Your math is wrong. Not the actual numbers, but the way you apply them. Your idea is to build big power plants rivaling what you know from steam turbine powered based power plants (how the steam is heated, coal or nuclear or fusion or whatever the heat source du jour might be, is completely irrelevant). But that's not how Wind and Solar work. If you just cover the public parking spaces of Houston, TX with solar panels, you would not take a single farmer's land, and still, you would be able to power the whole city of Houston. It begs the question though why Houston needs that much parking, and if that's not the real waste of space. By the way, that's what Portugal does with parking spaces in the country - cover them with solar panels. It cools the tarmac below, improves the ambient temperature in the towns, and generates energy. And you can build glass houses with solar panels instead of pure glass sheets. There are solar panels which have 50% transparency. They provide enough light for the plants in the glass house, and still generate surplus electric energy.

Denmark started with wind turbines 40 years ago, and now, Wind accounts for more than 50% of Denmark's electricity generation. In Germany, Wind accounts for 30% of Germany's electricity (the high prices for electricity in Germany have very bureaucratic, and quintessentially German reasons with braindead legislation, but that's another chapter). Ah yes, biogas currently generates the same amount of electricity in Germany as Nuclear did the last year before it was switched off. And then there is balcony power - a concept completely alien to the U.S., but widespread in Europe. For about 300 EUR, you can get a small do-it-yourself solar power plant, and legally assemble it yourself and plug it into your wall socket (any wall socket will do). No licensed electrician required. It's limited to 800 Wp - but hey, free energy for everyone. In a town with 10,000 apartments, this would be akin to a 8 MWp power plant for the price of 3 million bucks - without any tax payer money. If you want to pay an electrician, buy 10 of them. Or 30. And he will do the connection to the grid. For 10,000 EUR, you get 25 kWp solar power, which should cover most of your electric energy needs. If the 20,000 households in a medium sized town would do it, we are talking 500 MWp. That's the usual size of a nuclear reactor.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

I doubt that seriously. The big Iberian Peninsula outage already mentioned happened because a "reliable" power source was not decoupling correctly from the grid. France right now runs into electricity problems because its "reliable" nuclear reactors have to be shut down because of excessive heat making the cooling of the reactors problematic.

Your "reliable" power sources are not reliable, they are inert. This is not the same, and if conditions change quickly, or aren't within specifications, they fail in a big way.

Exactly. But you have to keep the original BSD license intact. You can modify the files, but you have to acknowledge, that you got them from FreeBSD. That's why many commercial companies like to base their systems on FreeBSD.

Which might be true for the Southern U.S. states, true.

On the other hand, we tried this in the 1970ies already, and it was abolished immediately after the first winter, after traffic accidents during morning rush hour had risen sharply, and school children had to wait for the school bus in the coldest time of the day (and the school bus took longer because of all the icy roads anyway).

That is not true. Left without clocks, humans in median latitudes tend to sleep longer in winter than in the summer. A standard schedule throughout the year is not healthy, except you live close to the equator, where the day length does not vary much during the year.

It's not only that. It's more that then, the very short daylight is concentrated in the evening, because you get up an hour early, during the coldest period of the whole day, and then you are wasting the daylight in the afternoon, when it is too cold anyway to have any outdoor activities which could profiteer from the light.

Not having DST, especially in regions away from the equator, is also dumb. You have to deal with the fact, that the Sun rises in the summer much early than in the winter, and getting up in total darkness and not having any daylight until late in the workday like DST in the winter is as annoying as trying to go to bed when it's still bright outside.

So either you abolish a strict day schedule and adopt during the year, which is not only two switch days a year, but multiple times, or you have some kind of switch between Summer time and Winter time.

If the Netherlands did this, they would reverse it immediately after the first winter. Not getting any sunlight until past 10.00 AM is so annoying, and the cost of road maintenance because rush hours is when everywhere, there is still ice on the roads, will be prohibitive.

People complaining have simply no clue how it is to have DST in the winter, and can't imagine.

We expected them 20 years ago, when all people working in the field knew already that SS7 needs security safeguards, not to sit on their hands and do nothing.

Merit should always consider strictly value.

Most of the population of Alberta lives south of the latitude of Hamburg, Germany. In fact, Edmonton is on the same latitude as Hamburg, where my sister in law lives. And she has Solar on her roof and generates about 70% of her own electricity. I don't see your problem.

No surprise here. Many important molecules for Life on Earth are quite abundant in the Solar system, especially in the icy worlds of the outer Solar system. It would need some serious scientific argument to rule this out for other planetary systems. Now we have proof that at least the building blocks for Earth-like lifeforms can form spontaneously anywhere in the Universe. No panspermia or other wishful thinking based theories required.

A sense of proportion might help:

- Data centers use water yes, but people waste way more water than that pointlessly on their lawns. There's no mass movement against that, but it would be more helpful if there was. (yes, it's more nuanced and complex than this. DCs should be resourceful and not mess up groundwater)

- It's being used for surveillance-state AI, but that was happening anyways, and it makes the US a lot of money as an export. It's *ALSO* being used by nerds to vibe code flight sims, and businesses to shed shitty devs, which is likely the larger use case.

Just follow the motivations! It's easy to see as a cheap (and effective) effort to slow down the US in the AI race. I use it as a personality litmus test to see if the incensed know what they're even mad about.

There are regulations nevertheless. The limit is 8 hrs of consecutive driving, after which a 30 min break is required, and 11 hrs of maximum driving after an 10 hrs break. It would make sense to split the 11 hrs into two 5-6 hrs periods with the 30 min rest in between. With 60 mph, this gives a driving range of 360 miles on a charge. A commercially available Mercedes eActros 600 with 600 kWh of charge would easily be sufficient, requiring a 30-80% charge within 30 mins. Or you go for the 14 hrs total, and split the 11 hrs of driving into them, giving you for instance a 3 hrs drive/1 hr rest rhythm, and requiring you to recharge for 180 miles during the stops, which means that you could drive that schedule by charging solely at 350 kW chargers.