In the UK, The National Police Chiefs Council stated that speeding is believed to be a significant factor in 17 fatalities and 126 serious injuries on the country's roads each month.Globally speeding is killing thousands; every day, every month every year, year on year a f*ck*ng huge pile of dead bodies and misery. Volvo's effort is not enough. Why are any of the manufactures still getting away with producing vehicles that kill people needlessly by not obeying speed limits - while at the same time they've all got self-driving prototypes?

And this is before our idiot politicians give the auto industry carte blanche with driverless cars.

YouTube has some compelling content and is the de-facto standard platform. However, I will not currently pay for it because I think that it is expensive (particularly as I have an existing music streaming service), encourages the Google-based monoculture and has an opaque payment structure to its creators.

In the short-term, I'm not worried about ads. If they continue to get annoying, then Vimeo, Twitter, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft etc. are all waiting to syphon-off upset Google customers.

Longer-term, I'm optimistic that 1st gen ad. slinger services like facebook, youtube etc. will die. The tech now means that running our own facebook, youtube, etc. -alike, services in the cloud is almost easy and cheap enough that we can cut out the ad-slinging, spy-ware laden, liable to censorship middle-men. Just needs that final little commoditization push from Amazon, Dropbox, etc. to take it into the mass-market.

1) Initially, there's an existing very large and growing, group of people that eat meat alternatives containing dairy, eggs, Brazillian Soya, Palm Oil etc. How likely is it that they'll be worried about something else in very small print on the label.

2) If it does eventually go mass market, how likely is it that the manufacturers will be forced to label it differently anyway?

It must be the immigrants, the mentally ill and the like.
Maybe it's the drugs, the gangs, crime, failing prisons and police.
The parents, schools and our godless society.
Too much bullying, abuse, Social Media and video games.
Our clogged roads and crowded cities.
The weather, too hot cold or too wet.

Pray harder, more guns and body armour; not missing something are we?

Fusion seems like a lot of money but the trick is to look at some of the other big things Governments spend money on.

Back in the sixties America spent the equivalent in today's dollars of $702.3bn to go to the Moon https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a... Even with today's technology the plan to do it again with Artemis is being estimate at $39bn https://spacenews.com/paying-f...

Depending if you want the nuclear powered jacuzzi, big aircraft carriers are somewhere between $8 to $10bn a pop. With each aircraft on it typically north of $50m. The US Navy's new 12 boat fleet of Columbus nuclear missile submarines is apparently looking like $128bn https://time.com/5566107/navy-... and the F35 program cost $406bn.

Even in the UK, we're starting to build a high speed railway network to make commuting into London from the north a bit quicker. If it happens, the final cost of this based on internal reviews is currently estimated to be around £85bn https://www.independent.co.uk/...

Multiply that globally and it's plain to see that Fusions main problem is not cost or even the physics.

Fusion's real problem is that globally we are saddled with leaders that fail to prioritise achieving limitless clean energy and a fighting chance with climate change against other trivia, like for instance saving about thirty minutes on a trip between London and Birmingham.

Selling your countryâ(TM)s secrets is fairly obviously treasonous behaviour even if it is not by statute. Heâ(TM)s lucky heâ(TM)s in the US, there arenâ(TM)t many countries that are so lenient with traitors. Certainly not China

...

"Lawyers now acting on behalf of Mr Hazeldean said he has been left with 'permanent scarring, both physically and mentally' as a result of the verdict.

He said: 'I'd like to thank my lawyers for helping me understand and navigate the complexities of the legal system, and can only regret not having engaged them sooner, delayed as I was by my lack of legal knowledge and concern about the costs." --- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne...

I feel really sorry for the chap. There but for the grace of $deity go many, possibly most of us. Hopefully the lawyers that he's now got engaged on the case will be able to undo some of the damage, hopefully ...

As I've been unable to find anything mentioning the cyclist's legal team, I believe he may have attempted to represent himself. If that's the case. Then the story is an all too predictable one of what happens when the legally naive (a Gardener) goes up against a specialist team of Lawyers and their many years of domain experience in an adversarial legal system.

If it wasn't him then his legal team should be ashamed of themselves.

Either way it feels like a poor reflection on our society.

It's axiomatic that anyone who organises anything will always has an agenda: why would anyone do anything if they did not care? Take a brief look at the Holocaust, most of the reports of Nazi atrocities against the Jews and other persecuted groups were from the survivors and not from the Nazis side. Why would anyone expect the situation in China with the Falun Gong, Uigurs etc to be any different?

