two things--greater domestic wealth for the working class, and a strong foreign policy--historically have been demonstrably causally correlated. Again, as I have alluded to in my previous post, the postwar American economy was extremely prosperous. The pressure to maintain military superiority against the emergent superpower of the USSR resulted in an expansion of domestic infrastructure and technological research. The idea of American corporations outsourcing labor to foreign countries was anathema to this philosophy of American self-reliance that was born from fears of being infiltrated by Communists--remember the McCarthy era, the Cuban missile crisis, the space race, the Vietnam and Korean Wars? That strong military, that projection of power, and building of alliances, is what has made the United States the dominant economic superpower it has been for the last 80 years, and for about half of that time, that wealth was shared with the working class.

What changed was that in a world in which the specter of external threats being diminished--the fall of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, the rise of cheap foreign labor in US-friendly countries became irresistible to US companies seeking cheaper labor costs. Jobs were outsourced, manufacturing died, and the owners of capital paid off politicians to pass legislation to deregulate and accelerate this process. Skilled foreign workers were brought in under the pretense of a lack of equivalent domestic expertise, and these immigrants are effectively indentured to these companies, further distorting the value of domestic labor and increasing wealth inequality.

And now, the result of this decades-long dismantling of the American labor market, with the American public being increasingly poorly educated, addicted to social media propaganda, unaware and unwilling to learn about a history that has been concealed from them, you have people completely unable to undertstand what is going on with this current administration and those who have been pulling the strings all this time. Americans are being robbed blind by the very people that they are voting for with cultish fervor, while the rest of the democratic world is looking on in horror.

Correct. People have a very short memory, and viewing current affairs through such a limited lens makes one susceptible to disinformation.

The whole reason why Eastern European countries and former republics of the USSR have consistently turned toward the EU after the collapse of the Soviet Union is because the people could see how decades of Russian corruption left them with nothing. They were fed up with being satellite states without any right to self-determination, kept poor and servile while the Russian elite flourished.

That said, the EU is certainly not without its flaws. But as a model for shared governance and security, every member country (except for the UK) understands that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Prior to Trump's ascendancy, Brexit was the most successful disinformation campaign we have seen coming from Russia since the Cold War, and we continue to see the stoking of populist propaganda from nations that seek to break Western alliances, because it has worked so well and for such little investment.

Forget about the Epstein files. Release his latest MRI results. They don't give you a cognitive assessment and MRI if you're healthy.

No, he's completely serious.

You're not wrong, but the blame is perhaps misdirected, because domestic affairs are not necessarily downstream effects of foreign economic and military policy.

My personal opinion is that the US military industrial complex has less to do with the depressed economic conditions of rural America than the corporate oligarchs who have exploited outsourced cheap foreign labor to extract more profit.

In the aftermath of WWII, there were many industry towns that experienced massive economic growth because of government investment into technologies that sought to maintain a strategic advantage in a postwar, US-dominated global economy. To maintain energy security, places like West Virginia mined more coal and Texas pumped more oil. Domestic manufacturing experienced a boom. But in peactime, increasing globalization of the labor market drove the outsourcing of labor as described above, and killed these towns. A generation of Americans who believed they were entitled to good jobs with minimal education were left in the dust.

Even now, with renewable energy initiatives, these same people still want to risk their lives and health to mine coal. They are stuck in a past that no longer exists.

And when you compare against Europe, you can see that a lot of the grievances that so many Americans (very much rightfully) have--fair labor practices, less wealth inequality, more worker rights, a living wage--are policies that those same Americans have consistently voted against by electing representatives that are bought by corporations. That's not just a failure of accountability, it's a failure of education and resistance against propaganda.

That austerity is coming to Europe is actually more of a symptom of the worldwide cancer of the capitalist class that relentlessly continues to seek ways to extract profit from the working class. They see social programs--money that hardworking taxpayers have paid--as their next target to raid, and drunk off their success in the US, are seeking to do the same elsewhere.

