That's the problem with old laws in the UK. Some of them have become ridiculously lenient, like ones imposing financial penalties that a centuriy and a half of inflation has rendered largely meaningless. However, some others allowed exceptionally harsh penalties - specifically the death penalty - to remain at least a theoretical punishment for crimes like piracy, treason and some military offences until 30 years after the death penalty was "abolished".

Fortunately, with them being old laws piracy was defined as the sort involving ships not computer games.

Overall it may reduce global warming since war hurts the economy and lowers the population meaning that there are fewer people around afterwards to burn fossil fuel or buy things created by fossil fuel. Indeed multiple studies after the 2008 market crash showed that the reduction in the economy also led to a noticeable reduction in carbon emissions. At the extreme end nuclear war is believed to cause nuclear winter where the dust thrown into the atmosphere causes a significant drop in temperature lasting for years.

That is exceptionally unlikely. All current designs for fusion reactors are complex and expensive to make and, even if you have a magic wand that can produce fusion reactors for almost no cost, they are all going to be large power-station sized facilities unless you also discover some completely new physics and that means expensive transmission lines whose size and hence expense depends very much on the amount of power being consumed.

So unless you also think we will have cheap, room-temperature superconductors as well, or a new way to generate clean, almost limitless power at power in the home, we will be metered for the forseeable future.

If you are earning $10M/year it does not need to last long.

It does, it radiates away into space. That's why the Earth, which receives over 1.3kW/m^2 in energy from the sun, has not been baked to a crisp over the billions of years it has received such energy: it just wamred up the to point that the rate of radiating energy matched the rate at which the sun adds it. Since the rate of radiation is roughly proportional to the temperature to the power 4, adding additional heat sources to the Earth (especially ones many orders of magnitude less than the power of the sun's heating, has negligible effect on the temperature.

The reason that global warming occurs is because CO2 is very good at absorbing radiation in the wavelengths that objects at the Earth's temperature want to radiate at. This traps heat from the sun by reducing the amount that is radiated until the Earth heats up enough that the new rate of emission overcomes the effect and since the sun's power is many orders of magnitude higher than any human power sources this effect is many orders of magnitude larger than direct heating. For reference the total global power generation was about 3.5 TW in 2024 averaged over the year while the sun's power hitting the earth is about 167,000 TW.

It's not risky it's insane. The only way that could possibly happen is if someone came up with a brilliant idea that turned out to be spectacularly easy realize. The problem is that the last ~70 years of fusion research has been filled with the exact polar opposite: brilliant ideas that all looked easy to realize but that all, without exception, turned out to be impossibly hard to make them work.

We'll achieve fusion in the end but expecting it to be 7 years away is insanity - I suspect it is still several decades away at best although nothing would make me happier than to be wrong.

Scene: a queue of customers in a shop. Customer at the head of the queue with a total of $19.10, hands the cashier a $20 note to pay. There is no till just an electronic card reader and a cash drawer.

A frown appears on the cashier's face as the sudden realization that skills learned in their "advanced" maths class will now be called on after years of neglect. They reach for the calculator only to remember that the batteries died this morning and nobody has had a chance to replace them. Concentrating hard finally an epiphany - $19 is just $1 less than $20 so they quickly hand the customer a dollar.

But no, the customer hands it back saying this is too much change. Panic sets in as the cashier realizes that they had forgotten the decimal place! How can they be expected to do university-level maths? They don't have a maths degree! Faint wisps of steam rise from their ears as mathematical machinery deep in their brain rumbles into action straining against the buildup of forgotten Tiktok videos and What's App messages. Finally, seemingly from nowhere comes the answer - it's 90 cents! With a flash of relief the cashier opens the cash draw only to be confronted with 25, 10 and 5 cent coins and a new seemingly impossible puzzle of how to choose the right coins to make up 90 cents....

My takeaway is that given the wonerful level fo maths education we now seem to have, sadly even cash transactions require working technology today.

Both Canada and the UK have national health care and their academic salaries are on very different scales so clearly healthcare is not relevant to the level of academic salary.

Even after this change it will still be the BSOD just with a different value of B.

So you do see them! ;-) That's what I was talking about. Yes, the broken rate is probably not quite as high as it is for chargers because pumps have been around for over a century so we have had time to really optimize the design. However, when you are going to a location with 4 chargers and one is broken and the other three are in use you really notice it because you have to wait 30 minutes or so to be able to charge. If that happened at a petrol station you'd just wait a few minutes and use the next free pump without thinking anything of it.

Yes, but to be fair typical academic activities of an 80-year old professor don't involve running around while being shot at by Nazis or finding caves with weird alien beings. Instead it involves being called a Nazi because you innocently used what used to be an acceptable phrase and increasingly wondering whether you might be an alien being because nothing around you looks like the world you used to know.

It's not the discrepancy between academic and industry salaries that matters, it's the absolute value of that salary. That's why I ended up in Canada instead of the UK as an academic - UK academic salaries are not enough to be able to afford a house and support a family on, Canadian ones are. I don't really care what I might have been able to earn in industry because I enjoy my job as an academic too much to want to work in industry. However, I have to have a job that earns enough to afford a house and support my family at a reasonable standard of living - that's my bottom line and the UK salaries for academics are well below that, even up north where I am from and the cost of living is lower.

Clearly your subconcious looks for you which is how you manage to avoid pumps that are out of order without realizing it! ;-)

If you mean that you drove up to one, got out and found it not working then I'd agree with you. But I find it hard to believe that you have never been to a petrol station in the past 10 years that did not have at least one pump that was down for maintenance or refilling the underground tank. The difference is that you probably saw that the pump was blocked off and just went to another without thinking about it like most of us do.

Good point - nobody has a petrol pump at home!