I suspect a lot of those 650k customers were just paying the monthly fee and rarely using the cars if the overall yearly revenue was only circa £50M. The local car club where I live is CoWheels and it seems to be doing ok and currently expanding, so there's definitely a market for this.

The main limiting factor for car club coverage is population density. For it to work you really need a good few cars within a few minutes walk of your home, and have good public transport. I have 5 cars available within a short walk of my flat. You also need to do the bulk of your travel by some other means (bus, train, cycle etc) and just use the cars for irregular trips. Probably the couple you describe don't live in an high density urban area so don't have a great choice of cars. I gave up my car 4 years ago and have saved a pile of money, but it only works because I live fairly centrally in a big city. Don't know why ZipCar have failed when other clubs are clearly making it work.

It was the CDS market that signalled the death of Lehmans and the whole sub-prime debacle. Wouldn't be at all surprised if this is the first little pop in an AI bubble devaluation event.

Correct. If you're a radiation worker you have to wear a dosimeter to measure your dose whilst working in radiation controlled areas, so the 1 mSv target dose only covers what you receive whilst at work.

The motivations behind this clearly don't have worker health as a first priority. If they're thinking of changing the legislation so that the 20 mSv limit becomes a working ceiling then that's really quite bad. If you crunch the numbers, it would make nuclear work as dangerous as deep sea fishing, since I'm sure the nuclear industry would work their employees up to the limit if they legally could. The taskforce mentioned comprises the department of energy and the MoD, an org with a bit of a cavalier attitude when it comes to employee safety - I'm thinking specifically of the Porton Down bio and chemical agent tests.

A little correction required. The summary states that the UK worker yearly radiation dose limits are well below what the general population receives in a year. This is incorrect - it's not what the report states. It should say the worker dose target, not the dose limit. These are very different things.

The worker dose limit is 20 mSv per year whilst the average public dose is 2.7 mSv. The worker dose target is 1 mSv per year. This represents what you should be trying to keep your workers exposure to, with the dose limit being the ceiling above which you'll be prosecuted if you exceed.

and brush up on my trepanation technique. I'll have a quiet word with Robert; it's about time that the old tried and tested therapies were brought back.

Did the stone age end because we ran out of stones?
No, but we didn't stop using stone when we discovered bronze.

They didn't explicitly say iron, but instead gave a large density figure. This simply narrows it down to a subset of hard cheeses like parmesan.

Pretty sure the Uyghur Muslims don't see it that way

Some of them end up dismembered in embassies.

is that huge pivots like this can happen very fast. No hugely wealthy industries making dodgy payments to buy political votes. No legal systems to bog down the flow of change. On the flip side you must do as your told broadly speaking, and you might get re-educated if your beliefs aren't the right ones, but shit does get done.

Technically this does seem to be the best solution; use the most efficient generation means for the local climate combined with an electricity superhighway. The problem with this is that we can't seem to stop falling out with each other. What do you do when you go to war with your neighbour and the switch of your electric supply? I think geopolitics and energy security is always going to trump the right technical solution, at least until we grow up enough to get rid of flags and borders and realise that we've only got one world to live on. Like that's going to happen.

There is a very common misconception amongst folks, even some physicists, around what "being observed" means wrt quantum mechanics. It doesn't mean somebody sees it. It really just means being forced to interact with some other form of energy in some way. This is what collapses the wave function.

It's also worth noting that the wave function description is simply a mathematical tool that enables you to make accurate predictions about what will happen. It's not intended to be taken as an actual picture of reality at the quantum scale, something we can probably never know.

Ever heard of a rhetorical question?

In the past, yes, there have always been other new types of jobs to replace the old ones. But look where we're heading with automation, robotics and machine intelligence. At some point it'll be possible to make stuff for zero financial cost. How so? If everything is automated from the extraction of mineral resources, through processing, to creation of end goods, you don't need money. There's nobody to pay. You just need to own the raw resources, e.g. the land. The owning class can then focus purely on what's always motivated them; living a life of total ease. Start focusing on luxury products created in their automated factories, plus robotic security. They will finally have removed their dependency on the poor to work for them.

And what then? The bulk of the worlds population then simply become a problem to them, competing for the same finite resources. They could suddenly become all concerned about the climate change and overpopulation. Bring on the one child policies and enforced sterilisation. Time to deal with the poor majority. Rise up and revolt you say? Against the robotic security forces and weaponry that are surely coming too? Good luck with that.

It sounds like a plot from a Sci-Fi novel, but it's one possible future, and unless we're very careful, it's possible something like this could happen. So no, sadly I don't think it's safe to just assume there will always be jobs.

This is how we're so fckd. One of the sunniest places in the world: probs best place for a solar based solution and they're going to stay on coal.