What is not said enough about this post-WWII security arrangement in which the US plays a large role in transatlantic defense, is that this is not simply just a "cost" that the US absorbs. The US has profited ENORMOUSLY off of this arrangement, in multiple ways.

First of all, much of the defense spending goes back into the American economy. Second, the US gets to sell weapons to its allies around the world. Third, the US gets tremendous soft power and influence to shape foreign governments' policies in ways that are friendly to US interests. Those things, put together, are why the US has maintained its dominant role in global geopolitics and economy since WWII.

And Trump/MAGA are incapable of understanding this. They are only interested in the short term reward of extortion for their own personal gain and ego. They've already killed the goose that lays the golden egg.

America's economic and military allies have realized that the US is no longer a reliable partner. This is not just about Europe feeling resentful that they have to pay for their own defense. It is a grim understanding that US idiocracy has destroyed all trust. That loss of trust is NOT coming back--not for many generations. That's why there is so much diplomatic manuvering going on between Western non-US countries to strengthen existing ties. By then, the consequences of the myopically self-centered isolationist beliefs of US conservatives will have relegated the US to a bit player on the world stage, incapable of influencing global politics, as other countries (e.g. China) fill in the power vacuum.

The reason why the US has so willingly invested so much into NATO and into defense in general, is because they have, by far, reaped the greatest rewards.

Looks like cheeto is siding with Russia now https://www.telegraph.co.uk/wo...

So, fans of MAGA, do you remember when Reagan gave his Evil Empire speech?

Because it would get swamped out with the sheer amount of foreign content. Canada has had a similar law for decades and it works rather well.

You would really benefit from some self reflection.

They do. Some people don't use them; and (if disciplined) use one or more worksheets to store data and refer to it purely internally and (otherwise) just sort of ad-hoc mix data and formulas.

In some cases a database connection is where the data comes from; but the number of cells grows because it's conceptually easier(and in practice often less opaque, given the ugliness of displaying very large cell contents) to munge on the data step by step rather than trying to ram everything into one transformation.

Coming from the IT side; and having to field questions from the perpetrators of some absolutely hideous excel sheets from time to time(no, I didn't even know that there was a way of creating a type of embedded image that actually quietly triggers the print spooler subsystem to do something that generates a new image based on the contents of another region of the spreadsheet, still don't know how they did that; but it's objectively depraved) I understand the hate; but I do have to admit that spreadsheets are pretty good for napkin-math thinking-it-through type processes.

Like when you work it out on paper; you've got your input, then you have a cell with the contents of the first transformation you wanted to make, then the second, then the third, and so on, and at each step you can think "does this value make sense?"

It rapidly gets out of hand in quantity; but as a rapid sketchpad for thinking something through you could do a whole lot worse. It's also tempting(again, tempting down the path of darkness in quantity) for dealing with jobs that need both a bit of string munging and a pretty-printed output.

You send the intern down to storage with a barcode scanner and have them start snagging SNs and MACs and stuff from the shipment of new gear. Turns out various vendors use different prefixes on different barcode values to inform their own ERP/inventory system/warehouse people which of the 5 closely spaced barcodes their scanner hit. And each vendor uses a different set of conventions, and while obvious enough they aren't documented. Ok, no problem; intern comes back with raw list; all the Lenovo SNs get a 'last x characters' substring; all the Cisco MACs get another transform, whatever.

Obviously if it were your inventory/warehouse system you wouldn't be treating the barcode scanner as a raw HID device and doing ad-hoc transformations, there would be a program that automatically uses the prefixes to populate the correct parts of the form; but you want to stick your head into ERP project hell rather than come up with maybe a dozen lightweight string manipulations? Obviously, you could also do it in your choice of scripting language and iterate through one CSV to create another; but that mostly just conceals what you did from anyone who doesn't use that scripting language; while you can walk basically anyone employable through the logic of the spreadsheet prettifying.

My wife and I just finished watching the Australian version of Ghosts and it was great.

Damn that is spot on. Nearly every fast food joint applies for temporary foreign workers visas so they can pay below market wages.