Clarke's vision of Rama in 1973 predates O'Neill's eponymous conceptual station design by one year, but it's a completely different model to this. Rama did not spin for gravity and was (internally) infinite in size, so probably wasn't really anything intended as something actually buildable so much as a fantastical McGuffin to facilitate the plot.

This design is much more akin to Gerard K. O'Neill's proposal for an *actual* space habitat consisting of two counter-spinning concentric shells to provide spin-gravity, mechanical stability, and increased habital surface area; this is where jms and Harlan Elison got the basic design of "Bablyon 5" from, although the basic idea of habital cylinders in space goes back even further; Hermann Oberth used the idea 1954 and also Larry Niven included the idea in 1970's "Ringworld", but AFAIK O'Neill's was the first actually designed as a potentially viable construct (once suitable tech was available), e.g. calculating that it was mechanically and physically viable, hence the reason the basic design concept is named for him.

It's theoretical - more an attempt to get potential ideas that might one day form the basis of an actual ship than anything else. Hypothetically speaking, before you would actually build something this you'd expect there to have been a few technological advances to both shorten the trip and confirm whether or not Proxima Centuri b is habitible or not.

Despite their issues, I think China supplanting the US as the world's largest economy is pretty much a given at this point. While the remaining western governments, quite rightly, have reservations over how trustworthy and reliable China might be as an economic partner, the reality is that's just a matter of degrees and ultimately every country is mostly looking out for #1. The only difference is the lengths they are prepared and able to go to achieve their aims; some much more so than others.

Establing sensible international trade agreements without loopholes you can sail a carrier group through don't happen overnight, no matter what tariff threats you might make to expedite the process, and similar timescales are needed to remodel global trading routes at scale too. With the US now demonstrably proving that as long as MAGA has any meaningful say in US politics they are no longer either a reliable or trustworthy partner to the west, any western government not already making overtures to re-arrange their exports and establish trade agreements around a more China-centric global economy in fairly short order has probably left it too late, IMHO.

Climate = tide coming in.
Weather = extent of individual waves.

You've also got the waste heat from power generation and transmission required to power all the ACs that plug into the mains and draw their power from the grid. If an AC is powered by locally connected solar or whatever that's going to be pretty insignificant, but the rest are going to add up. The laws of thermodynamics totally apply, which means you are not magically moving heat from A to B in a zero sum game, you're consuming power to do it, and that means more waste heat in addition to the losses in the system through inefficiencies.

Cities are already microclimates and mass AC adoption is absolutely going to cause an aggregate, and almost certainly measurable, temperature increase across that microclimate, and especially so in narrow streets where there is limited airflow to disperse that extra heat. If the heatwave is already making outside temperatures unhealthy then adding another degree or whatever on top of it to help keep interiors cool via AC is going to really suck for those who are forced to go outside in it for whatever reason.

A better solution, given climate change has been a thing for decades, would have been to look at how pre-AC civilizations in equatorial regions built very efficient ways of keeping interiors cool passively in extreme heat and adopted those techniques in anticipation of hotter summers for any new builds over (realistically) the last 20-30 years. Hindsight, and naive optimism the Paris Agreement et al would work, is a wonderful thing though and here we are - putting a band aid in place that will actually make the overall problem slightly worse.

You should post that on Truth Social for the Lulz. I hear Donnie likes big simple charts. :)

It does, but there's a slight issue with that. In terms of the world's largest economies by GDP the BRICS countries rate as:

#2: China
#4: India
#10: Brazil
#11: Russia (sanctions not withstanding)
#17: Indonesia
#28: United Arab Emirates
#38 South Africa
#42: Egypt
#44: Iran (again, despite the sanctions)
#66: Ethiopia

Now it's not like these countries are doing absolutely nothing to mitigate things, but it would be really interesting to see some numbers on exactly how much of a proportionate contribution they are making to "fund mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in poorer nations" when even lowly Ethiopia still has over 130 poorer nations to choose from.

Unofficially, it's already done. It used to be that if you were going to somewhere with a weak and mostly cash-based economy you took the bulk of your cash in USD and the rest in the local currency. For quite some time now retailers in such economies have been just as likely to take Euros or Sterling as they were USD when they are after some hard currency, and on my last couple of trips I've actually been asked for Euros or Sterling in preference to USD. My local contact for my upcoming trip to the Far East has advised me to forget the USD and just bring Sterling or Euros because I'll get a much better exchange rate.

When the hawkers on the street and small store owners don't want USD any more, it's just a matter of time before that sentiment climbs up the ladder to larger retailers, and eventually to governments.

but the tradeoff they are making for us is that everything we import could cost as much as 3X more than it did before they destroyed the value of the dollar.

Before or after you add on the tariffs? Don't forget those are on the sticker price and paid in USD, so if something costs you 3x as many dollars then you'll also need to pay 3x as much in tariffs on top as well (assuming the tariff rate doesn't change again, of course). Even at Trump's base tariff rate of 10%, that would mean something that would previously have cost $100 to get shipped to your door from AliExpress or wherever now costing $300, plus a further $30 in import taxes.

I think there would be a red line when one US Dollar no longer gets you more than one Canadian Dollar, but who knows with all the crazy at the moment? Some people probably won't think it's a problem even when it no longer gets you one Mexican Peso...

More likely they're afraid of the wheel turning again. This is how the process starts; a new factory gets spun up to take advantage of cheaper labour in another country. That leads to a general increase in skills in that country and, before you know it, a dozen copycat faciliites have been spun up based on your techniques and you've been cut out of the market.

Right now, both China and Taiwan, as well as several other countries in SE Asia, are seeing India's massive source of potential cheap labour as an existential threat to a core part of their economies, and while they are, in many cases, at least someone allied politically with each other, they're all still very much trying to stamp on the fingers on the rungs of the ladder just below them.

A better analogy would be that we've been swimming around in the same pan of water since the 1970s yet, despite being told every year since then that the dial on the hob has been turned up another notch, have still not leapt out of the pan to turn the dial back down again.

Also, Trump / DOGE have apparently pulled funding NOAA that may lead to the shutdown of some of the world's most important CO2 data collection stations, so we'll all be able to firmly stick our heads in the sand together. If there's no data, it can't be a problem, right?

Only it'll be worse, because the value of the "assets" that have secured all those mortgages they sold the risk on as derivatives will almost certainly go into freefall along with everything else when the bubble pops.

"So, Mr. Jones, you secured your mortgage you're struggling to repay with £1m of... ah, crypto. And what are those holdings worth now? $500k you say? Well, if you'll just vacate the premises and hand over your house keys, I'm sure we can sort all that out to minimise our losses as far as possible. I hear there are some nice bridges and stuff to live under not too far from your neighbourhood. Next!"

I remember the old "Windows ain't done until Lotus won't run!" schtick. I wouldn't surprise me at all if the "faulty" code originated with the Edge team to help encourage adoption of their version of the Chromium user tracking software over Google's version, and through doing so nudge a few more people into using Bing and Copilot instead of Google Search and Gemini for even more tracking.

Think of an iceskater pirouetting on the rink with their arms stretched out. If they pull their arms in, they start to spin faster, thereby conserving angular momentum, but they don't gain any additional mass from doing so. More massive blackholes with a faster spin have just consumed more matter to get to that state, but it hasn't fundamentally changed the overall mass of the galaxy they are in.