Of course it was an attempt at annexing at least parts of Canada. If you look at the votes in Congress, you will note that the frontier states in the West were for the invasion, but the coastal states were against. If the main reason really was impressment, you would expect the states most affected by it to be in favor of the invasion. But it was the frontier states, because they hoped for the annexed territories to be like them and give them allies in the future Senate against the southern states.

Those would be the same people victorious against the U.S. invaders trying to annex their country in 1812, right?

But can you measure it by counting the number of "Please" and "Thank you"? Like every benchmark, this one is so simplistic, it is easy to game, and people, when they are in a bad mood, will just murmur "please, please, please" all the time. And for me, formal manners of people serving me food is very far down on the priority list. Cleanliness would rank much higher, and the highest rank is serving what I actually ordered. I take a perfectly prepared burger from a disgruntled worker every time compared to having some sad, soddy piece of foodscaps served with the most winning smile. (But on the other hand, I don't eat at a burger joint that often anyway.)

And I wonder how you somehow managed to get DEI into this debate. There seems to be an itch with you in the need of scratching. I hope you can keep your fleas at your side.

This is not how it works. If you want public healthcare, you have to pay for it. A share of your retirement funds will float each month to the various health care systems. It's just that it is much cheaper than in the U.S., and usually, you can't opt out, except you can prove you have enough regular income to pay out of pocket.

Contrary to popular opinion, politicians in general try to get through with the agenda they presented as their election platform. There are many ways to fail, but in general, it's not because of the lack of trying.

Why start in the 1800s? Why not start in 1620, when armed aliens took land? The land grab of 1000 AD resolved itself with some luck in 1030 AD.

If you can just switch off power instead of dumping it, that's a win. And you can also use wind turbines or hydro plants instead of steam turbines to take surplus electricity off the grid. And battery capacity also helps, albeit you need to rectify the current first.

Yes, but keeping the grid in balance is a different, albeit related issue. But other than thermal power plants, which are really inert and can cause the grid to oscillate, this is easier to attenuate with Solar and Wind, right because they aren't inert.

With Wind and Solar, this is a non-problem. Just switch them off. Works within milliseconds. It was a problem with thermal power plants (both coal and nuclear), that they could not be switched off easily, and it took hours or even days to power them down, and then again hours or days to power them up. All that water had to be boiling first, and then superheated, before you can get steam to a steam turbine.

That's the feature I always switch off.

The Orange One apparently has no idea about economics, otherwise he would not rally so much against the extraordinary ability of the U.S., to sell green printed paper in exchange for really valuable products like steel, oil, cars and electronics, while the U.S. can even set the price of the green printed paper arbitrarily.

No. Physics knows pretty well where its limits are. But as Physics is an experimental science, we have to find a counterexample to our hypotheses to know their limits. This is one limit we didn't know before, as we did not find an example like this before. Apparently, the mass aggregation of Black Holes is not fully understood.

Other modes of transport are walking, cycling, street cars, cabs, busses, trains, ferries... It does not boil down to EVs vs. ICEs. For me, the automobile is the vehicle of choice only if all other modes are exhausted, because it's the most expensive mode. That does not change much if I go from an ICE powered car to an EV. In general, the automobile moves the most mass per passenger compared with all other modes of transport. It is horribly inefficient.

Still - it's two days in your average nuclear reactor.

On the other hand, Oklo is 1.7 billion years old, and any geological structure at that age is exceptionally quiet from a geological point of view. If this region was any more active, we would not have anything of Oklo left, except traces of it thousands of miles away. If you find 1.7 billion years old bedrock, it might be a good idea to store 10 pounds of nuclear waste in it - because that's the total mass deficit of U-235 recorded for Oklo. To put things in perspective, 10 lb of U-235, when spent, return 3.3 × 10^11 kJ of energy, which are about 90 GWh to heat water into steam, getting you about 35 GWh of electric power. A typical nuclear reactor produces about 7 TWh per year, which means that Oklo is equivalent to a commercial reactor running for about 2 days.

I am fine with storing 2 days worth of nuclear waste of a typical reactor in 1.7 billion year old bedrock.