So how does anyone with no direct first hand experience come to a reasonable understanding as to what is going on? The key is in the credibility of the entity doing the weighing and presentation of the report. The gold standard would be a UN report. However, with China being a permanent member of the Security Council that is never going to happen. This report though, was chaired by Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice QC. Professor, Sir and Queen's Counsel. To someone from outside the British system those titles may sound pompous and/or archaic. However, they do actually convey information that says in essence this guy should be taken very seriously on this subject (Google them and him). As you would announcements on Physics from the late Professor Sir Stephen Hawking CH CBE FRS FRSA. Ask yourself is he the type of person who is going to have the wool pulled over his eyes? In short is Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice QC likely to risk his career and reputation backing something that is utter garbage?

Ultimately, China is by Western standards a vast controlled and secretive society that doesn't even officially publish the number of death penalties it carries out each year. In the West our bias is to tend to think of it being like a machine where everything moves like a cog and nobody steps out of line. In some ways it is, however, all that effort monitoring what people say on social media, face scanning etc comes at the cost of other forms of illegality and gangsterism being overlooked elsewhere. The Chinese authorities, even with AI, like anyone else can only have so many priorities. There have been consistent stories of organ harvesting in China for many years, and now this weighty and credible report. Fwiw On the balance of the evidence I personally do not believe this is official national policy, but I think I would be stupid to pretend it is not happening.

Hmm, BPA et. al ... collapsing male fertility ... just a coincidence?

Let's try a little experiment ...

I do not think you should have the vote because you do not agree with me and are are therefore too stupid to know what you're doing. Now idiot, Brexit, it's a great idea and you should vote for it and cheer it on etc.

Now, did that make you, or anyone else, more strongly agree that Brexit is a great idea? Really, why ever not?

It amazed me during the run up to the Brexit vote and beyond how many intelligent people, but particularly the Remainers, failed to grasp this, so I'll spell it out.

To win any vote where universal adult suffrage is in place is going mean convincing those whose intellectual capacities and opinions are different to one's own. That is the nature of the beast. It is bloody hard at the best of times to get people to change their minds. But, trying to change a persons mind by first belittling them as being too stupid to know what they are doing is unlikely to convince them of anything other than the persuader's own arrogant asshole status.

With potentially the entire "adult" population of a state involved, an artificial restriction and rationing/trading system it would be, too put it mildly, a hideously difficult and expensive system to put in place. To say nothing of the "fun" of trying to roll it out globally. It's an over complicated point solution and it could only make sense if it's believed that air travel is a fundamental human right, alongside being fed, not being routinely tortured and that sort of thing.

The best idea instead is to simply let market forces decide but tax it properly. Fly, but pay a fair share for the increased health care costs, double glazing, property devaluation of all on the flight path. Fly, but pay a proper share towards the global cost of the CO2 emissions, towards the lost land and sea productivity, animal extinctions and sea defence costs.

What we do need though, be it for air travel, guns, autos, plastic, whatever; is to become massively more agile at taxing the service providers and producers according to the costs inflicted on our society. The Romans' knew Lead was poisonous, yet Lead was allowed in our plumbing, gas/petrol and paint right up to the twentieth century. Similar legislative torpidity in the face of scientific evidence and fairness applied or applies to tobacco, guns, alcohol, cars, drugs etc. How? It is not getting the right result that is the problem. It is getting the evidence acted on quickly enough before significant problems occur. Because unlike with Lead, we do not have thousands of years for our Politicians to get it right on Climate Change.

... said no one ever.

Even if they are electric theyâ(TM)re not silent. They, or their passengers, will come with cameras attached. If people can, then people _will_ do stupid/evil things with them. They will fly low and direct; if your house, your school, your life is in the way then at scale they will be, like similarly idiotic delivery drones, be bringing their dubious benefits(?) to it.

We already know that living in the noisy and polluted sh*t hole cities that weâ(TM)ve created makes us ill. And we know that these come with some benefits to the minority who will be using them. Let people use them, but regulate and make them pay for the damage to the environment and health they cause to the rest of us. Letâ(TM)s have them but with a reasonable balance. Because without, do we really need yet another way of making urban life worse for the majority?

If so they're in for a bit of a surprise when they discover that their adverts ubiquitous portrayal of empty roads, driving wherever, at whatever speed and it's all just tickety-boo is one big lie that'd make even the Marlboro Man's death stick purveyors blush.

Seriously though, I think we're at a juncture were we need to understand very quickly what they're being lined up for with self-driving cars by the car/auto lobby. For while it's likely that the number of accidents will go down. It's also true, all else being equal, that the number of car journey will increase. Is there anyone outside of the auto lobby that thinks, yep, what we need is more car journeys. That'll help with the obesity crisis, pollution and global warming. Really?

So obviously, given the likely outcome of their endeavours what do we think these companies are going to do about it. Is it going to be a) Create policies that attempt to humanise their technology, reduce environmental damage and generally make life better for everyone including non-car owners/users. Or b), keep making vast amounts of money at whatever the cost to society and the planet? How well do we think our legislatures are prepared for this?