While I won't argue with speed limits often being arbitrary, the problem of fines (and civil forfeitures) being used to generate revenue is largely an American one. In most places fine revenue either goes to the central government's general fund or is ring-fenced for specific uses that are not the under the control of the people enforcing the laws. In the USA most states let the police agency that levies a fine or civil forfeiture keep some or all of the money. This leads directly to abuse. Enforcement is always subjective and selective; giving the police a personal financial incentive to be heavy-handed is bound to lead that way. Unfortunately there is a notable contingent in the US that seems to think that "law and order"(TM) is perfectly even-handed and should be vigorous, and also want the funding for government to come from someone other than them, so this sort of arrangement persists even though it's patently obvious that it leads to corruption.

The amount of precipitation wasn't the issue this year, it was the high temperatures in the mountain West. From the OP:

It's the snowpack that feeds the rivers through the dryer months. Winter rain melts what snow is there and it all runs down hill quickly (literally and metaphorically). There's only so much space in the reservoirs and the rest is back in the ocean by April or May. This summer is going to suck for farmers, or anyone else who needs a steady water supply.

Maybe, but that's also what people said about both Google and Facebook. The cost of delivering the service will go down over time. The cost of customer acquisition will go up as incumbent players solidify their positions. A loss leader now is arguably well worth it for the future. Add to that the fact that the vast majority of the investments being made are going into hardware that is increasingly hard to come by and the risk to investors is less than they first appear, while the upside is potentially huge.

There is a lot of hype in the AI space at the moment, and the valuations across the market as a whole are unsustainable, but Anthropic is one of the companies that seem more likely to come out well in the long run.

I grew up in a house that was more than 300 years old. There are plenty of churches in Europe that have crypts which were sealed 1,000 years ago and are still in fine shape. There are large scale human constructions such as the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids and the Great Wall of China that are over 2,000 years old. Construction to last 300 years is not that hard.

Probably more importantly, 300 years is short enough that people might actually remember why they are not supposed to go "in there". I suspect that one of the biggest challenges with burying waste for 10,000 years would people thinking that it looks "interesting" after 1,000 years and digging it back up.

No, sodium is much cheaper than lithium in the form that is needed to make batteries; recent commodity prices for NaOH have been 10x to 20x cheaper than bulk LiOH, although this isn't all the cost. The technology development is now to a state where complete sodium batteries are cheaper the lithium ones and has been for a year or so, and the technology is improving fast.

You are correct that the energy density is indeed worse, but that gap has also been closing in recent years. Modern Na batteries have better energy density than the Li batteries in cars from six or seven years ago. If you're trying to build a lot of cheap electric cars then the lower price is very likely more important than the cars being somewhat heavier and thus a bit slower.

They are not the only people to make a profit from AI!

Surly everyone knows that Belgium is just a little bigger than Lesotho but just a little smaller than Moldova, but for the geographically challenged, that's a somewhat bigger than Hawaii but smaller than Maryland.

It was the size of Luxembourg after the last downsizing. It's now the size of Andorra, but there's another set of cuts coming and it will end up a little smaller than Monaco.

The article you cite says that Canada had 8,982 deportations, 5,821 exclusions, and 3,982 self-departures. For comparison, the USA, which is about 9 times larger, according to ICE had 605,000 deportations, about 1.6 million exclusions and self-departures, and another 525,000 or so deportation orders.

So you're right, the data here is quite relevant. It shows that the USA is deporting people at at least 10 times the per capita rate of Canada.

Well, it's a US news outlet, and US news reporting does tend to be rather parochial; I think it is more myopia than new suppression. The news here is the huge leap up in cases in the USA but I'm sure the RFK will be upset that you're not #1 yet.

It's worth noting that there are some strong similarities between the US and Canadian outbreaks in 2025. Both started in Mennonite communities with very low vaccination rates and spread through close community contact. The Canadian outbreak appears to have started at a wedding in New Brunswick in December 2024, where a large number of unvaccinated people travelled to the wedding and one of them brought an infection to the party too. This large scale close contact got the outbreak kick-started faster than the one in Texas, but then they grew at a similar exponential rate which alleged with the similar low vaccination rates in the communities where they took hold.

Fair enough. Don't get me wrong; I'm a huge fan of EVs. I just worry that focusing solely on trying to replace 2.5 billion existing ICE engines with electric ones will take too long to make the necessary impact. Finding a way to effectively reduce the net carbon emissions of the existing installed base is going to be a critical part of the solution. When you couple that with the fact that there's a large overlap between the technologies needed for synthesis and sequestration, it seems like finding a way to get the market to switch from pulling oil out ground to pulling it out of the air seems like it would be worth the effort.

The existing processes are inefficient for sure (most e-fuel systems have about 45% efficiency minus a a few percent more for the CO2 capture) but the efficiencies have been improving over the last 10 to 15 years with a bunch of new catalysts and if this was a market priority then I expect that we would see even more.

I suspect that what happened is that people found hydrogen difficult to store, move and handle and it didn't fit will with the huge installed base of infrastructure, so the market rejected it.

There's not enough movement on nuclear, but we are already reaching the point where we have gluts of electricity in the wrong place (just search for news stories about the spot price of electricity going negative). Wind and solar are abundant but unreliable and unevenly distributed. Deploying technology that can store the energy (even if inefficient) and then enable it to be moved to where it is needed (very efficiently) has value even if building new nuclear capacity is slow.

I always thought that the EU's goal of phasing out all new internal combustion engines was attacking the wrong problem. The problems of climate change have not come from burning hydrocarbons per se, they have come from taking carbon-based fuels from the ground. We should phasing out the use of extracted oil for powering internal combustion engines and demanding that cars use air-to-liquid synthesised fuels instead.

There are currently somewhat over 260 million passenger cars in the EU, of which around 90% use an ICE. Banning the sale of new ICEs won't do anything for these nearly quarter billion existing vehicles (or the other 2 billion around the world). Vehicles are long-lived capital purchases and they aren't going away any time soon.

Spending government time, effort and money on improving the synthesis of fuel from CO2 and water would help all of them. The fundamentals of the process have been understood for 150 years, but the oil companies have never had a strong incentive to commercialise them. The oil companies are rich and politically connected, but they also employ many of the best chemical engineers around. Whether you like them or loath them, pragmatically if you want to solve the problem of burning new carbon pulled from the ground then finding a way to have them as an ally who will benefit from the change, rather than an enemy who will fight you tooth and nail, is going to be more effective and quicker.

Personally I like the torque characteristics of electric motors, the low moving part count of EVs and their quiet interiors, but the fact is that there is a huge installed base of old-fashioned motors and a vast infrastructure in place to support them. If you want to cut the net CO2 going into the atmosphere then you need to cut off the source of the new carbon and force the market to pull the existing CO2 out of the air. Couple that with tight particulate regulation on new engines and the market will move to EVs eventually in due course, but in the meantime you can cut the net emissions of the billions of vehicles out there already.

Obligatory XKCD cartoon (circa May 2017).

It applies to 42 countries, including 32 of the 35 members of the OECD that don't have some other form of visa-free entry. These countries account from a little over a third of visitors to the USA and given that the OECD represents the largest economies in the world it's likely that their spending is disproportionately higher.

If they were only looking for people who were talking about killing people (of any nationality, ethnicity or religion), and they couldn't get that information some other way, then there might be some case for this. The problem is that all the evidence so far indicates that this is an administration which will be looking for and punishing people who happen to oppose this administration, even if they are highly supportive of America and Americans in general. What makes you think that this won't be abused once it's in place?