Definitely time for a different approach. If I were them, I'd definitely build out a domestic supply fully, but I'd also seek to build shorter cables with Spain and other near neighbours.

It's just not true that renewables generate electricity when we don't need it in the UK. Windpower is pretty much all consumed, and to the extent it's not, that's because it's readily switched off in a way that expensive nuclear can't be. We have only a small amount of solar, and again, we're able to consume it all. And of course, there are other solutions to excess supply of renewables besides selling it to variable-demand industrial consumers. The most obvious is storage -- short, medium and long-duration -- which is falling in price rapidly and extends the hours of usage for renewables.

Paying cash if there’s a power outage isn’t going to work in any store larger than a mom-and-pop anyway, because cash registers are powered and linked to POS systems that track transactions.

If you use Apple Pay, you don’t suffer from these issues, because transactions are anonymous and private.

You can make much larger purchases with Apple Pay than with contactless.I bought my wife some jewellery with Apple Pay, and it worked just fine. With a card, I’d have had to revert to chip-and-pin which is a pain and less secure.

I think the answer is broadly that China being ahead doesn’t push the UK further back. The most obvious potential bottleneck would be supply chain, but China is still exporting a lot of solar panels, and capacity ramp-up is likely to mean that certainly for the UK, it could meet its demand even if it massively spiked its demand. Pakistan alone has put in tens of GW of solar in the last year or two, using Chinese panels.

I have a huge amount of respect for engineers of every stripe. I know they’re super-important to driving progress for humanity. But they’re far from the *only* career that counts. Other paths are also valuable, and so I’m less worried about 5% vs 36% than this article is

He came in, all piss and vinegar, with this vibe of the Serious Retail Exec who was going to professionalise and secure the funding. But he should have invested in advice from someone like David Yelland and built a more successful lobbying operation. I’d have much preferred to see this go ahead than sodding Sizewell C, which is clearly going to be just as pricey as Hinkley Point C, for all the guff about economies of learning. But these kinds of things require being politically adroit to get them off the ground. With the government spending lots of time shitting itself about Farage and his “net zero is the new Brexit” lines, the stakes were high.

Personally, I think the right populist response to Farage on all this would have been to offer massively subsidised solar installs to everyone. But then, I’m not a politician and no doubt there’s very good reasons why they didn’t.

That’s always true with all exports. The alternatives are use it domestically or export it and receive income. It’s often better value to export, receive income, and use part of that income to fund local additional usage.

Actively dismantling the US's vaccination system is indeed going to kill a lot of people, and that's what he's doing. That's exactly the point.

That rewrite wasn't important. My point would have been the same if I'd written "vaccinations are an essential *component* of mak[ing] Americans healthy". It's the component vs entirety point that I was trying to focus your attention on.

Anyway, we will just need to agree to disagree on all of this. I think it's completely reasonable to point out the ridiculous hypocrisy of RFK Jr's position, supposedly interested in making Americans healthy while promoting anti-vaccination policies that risk the health of millions. It doesn't matter what else he talks about -- the vaccination policy alone is so overwhelmingly bad that nothing else he will ever do can matter by comparison.

You missed the bit about *healthy* life years. In the jargon, that means reducing morbidity. Lower pain score = less morbidity. That's why it's a *quality-adjusted* life year, and not merely a life year. Not all years of life are equal in value.

Re NSAIDs -- the choice of whether to use a particular med can be very complex. For example, NSAIDs are now contra-indicated during recovery from an ankle break, whereas they used to be recommended, because while they relieve pain and reduce inflammation, they slow the fracture healing process. So the net result is higher morbidity.

As I said before, this really is my specialist subject.

I don’t think the OP was claiming that vaccines *alone* make America healthy. I think that’s a massive over-read. The OP was clearly employing rhetoric to point out that vaccinations are an essential *component* of how modern populations get and stay healthy, and that RFK is notorious for repudiating them.

You claim that the OP is being reductive, but that’s a claim that only makes sense if you yourself treat what they said reductively, insisting on a plain reading of the text, and ignoring the obvious fact that it’s a rhetorical reversal using echoic mention (the repeat of the phrase “make America healthy”) and ironic reframing (pointing out the contradiction between RFK’s stated goal of a healthy America and his opposition to vaccination, which will lead to lots of ill health in America). Human communication is too subtle to insist on only plain interpretations of text.

I don’t know what you think you are getting at with this, but it doesn’t mean anything. There are many forms of exercise that are highly targeted and there are many drugs that have multiple systemic effects (Mounjaro being an excellent example). But in any event, the clinical purpose of both exercise and medications and indeed all health interventions is to extend healthy life years.

If you talk to a medic about “life to years and years to life”, they’ll recognise the phrase straight away.It’s just a nice easy lay person rendering of QALY. And QALYs are well understood as a means of comparing the impact of health interventions, and increasing QALYs is a goal of health organisations around the globe, which is what you’ll immediately notice if you google the phrase.

This is my specialist professional field, by the way.

You also made out that I was making some weird point that technical terms don’t matter in medicine! They absolutely do, prevention matters, exercise matters, healthy living is vital, but clinical interventions are not entirely separate from them. I am in awe of the technical brilliance and sophistication of medicine.

I will give you just a single example of how these things interconnect: I broke my ankle climbing last year (well, landing badly from a fall). I needed an operation and my ankle was pinned. The intervention was exceptionally technical, I had a bunch of drugs and all sorts of other stuff and my recovery involved not only physio (ie exercise) but also tapping the inflamed area and mobilising it as soon as possible — massively different from standard practice of just a few years earlier. The surgeon explained that tapping the area helped push water molecules that were accumulating in the affected part of my ankle through the inflexible lattice formed by tendons and ligaments, and thus reduced swelling and enabled quicker recovery. It worked, too. I was able to walk after six weeks and was fully mobile after 12. Some of the intervention was thus super-specific, some was broad, some was “clinical”, some was “health”, all of it was useful and all of it added life to years for me (ie little impact on my mortality, but lower morbidity during the recovery period). What was medicine and what was exercise? Utterly unimportant to me - all I cared about was that the interventions were backed by an evidence base, feasible for me, and worked for me. It was, they were, and I’m grateful every day, especially because I’m actually stronger and more flexible than I was before.

This is *such* a weird response and I only ever see it on Slashdot. While modern engines are often quiet, van, lorry and bus engines are absolutely not, and neither are scooter engines, G-Wagens, sports cars, etc. I live near a gentle hill — I can just about hear tyre noise from passing cars going downhill from time to time, but the noise of engines of vehicles going uphill is dramatically louder and more obnoxious.

Tyre noise is definitely not the loudest component of traffic noise in urban settings, which is why EVs are required to have noisemakers fitted in the EU and UK for below 12mph. I have an EQA that weighs just over 2 tonnes. Under 12mph, the only thing you can hear is the AVAS (noisemaker). Tyres are basically inaudible. Above 20, they’re still really quiet. I frequently drive with my windows down — I’m keenly aware of how noisy my car is — answer is “not very, and much quieter than it would be with an engine”.

This is what London traffic noise sounds like — listen to say 3m20s in, and you’ll hear that it’s dominated by engine noise, especially from the buses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...