And what problem could there possibly be for freedom of scientific exchange if major research labs fire people for trying to publish contrary opinions?

If you're attitude is "but of course, they're the boss, why should they be foreced to pay him to work against them", you're pretty much establishing that commercial research groups such as Google Brain [1] can't be trusted and probably shouldn't be allowed to publish in journals such as Nature.

[1] "Google Brain" sounds like the condition that afflicts google employees who start calling themselves "googlers".

And as for the other points raised here... Google said "at cause" that means there must've been a good reason, because large corporations never lie, and corporate management in the United States is far too honest to invent "causes" just because they need them, and besides, I worked with a jerk once, therefore this guy must've been a jerk. Seriously?

Pretty good run down, I would also complain about:

(1) the "let's pretend everyone is on a phone" re-design that a lot of stuff (gnome?) went to and never recovered from.

(2) redhat using it's muscle to put over systemd (note: this complaint is orthogonal to whether you think systemd is an improvement), which (combined with ubuntu's spyware) made me wonder if commercial distros weren't as harmful as proprietary development.

(3) the complete inability of Mozilla to understand that their selling point was customization, which means they need to stop breaking customizations ("only five percent of our users will be pissed off by this and spend the next ten years ranting and feeling betrayed").

Practical (?) advice: on distros, I'm back to Debian. Most of the clunky aspects of Debian that gave Ubuntu an opening have been fixed, and they seem a little less likely to go off the rails than other distros.

Currently I use meetup to announce on-line gatherings, and every step of the process works on Firefox, except for the final step to publicize the meeting, that now just spins and does nothing, without giving you a clue to debug the problem. Eventually I remember to try the chromium browser, and that just works.

This is pretty common in my experience: the web "designers" do everything (and I mean *everything* no matter how simple and stupid) with insanely complex js libraries shipped by the google or facebook, and no one checks to see if the automatic upgrades (that get pushed on you without asking) have any breakage on non-chromium platforms.

Looking at demand today isn't all that helpful, because it will certainly change as the grid transitions to renewables

And it will radically increase once we succeed in "electrifying everything" including transportation and manufacturing.

When there are short periods of high demand and low availability,

Like the German winter.

Building additional reactors at the same site is often a sensible even if re-using components usually isn't-- some of the over head is the security staff, the storage facilities and the licensing approval for the site.

The way I would put it is that we don't have anything like a sane pricing system on energy-- the actual costs of carbon emissions are not captured in the price of the energy, so you can't just "let the market decide".

Team anti-nuclear right now likes the line "it's just economics!", having suddenly discovered the laissez-faire religion (except when talking about subsidies for solar and wind or electric cars).

https://journals.ametsoc.org/v...

A Mark Z. Jacobson paper? Okay, now you're just trolling.

The plain-text internet, eh? So I'm ahead of the curve, once again:

http://obsidianrook.com/doomfi...

Except that's genuinely an html 1.0 design, without any CSS or what not.

And the "N" in pinhead stands for "narrowminded".

The religious commitment to Mathism is seeming increasingly peculiar to me for varioius reasons-- not the least of which is I've been working as a programmer for decades and am having trouble figuring out why the Computer Science department won't do experiments to verify that their ideas about language design are correct (hint: you have to put down the pencil and talk to the Social Sciences people).