Could this be why my windows folder on my work laptop is 65+ GB? Maybe that Weezer video from Windows 95 is in there too.

Well with a Putin agent in control of America for the foreseeable future (the next revolution or two) getting your nuclear fuel from Russia will keep everyone that matters happy : President Putin and President Putin.

The overhead lines into your house are too. The line connection into your breaker panel is aluminum.

The "overhead line" is underground, from the nearest substation. Which, come to think of it, has no overhead lines into it either, so it must be supplied underground too. We do things differently to America.

And the Earth and Neutral lines coming into my consumer unit (different terminology too) are definitely copper. The Live line terminates within the supply-company's fuse block, so I can't examine that without breaking the tamper-evident seal.

The "last mile" of power distribution here is largely underground in urban districts, so weight-on-pole isn't a concern. (And for decades, we've been pushing telephone lines etc underground too. Dad's house was "telephoned" in the mid-1970s from a pole - and the roadside trees have snagged the line at least twice since then ; but no house I've owned has had telephone lines on poles. (1980s wiring?)

Different country, different choices. I'm not sure when (if, even) a decision was taken to go for underground distribution instead of on-pole here. Maybe in the aftermath of WW2?

My first career was mineral processing at a mine. A promising career in 1990, dead on its ass by 2000.

No first world country likes to have dirty things like mines around. Or, for that matter, the oil wells that fuel their cars - they like them decently over the horizon, out of sight from beaches with built-in hypothermia. The only metals mine to open in the country in my lifetime went bust about 18 months ago - just after I'd applied for a job there.

It's so much more civilised to buy processed materials from foreigners ... until the foreigners start to manage the prices for their benefit, not ours. The barbarians!

Even wire has gotten complicated.

Well when you're already talking about a composite cable with steel for tensile strength and Al for conductivity, yes, you're already talking about a relatively sophisticated technology.

To be honest though, I gave up expecting "wire" to be simple nearly 40 years ago when I had to carry out repairs on wire-rope ladders for the university caving club, on whose rungs people (including me) were intending to literally hang their lives. Wires (and "soft" ropes) have not been simple since the 1800s. In fact, since a former paid employment dealt with legislation from mine explosions in the 1800s (Humphry Davy and the "Safety Lamp" which you must have studied in school), I'd hazard a guess that wires and ropes went from being "simple" to being highly-researched in the years after a spectacular multiple-fatality rope failure in a mine shaft. I can't think of comparable failures in suspension bridge cables - because the suspension bridges I can think of from that era tended to use wrought iron bars and chains rather than "ropes". People don't look at materials closely until there are grieving bereaved families nagging politicians.

... you mine it and process it.

So all the price inflation in the world isn't going to do much until more copper mines and smelters are in operation - which is a decade-scale investment.

and that is why fucking around with the global commodities markets on a faster-than-monthly basis is a good way to fuck things up for decades.

Well done, Dear Leader, for acting like a Tangerine Shitgibbon. So glad to know you'll still be in power (or your appointees, as the Alzheimers bites) to try to sort out your own self-inflicted problems.

It's not just copper - a lot of high power grid lines are made of aluminium conductors with a steel core - you can get more conductivity for cheaper pylons carrying less weight. But it still needs mining and smelting.

The game changer would be if someone succeeded in inventing a sufficiently conductive carbon-based polymer. With some genetic engineering, we should be able to harvest the raw materials instead of mining them. I've been hearing about incremental advances in "plastic conductors" since I was literally in school. Sounds like it's poised for a revolution some century soon, because nobody has put any real effort into the problem. Assuming, of course, that such a thing is actually possible, of which there is no guarantee.

There will be knock on the door from the Thought Police for you in the near future. How dare you contradict the Dear Leader until he contradicts himself?

FTFA :

"My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don't fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven't been able to find any of those yet either,"

What's that saying about "when you hear hooves, expect horses, not zebras". Note that the effect seems to be occurring in the particles caused by the interaction of a (notoriously unreactive) neutrino with a boring rocky particle (proton, neutron, electron, in roughly equal numbers) ; but those reaction products are boringly reactive particles, which is how the produce the showers which are behaving weirdly.

FTFS :

leaving Russia controlling roughly half the world's enriched uranium market.

A quick Wiki (verb) (because I noticed a similar claim in a non-America story recently and thought "I should check that") gives me :

Rank .. Country. . . . . Annual tonnage . . % of global total
1 . . . Kazakhstan . . . . 21,227. . . . . . . . 43.01%
2 . . . Canada . . . . . . 7,351 . . . . . . . . 14.89%
3 . . . Namibia. . . . . . 5,613 . . . . . . . . 11.37%
4 . . . Australia. . . . . 4,553 . . . . . . . . 9.22%
5 . . . Uzbekistan . . . . 3,300 (est.). . . . . 6.69%
6 . . . Russia . . . . . . 2,508 . . . . . . . . 5.08%
7 . . . Niger. . . . . . . 2,020 . . . . . . . . 4.09%
8 . . . China. . . . . . . 1,700 (est.). . . . . 3.44%
9 . . . India. . . . . . . . 600 (est.). . . . . 1.22%
10. . . South Africa . . . . 200 (est.). . . . . 0.40%

(There has got to be a better way of doing tables in Slash's crippled subset of HTML. But it's a rare-enough need.)
So, Kazahkstan (yes, it's a former SSR of the USSR ; but it hasn't been part of Russia for a generation now, and they'll be looking at Ukraine, reading the "Ukraine Lesson", and collaborating with whoever they can trust (DPRK, Iran, Pakistan?) to trade some of that lovely fissionable material for nuclear weapons technology) is by far the largest producer, with another former SSR on the list ahead of Russia (the Russian Federation). Haven't the Kazakh's changed from the Cyrillic script to the Latin script in recent years? Yes, I thought so.

