Thing is, that figure was still not correct, the £350M was shown to be wrong, the actual number is £180M, which is just over half the figure used by the Exit campaign. And people still went for it because it was "truthy", so it played well to their own preconceptions. Similar to the rhetoric about Eurocrats, when the reality is that the EU has less bureaucrats employed in total than the UK has bureaucrats working in Birmingham, their second largest city.

I think one item that made it very clear that people were voting with their feelings rather than weighing positives and negatives, was Cornwall realizing, after the vote, that they get a lot of EU support, and trying to put pressure on London to match this. Whether or not it will happen, who knows, but after the vote probably wasn't the time to bring it up.

I've said before that I believe that much of the negative feeling towards the EU is from governments all over Europe using the EU as a handy scapegoat, and claiming that any unpopular decision was a result of the EU. This has been going on for 40 years in the case of the UK, which was bound to have an impact. It also doesn't help that people find it difficult to distinguish the EU from the ECHR (a separate organization) and EU related immigration from external immigration (in the UK, the largest number of immigrants are from India, for instance). This is a great example of what the article is saying because it shows that the narrative has been prioritized over the reality, and it's really difficult to dispute a narrative now because it's dispersed, rather than having a small number of sources.

The commissioners are nominated by the governments, the councils of ministers still have most of the power and there are more civil servants in Birmingham than Brussels.

Smaller. Beureaucracy.....

There are 55,000 eurocrats working for the commission (source). There are 60,000 in Birmingham alone (according to the same link) and for the UK as a whole there were 405,573 in 2015 according to the UK's own statistics.

The UK joined the EU as an economic basket case in 1973, and its trajectory since has been largely upward. This simple fact was lost in the debate. In every way, the UK is more prosperous now than it was then. Obviously, this is an aggregate and some areas have faced particular hardships, the older mining areas in particular but that was nothing to do with Brussels and everything to do with internal politics. The NHS funding issues are nothing to do with migrants and everything to do with the current government attempting to cut back. The migrant integration issues have almost nothing to do with EU migrants, and nearly all the problems occur because of immigration from former imperial holdings like Pakistan and (to a lesser extent) India. The European Court of Human Rights (a particular bugbear of the Daily Mail) is not related to the EU, it predated the EU and the UK is still subject to it.

The leave arguments were trivially debunkable but very emotive, and the remain arguments were basically putting a sheet over their head and saying "woooooo, scary". It really doesn't help that the UK government (and they're not alone in this) spent the last 40 years justifying every single unpopular decision by claiming that the EU made them do it. They are reaping what they sowed, and we can only hope that 1973 isn't their destination.

Yeah, but the flip side is that the EU cannot really give the UK a sweetheart deal - the best deal on the table will have to be a Norweigan style EEA membership, otherwise the benefits of being in the EU are non-obvious.

Most people seem to think of "Starship Troopers" when they think of Heinlein, or the incest focused subplot of Farnham's Freehold but he was a seriously prolific writer and it seems that his real schtick was challenging assumptions about society and government - in 1960 he wrote an essay with the sentiment that "Maybe we should let women rule the world - they can't do worse than men have, and might do better".

He explored collectivism in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" along with polygamy, he explored militarism in Starship Troopers. He saw a world where Africa reigned supreme after a nuclear war ruined the first and second worlds in Farnham's Freehold. He tried to envisage a world where a "prophet" broke all the accepted rules of society in A Stranger in a Strange land. Those are just the highlights. Heinlein, whether you agree with anything he wrote or not, is a writer that everyone should read in my opinion.

He was also decent chap, as his treatment of Philip K Dick in the latter years of his life shows.

Notably EE "Doc" Smith had variations of this all over the shop.

His stuff is enjoyable but wow, a fair amount of genocide occurs.

That link is of a conversation where she tells an aide to remove the classified material and headers.
Effectively, she told the aide to do something similar to the process where documents are released redacted. If the classified portion of the material is removed before transmission, the remainder is no longer classified and can be transmitted.

Seriously, if it were as simple as portrayed, this would be a non-issue because she would have been charged.

If you believe that the Russians are the underdog in the Russia-Ukraine situation you may wish to re-assess that. If you were supporting underdogs, you'd be supporting Ukraine.

Whatever your views on the general situation, the separatist forces on the ground claimed this before they realized it was a civilian airliner, and then they panicked. It was really, really obviously the separatists in the Donbass who did this - whether it was regular Russian troops manning equipment from Russia may be less certain (although the balance of evidence is that this was the case given reports from locals in the area at the time). Russia would have been better off going for an explanation that the poorly-trained separatists had looted a BUK AA missile battery from a Ukranian military base - they could have slapped the separatists on the wrist but generously provided them training to ensure no more mistakes were made, and moved on. Instead they picked an explanation that was couldn't hold up to scrutiny and doubled-down when caught. The reason people are accusing you of being a Russian troll is because you must be discounting everything except sources that are known to be supported by the Russian government to argue your cause.

