Yup. It's pretty hard to do the right thing when the oil cartel that has invaded Alberta keeps threatening to shit itself and is actively trying to engineer a separatist movement entirely for its own benefit. Here's hoping Carney eventually finds a way to disembowel them.

Its only real flaw with the latest tech is the pacing, but it doesn't take much for a human to correct that. It's not at all what I'd call slop

Its objectively slop and the best models sound dead and lifeless. What *I* want is for Voice artists to still have the career they've been slaving their asses off to still exist. Your not going to get the traumatized performance of Astarion collapsing with grief after killing the vampire who enslaved him, without Neil Newbon drawing on his own experience of trauma, or even the narators snarky delivery without a voice actor whos spent her life playing D&D with absolutely diabolocial nerds informing her subtle intonations and knowing delivery. All you hear in AI performances is .......... nothing. No acting, no emotions, just a dead plagarism machine sewing together stolen performances.

It is the very definition of slop.

The last game Sweeney did the artwork for was ZZT. As much as I love playing around with AI art generation for fun, he's really not an expert on this.

When I looked a few years ago, motorists in the Youkay paid 8x as much in motoring taxes as the Youkay government spent on roads. They're a generic tax grab rather than something to pay for roads.

But yeah, it's incredibly unfair that EVs don't pay the tax when they're typically significantly heaver than ICE cars and road damage scales with something like the 3rd or 4th power by weight.

There is no group if the members are "diverse". If you try to create a "diverse" group you end up with multiple groups forced together who disagree about what the group is and what it's going to be doing.

Which is largely what you see in the UK, where the different types of "diversity" are creating their own enclaves where they don't have to interact with each other. Except the government takes money from one group and gives it to all the others.

This inevitably leads to breakdown and collapse.

We know what will happen in a world where there is no need for human labour. The 'elite' will build Terminators to eliminate most of the humans.

They are not going to pay for billions of people to sit around watching porn all day.

Soyuz, presumably.

Yes - exactly this. Stop subsidising gas, but to do this they'll need a transition to move all the gas central heating in the UK over to heat pumps instead. Grants for doing so exist, but also increasing pressure on the gas price side would push people in the right direction as well.

If its true, then.... well yeah.

And we'll almost certainly get a better name for it than "Phrase which confuses non scientists into thinking scientists have an unprovable theory when scientists literally called it that to indicate that actually, they really dont have a theory yet, or more concisely 'dark matter' "

You're thinking DRAX which yes, as it stands is definitely not a net-positive. But DRAX is normally excluded as they usually report on 'wind and solar'. If someone in government wants to look good with a pie chart with bigger numbers then yes - DRAX gets put in. But for the energy industry itself, it's reported differently.

It's the reverse. Green electricity is held back from adoption because the price is linked to the price of gas. While ever that link exists, electricity will be unnaturally expensive in comparison to its raw market price.

It's not completely irrational, although arguable (I would be on this point of view for instance) it's now out of date. The idea is to pick the most expensive bid price for the spot market price, not the cheapest, in order to incentivise continued operation of difficult energy sources. Why would you want to? Because in ye olden days 'difficult' were things like the hydro power or nuclear which were great for maintaining base line load and which you wanted to subsidise to keep going.

In today's market, that's completely on its head and renewables are the cheapest. Established nuclear second, granted construction costs of new nuclear make that overall cost higher of course. This is why the government is incentivising pushes towards heat pumps etc. - the more we get off gas, the less reason to maintain this market oddity exists and it can be removed making electricity cheaper again.

This is easier said than done. Much of the UK's housing stock would need improvement before heat pumps are viable. I recently had a survey on my own house for instance, and it came back as non-viable without a lot of improvements around heat loss first. These improvements would be a good thing and are semi-subsidised, but it's still effort. I believe the new build rules have finally, years late but finally, been changed to require standards around heat pumps and solar.

So yep - electricity being expensive in the UK is not due to the renewables or nuclear, it's due to gas. And the reason we still rely on gas so much is inertia plus building standards and upgrades. Hard one to unpick, but got to start somewhere.

Where, prey tell, do you think humans get the vast majority of their "knowledge" in 2025?

I had a person yelling at me online this morning because I had the gall to point out that the only way vaccines could cause autism would be using time travel (your born with autism, clearly something that happens to you after you are born can't cause something that happened to you before you without a time machine of some sort), and it struck me that actually the internet IS how a lot of people are "learning" and its making people incredibly stupid.