"four days of sunshine" is not the same thing as "only four days of solar energy". The Sun is always there, it's just more or less occluded by varying atmospheric conditions. A solar thermal system is much more efficient at gathering insolation than PV cells because (among other factors) it has a broader range of incoming wavelengths that it can convert to useful energy. Basically any wavelength that can reach the pipe network and get absorbed, will be converted into heat. In particular, PV cells are insensitive to short-wavelength light, which is _exactly_ the wavelengths that pass more or less freely through cloud cover.

It's not a toy. Would you rather have a hot roof or hot water for your bathtub, given that you can get either of them for free?

... is that solar water heaters don't use any exotic materials from questionable and/or polluting sources or expensive dedicated factories; you could fab one yourself easily. It's basically just a grid of pipes on your roof, and you run your water through it before it hits the water heater. The ones I used to see a couple decades ago weren't actually "pipes in a glass box" as the article describes; they were a zigzag of pipes covered with a black tarp-like material to reduce albedo. I can see how the greenhouse effect of a glass box would make it even more useful, however. Even in situations where you don't get enough insolation to make it shower-hot, you still get a very useful preheat that reduces the amount of energy your water heater has to inject to get the water to temperature. And the systems are very durable. Additionally, you don't have any of those pointless and annoying battles with local electric company regulations that make rooftop solar electricity an exercise in frustration in many areas. Solar water heating is a 100% win.

The description of this fiasco seems to be: "You have to run any new feature by our (UK) government approvers, and if we don't approve it, you can never release the feature anywhere in the world, and you can't tell anyone why". Sooooo... what am I missing here when I say "release it to the rest of the world first"? Seriously now.

A jammer doesn't need to be in orbit to be above you. Don't both the US and Russian ELINT planes carry active jamming/spoofing equipment as well as various snoopy receivers?

Potentially even worse: "your level of PFAs is really high and you're at massive risk of cancer but don't worry inordinately because everyone else in this city has similarly high levels".

Came here to say something similar. Testing that isn't actionable is at best useless to that doctor-patient relationship and at worst exposes the practitioner to liability issues. Isn't there in fact strong discouragement given to doctors telling them NOT to perform unnecessarily broad testing that won't be acted upon? The idea being that if something bad happens to the patient in the future, some lawyer will dig up a study showing that with enough p-hacking, that test the Dr did should have been a blazing clue that the patient was at high risk of XYZ, therefore please insert millions of dollars. What this pfas situation calls for is not random core samples taken through a very skewed demographic, but rather a properly controlled, focused study.

What you have just highlighted is essentially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Goodhart's law. Companies - and indeed _countries_ - often measure their "innovation" by the number of patents they file. This creates a perverse incentive to file patents of narrow or practically meaningless application simply to increase the body count, so to speak. It is exactly analogous to metrics about "lines of code per day" and other meaningless numbers that can be applied to programmers.

US supermarkets trialed that "wall of hand scanners, check one out and start shopping" system a while ago - I remember using it in New York in the early 2000s. They've all been retired in favor of mobile apps that do the same thing, now. Those seem to be gaining in popularity, especially at price clubs.

This used to be quite problematic as the DBs the scale uses to determine "was that the item he said it was?" I think used net weight and a general allowance for packaging - lots of errors. Haven't had that problem in a long time at the places where I shop. Also, a few stores seem to ignore the scale completely and rely on video surveillance (Wal-mart near me doesn't seem to care if I put the item in the bagging area or not).

The other annoying thing about the "10 items or less" lane is that, in America at least, they still accept checks and bulging sacks of small change as payment methods at these registers.

Cart RFID tracking - assuming you mean "RFID tags on every item" - eliminates self checkout. You walk out the door and you are scanned and debited (or, if your credit card declines, possibly disintegrated by high-wattage lasers?). A system that seems less costly and potentially actually viable is Amazon's method of basically having machine vision watch everything you pick up and put back.

Recall that Boeing is also responsible for the plane(s) designated as Air Force One. And there's been similar careless stupid stuff found on those aircraft. IIRC one of them was "empty soda cans found rolling around inside various spaces that would only have been open/accessible during assembly or heavy maintenance". So, perhaps the answer to your question is "not yet ... but given the track record of these people, it's inevitable".

Assuredly wrong on both counts. The second point is the more important one: The same companies that control the energy supply chain of the world today can afford, and are spending money on, lots of researchers and engineers (and M&A activities) to make sure those same companies continue to own the energy supply chain of the future, regardless of whether it's solar, hydrogen, nuclear or ethically sourced unicorn manure. Sure, in the meantime they will continue to hype their _existing_ tech because there's a lot of sunk cost there and the more feedstock you can flow through that infrastructure, the better the amortization looks. But if you think Exxon or BP has their neck chained to liquid dinosaur to the extent that they will become bit players in the future, you're totally wrong.

As for the two decades thing, that's a spitball that way misses the mark. We could start by pointing out that the average age of consumer vehicles on the US market (and the US is a big market, whatever Europe or other blocs choose to do) is 12.5 years and rising, so even if ICE sales were banned it would be way more than 20 years before they were insignificant. But consumer vehicles are only a slice of the pie, not the whole pie. The US military runs on oil. Replacing every vehicle in US military inventory (even if it's possible) is a very long term project. And that's not even counting shipping and civilian aviation.

I was wondering why nobody was focusing on this and everyone was diving into the "ICE BAD! BEV BAD!" (whatever side you're on). To me the much worse part of this article was the implication that all the connectivity in any modern car - regardless of powerplant - is a desirable thing. It IS NOT. It is not there for your benefit, it is there so that auto manufacturers can harvest data from you for resale, and also so that they can implement subscription features in a piece of hardware you bought. To me the single _worst_ aspect of electric vehicles is _precisely_ the fact that they all have forced connectivity to the mothership, and for this reason I won't buy one.