This, while true, is also mostly irrelevant The NFC card will still generate an ARQC that uniquely validates the transaction based on a key present on the chip which the attacker cannot gain without gaining the card.
The data can only be used online if the attacker has the CVV2 from the back of the card, which is never transmitted.
That card could be cloned and used via magnetic stripe but again you don't have the CVV1 (which is on the magnetic stripe and won't be transmitted via NFC because it uses another validation method) and chip card cloning still hasn't happened, again thanks to the key on the chip.

And, as pointed out, using a Point of Sale device like this makes it trivial to trace the recipient of the funds.

The odder thing about this is kind of attempted fraud is the question - where does the money go?
It can't go to an arbitrary account because the POS device is tied to a merchant. You need a merchant account at the bank (you can't just use your retail account for this). So the first time this is noticed, everyone involved should be trivially identifiable. The money HAS to go through the merchant's account.

Really, you're so humour-challenged that you didn't catch the really obvious pun?

I mean, if you'd raged at it being a bad pun, or tasteless, I could see that. But missing it entirely? Sheesh. Or "Whoosh" in this instance.

Which is? They run tourist trips to Pripyat! There is an area around it that you probably wouldn't want to live in if you didn't have to, but bear in mind that Chernobyl WAS a worst-case scenario - the reactor exploded. The world's still here.

I did flag these as opinions! I think that it would require an international agreement before beaming and form of concentrated energy back to earth would be allowed by governments. And if you think that people will be happy about "being bathed in microwaves from a space satellite" no matter how diffuse, you haven't been paying attention to the media.

Please stop saying this. It's like saying "my i7 processor is made from: sand!". It requires microchip grade silicon, rare earths, and copper to make a solar panel. You can't go to the beach and steal a kid's sand-castle to make one. In particular there is a potential bottleneck around the supply of rare earths.

Yes it does. But what it means is that the total installed power generation capacity will (probably) never be reached which leads us to:

It appears that these countries are building LNG and Coal backup plants, such as in Germany? Germany also can import nuclear power from France on a calm day. Another wind-power stalwart, Denmark can import power from the Scandinavian peninsula's hydro power and from Germany's neigbours via Germany too. Wind is a great power source, but pretending it doesn't have issues around base-load at the moment is disingenuous.

The pylons will require significantly more maintenance than their onshore cousins, as will the blades.

Yeah, I did. Theoretically, they are great but practically the maintenance considerations make them non-economic right now.

Maintenance and corrosion are "solved" by very, very intensive maintenance.

This is viciously ironic given how the land rights for the island of Manhattan were acquired from the native Americans.

Chernobyl was not really an accident, though - Chernobyl is what happens when you turn off all the safeties and then deliberately stress the reactor to see what happens, and have your B team there and no backup plan. Chernobyl was deliberate. The result was not what they expected, but they effectively pushed the big red button to see what would happen. And even then the casualties were light (using WHO figures, your opinion on their reliability is your own), especially compared to the fear that it generated.

Argue economics about nuclear, but it has an enviable safety record. The problem is perception - you can name all the nuclear accidents but probably few, if any, accidents for coal or gas, even if the casualties were higher. Heck, dam failures are more devestating but people are still more afraid of nuclear.

Other opinions:
Orbital solar is unlikely to happen because no-one is going to allow anything that can beam energy in the control of another nation in orbit at the moment, all other considerations aside.
Solar panel production is going to become a bottleneck - particularly the raw materials needed - if the solar build out accelerates significantly. In the long term it will only become the bulk of power generation if we get continent sized grids or better grid-level storage. It is the preferred solution, for sure, but it will take time.
Wind is situational and without better storage or matching generation will not be a trusted generation source. Also, offshore wind is going to be really, really expensive on maintenance. Few substances are as corrosive as salt water. Otherwise we'd be using tidal generators everywhere.

The linked study explicitly says that potentially petrol cars "must have been" emitting twice as much particulate as previously measured/estimated. As you seem to have forgotten it

I pulled the previously measured estimated numbers, doubled them, and they're still far behind the measured diesel ones. Double the gas ones again and they're still behind based on the current measurements although now it's close. How is this difficult to understand?

That is not a conclusion that you can take from the study you linked. That petrol is worse than previously thought does not make diesel better. By their measurements diesel is still signficantly worse!