It's an election year, this is pure pandering to voters. 'This is a thing you should be scared of and we are the people to fix it'.

There is absolutely a level of poverty in the UK that is driving people to shoplift to survive. Supermarket help schemes need to be better signposted - maybe a national scheme of going to customer services and asking to speak to 'Claire'. On the other hand, some shoplifting is happening because of the perception that the worst that can happen is you get a have-a-go security guard who breaks your arm and you get a five-figure payout. We need to get to a situation where those who need help can get it and those who are taking the piss get caught and prosecuted.

I'm utterly baffled. Why is walking for a few mins, sitting on a tram/bus/light-rail for a few mins, and walking for a few more a bad thing? Do you have the same issue with escalators/elevators/travelators? Is this a cultural dislike of public transport - is there a taboo against using it where you are?

It would be incredibly inefficient to replicate every service a person might need every mile or so. Remember, you need to account for those who have mobility problems too, so you can't just presume a six mile walk is OK for everyone. A star network where easy to replicate services are at your node and more centralised services are at a more central node is much more efficient, and public transport is the best way to connect them.

So that's 35 days at 100% rated generation, 180 days at 70%+ generation, and 150 days at 30%-70% generation. What number of TWh did you compute from that to make it 'utterly ridiculous'?

That's a useful delineation between 'woke' and 'pop' (but not as useful as your sig).

Interesting that you didn't come to that conclusion about the prequels though - I guess that most of what is presented as objective opinion about Star Wars is more the changing subjective opinion of people who are themselves changing as they age.

Why would you expect the moral themes to be the same - that's over half a century ago?

What's changed is social-media driven tribalism. It's possible to build yourself a solid power-base by convincing people that they need to be afraid of some abstract concept like 'woke' and then herd mentality stops anyone from speaking out when you label the latest thing you want to swing people against as 'woke'.

The examples that you give aren't objectively true, they are subjectively true to the tribe you are part of.

If you have separate devices for work and home, you might be right. If you are the sort of user that uses one laptop for work and play across their whole day, and doesn't want mobility restrained by a power cord during that time, you'd be wrong.

I recall changing both font and font size for button labels in X/Motif 30 years ago, so possibly just a hard problem to solve for current systems.

Knowing where the answer is and referring to it to check correctness > thinking you know the answer

Ok, but the Shuttle does not need to survive the process. How much mass could you jettison from the shuttle if the only requirement is that the astronauts survive the transfer to the ISS? We can't increase the thrust or the fuel, but mass isn't fixed.

I wouldn't class the effort as 'little'. There are multiple modelling packages, backed up by experimental validation tests. There's still work to be done, but 'little' is a bit unfair. An example paper:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

Government has 4 levers to pull: Tax, Subsidise, Ban, and Promote. This is a local maxima issue. Businesses cut employees because that leads to immediate small profits. Reducing hours instead leads to short-term lower profits and potentially long-term higher profits as a population working fewer hours is more productive per hour, and has more leisure time that they will pay to do stuff in. Government may have to think of a way to adjust those levers to encourage the adoption of shorter working hours for more people to allow the economy to transition to the higher maxima.

It also increases robustness. If you have more people working fewer hours it's less trouble to find someone to cover emergencies.

Sorry to break it to you, but there never was a 'normal'. Just a brief typical that you happened to drop in the middle of. Everything has always changed.

The pandemic was a disruptive event. Some of the adaptations were beneficial and have been retained, like WFH and online events, and some were not and have been reverted. That's just evolution in action. It will suit some and not suit others. Survival of the fittest.

Low-budget housing is what most people need.

So you've been told, yes. The question is: have you been told this because it's true, or because it's an effective way to manipulate you?

That's certainly a question to pose to a room full of war-game enthusiasts.

I can't honestly think of an action by 'western powers' over the last several decades that didn't have unintended consequences, even if the reasons for doing it seemed plausibly 'right' on the surface. That may be an observational effect though where we only get to know there has been meddling if the meddling goes badly.