If I were in an anti-proliferation inspectorate, I'd look at those production rates for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan with the proverbial fine-tooth gamma-ray spectrometer. The amount of happy-happy-joy-joy they could mutually share with Iran (or Pakistan) by trading some lies on the export paperwork for the tech to low-enrich some of their uranium (destined for Iran (or Pakistan)) to, say, reduce by half the amount of enrichment that both themselves and Iran (or Pakistan) has to do.

Does Israel have planes with the range to bomb the further reaches of the 9th largest country in the world? I bet that question gives them twitchy arseholes in Jerusalem. Along with the question of how to get other distant countries to allow their bomber and tanker planes silent overflight.

The next administration could simply revoke that executive order and it all comes crashing down. Would you invest in a scenario like that?

S/next administration/next revolution of Trump's braincell/

As if there's going to be another "US administration", this side of the 3rd or 4th American revolution (depending on your opinion of 1/6). Hilarious.

We will likely be synthesizing hydrocarbon fuels with some regularity soon. I know there are doubters because hydrogen from electrolysis is so energy intensive. My answer to that is to not get hydrogen from electrolysis, there's more efficient methods using heat.

What's wrong with getting hydrogen from water, the way plants (and other photosynthesisers have (mostly) been doing it for the last 2-5+ billion years?

To remind you of your kindergarten chemistry : 2 CO2 + 2 H2O -(through a chloroplast)-> 2[CH2] (an approximation to "hydrocarbons") + (some) O2 - which is the basic reaction of oxygenic photosynthesis. You still need to do a degree of methods using heat to convert the mixed organic gunk coming out of a bioreactor into something that a regular IC engine can handle, but not a huge amount. There's a reason that most of the world blends alcohols (mostly ethanol) into their petrol (gasoline) supplies to reduce smog-forming emissions. It even works without the corruption in the US agricultural industries.

Of course, you don't have to release O2 if you don't want to - there are around a dozen non-oxygenic photosynthesis systems for turning light and CO2 into "fixed" carbon (with a lot of bound-in hydrogen) and some other organic gubbins that can generally be burned. And indeed, multiple groups are touting modest variations on the theme and trying to get from lab scale to refinery scale. But there's no good reason to go to synthesising hydrogen by electrolysis when you've got biological catalysts around to do the job for you. Unless you have some biting need to build high-pressure high-temperature heavy-iron chemistry sets for some other reason instead of atmospheric pressure glorified buckets. (Such a reason might be supplying hydrogen for ammonia synthesis, as a precursor to the explosives industry. If you want that, say it.)

There's an effort - whose details I don't much follow - to develop a biofuel replacement for Jet-A1, which may be the first such system to make it to "refinery scale" manufacture, because it's got some relatively coherent global backing. The aviation industry tout that one quite often, because many tourists feel guilty about drowning the tropical islands they flock to to do their lobster impersonations. That might get the refining ("downstream") end of the oil industry quite upset, if it approaches fruition.

He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy!

Global population will begin to decline in 2080.

The best sort of problem : someone else's.

However, the population of people 40 and under *has already peaked* and is declining. That means *not enough people working* to pay for benefit programs for people over 60 starts *today* .

Ditto. I've paid my whack. I'll take what I'm due.

"after me the deluge"

This is Scotland. "Toujours le deluge!"

But having 5 billion seniors, 2 billion adults, and 1 billion kids isn't going to be healthy.

Someone Else's Problem.

I can tell you are a flat-earther type.

Nope - geologist. Firmly rooted in reality.

How do you arrange to use a word processor to handle text input on a web page form?

Doesn't necessarily happen on school premises. Indeed for application forms, the school doesn't have any duty of care at all.

Thinking back to a classmate who struggled to get around the Department when he was in his wheelchair, there being only one lift which didn't cover all floors of the Department. The uni didn't have any duty of care, because he broke his literal neck on the second day of his summer break, and first day of his holiday, in another country, and another nation. The "listed building" status of the college as well as pure economics made putting in additional lifts a non-starter. The short sets of steps between building phases had mostly been ramped away in the 1950s updates.

US politics is getting madder, and is probably more likely to get us all killed now than it was last month. Situation "normal", for insane values of "normal".

You've got to hand it to Putin - he's bossed the "getting an agent into US politics" achievement. One of these days, I really should watch the "Manchurian Candidate". That's the original - there was a re-make recently, I think, and they're never worth watching.