The infrastructure required to perpetually get decent to good quality petrol to where it's needed is insane. For electric you just need a battery, some solar cells and you're good to go. Petrol throughout south America is notoriously bad, often mixed with (bad) (m)ethanol and often a gable to fill in your tank. Its not uncommon for adventure bike riders to bring an extra spare piston and cylinder along in case you frag yours beyond repair and need to replace it somewhere in the ass-end of Patagonia.

That doorstep countries around the world are moving to solar and electric vehicles faster than developed countries makes perfect sense.

This is a detail many PC fanbois tend to overlook. And it's the reason consoles are so successful.

Point in case: I ditched hardcore PC gaming 25 years ago because it was becoming ridiculous with the constant hardware upgrades, fiddling with drivers and the mess that is M$ W1ndows. And I at one time had the most performant gaming PC available that costed roughly 5000$. I'm a computer expert but when even AMD went from one socket type to something like 5 different (Intel was already at roughly 10 different socket types back then) I got tired of keeping track, said f*ck it and left PC gaming alltogether. I just stopped the hardware upgrades, installed Linux for programming and the occasional Linux-native Unreal Tournament and Tribes 2 session and left it at that. This was in the late 90ies. I don't have the kind of space, time and attention anymore that PC gaming needs.

Roughly 15 years later I had some cash left and was curious about the new games such as the Deus Ex reboot and some discounted FarCry title and got an XBox 360, the last iteration just at the end of that generation that could run on a regular monitor without hassle. With all kinks fixed and a large cheap library of budget-priced games as GOTY premium editions and an affordable box that I knew would run those games with zero config fuss I was all set.

I've been with XBox ever since, always lagging 1-2 generations for price and stability reasons. I'm still using a Xbox One X as my main gaming rigg and it's totally fine. Yeah, I do miss mouse and keyboard occasionally, but I also enjoy being prolific with the controller by now and just leaning back on the sofa doing Open World Looter-Shooters, (A)RPGs or the occasional Spaceflight game. Every once in a while I ponder getting back into PC gaming but when I l then look at the prices, the science involded and remember the hassle of dealing with shitty operating systems, drivers, flaky software, etc. I quickly drop that notion again.

I might look into that new Steam Box thing, but I still have 82 games for XBox One alone, not counting my 360 titles. Most of these games I haven't played yet, so I'm not too much in a hurry. I also love the fact that the XBox is backwards compatible, which is a huge plus, Kudos to M$ for doing this. M$ W1ndows sucks, but with XBox they're still the global underdog and behave accordingly. And have me, a prime-time Linux user for 25+ years, as a paying customer, believe it or not.

I think pupils should learn to hand-write. It's a useful skill to have. What I think should be done away with is torturing children with dictations and other non-sense that are basically speed-writing contests _without_ teaching them to type and giving them the option to chose typing over hand-writing.

Oooh. I like this idea.

I know you're trying to be sarcastic, but the truth is, we Europeans are only going to get through these times of de-globalization, demographic decline and power-shifts together. The UK would've been far better off throwing their weight behind EU issues that need solving rather than using the EU as a cheap scapegoat for the elites grabbing a paycheck and lining their pockets.

[disclaimer: continental European here] ... but I think it's safe to say that even proud EU citizens are surprised at how the UK seems totally and irreversibly shafted at this point. No gloating here, it's really painful to watch.

Here's a perfect expert analysis of Brexit and it's outsomes in 90 seconds.

The cascading effects have already kicked in. Which means that the more "pessimistic" scientists were right. Or at least more right than others. Those target numbers always seemed a little lenient to me anyway.

... ice land? Am I getting this right? 8-)

They are the plaintiff in this case. They're still stuck in the steam age of media technology and royalty mechanisms. Rulings and concepts from the 50ies and 60ies. Super annoying. You don't want to get pissy with them because they have a de-facto government mandated monopoly on collecting royalties. Quasi a semi private semi official body for that exact purpose.

Yeah, but in actual war (like Ukraine is finding out), flexibility matters. There are absolutely cells of Ukrainian engineers 3D-printing parts as they respond to our evolving understanding of drone warfare with innovative solutions.

Moreover, standardization is a long recognized enabler of industrial warfare... good standards let militaries flexibly source parts and share equipment, simplifying logistics. Letting military contractors obstruct that is our corruption... it's strategical stupid for a military that wants to be effective.

The goal is probably to bilk crypto investors from prosperous countries. While third world peoples are being exploited in some intangible sense, the main point is to use them to inflate the user count. It's bullshit because typically such users immediately cash out the meager compensation they were given for scanning their eyeball and cease any further usage of the coin.

I'm sorry, simply calling this crack-pipe dream of a "project" "poor design" is an epic understatement. A few examples:

- Building the line would eat up 60% of the worlds entire steel production for decades on end.

- The "chandelier stadium" is so l00ny and physically impossible that it might as well be dreamt up and squiggled on a piece of paper with crayons by a 5-year old. Advisors told the deciders this and they still chose to ignore them.

- The basin planned for the cruise ship docks at the west end would clog up due to lack of flow.

- Basic stuff like sewage treatment isn't even considered, as is way to common with these people I have to say. As with this stupid ultra-high sky-scraper, sewage management is/was intended to be done with trucks. Every day 200 trucks line up to empty the sewage tanks of that skycraper, then drive to Bahrain and simply dump the sewage into the ocean where it then get's carried right back to the coast of Dubai to stink up the beaches and that palm-tree island thing.

I could go on and on.

The list of inane and flat-out retarded decisions surrounding this and other projects is endless. These are infantile pipe-dreams by badly educated Arabian dimwitts with too much money on their hands and too many yay-sayers around them who are too greedy to ask them to stop being silly. Everybody with two or more braincells to rub together knew that this wouldn't go that far if at all anywhere. Perhaps the deciders should take things down a few notches because right now they actually _do_ have enough amounts of money to really make a change for large portions of the population in those regions and get themselves independent from oil. Perhaps let some smart people present some realistic ideas?

... with ginormous sun-rich empty spaces of mainland that we could solarize at record speed - as China is doing right now with results as shown - in order to get this fossil-fuel eco-turnaround happening ASAP. Wouldn't that be nice, no?

... are way more stupid and/or pointless and more expensive I'd say exploring space should be one of our global scientific priorities. Perhaps even more so than yet another collider for even smaller sub-atoms or yet another Tokamak that goes nowhere. I'd perhaps even make that a new sort of quasi-religion, since the benefits from work on this is likely only to pay out when todays generations are no more.

As for saving this planet and keeping it livable for humans: We can do both and then thousands of other things on top of that at the same time. And we should absolutely do all that while we still have an advanced scientific high culture.

... just as I have never written for Google Search. I've always written for humans. If an AI and/or a crawler wants to read that, I'm totally fine with that. If it doesn't, then that's OK too. By and large I couldn't care less.