mike_hearn

Their second attempt at this created the Borg though, so they did get it very right in the end!

Not really! There were several systemic failures:

1. It happened due to forecasting errors. Nothing remarkable happened that day, there were no sudden station trips or natural disasters. The margin was gone mostly due to planned maintenances combined with incorrectly forecasting demand. Whether the root cause is decentralized PV or not, the core issue is that the lowest frequency ever recorded happened on a totally unremarkable day. That can't be said to be the system working correctly.

2. The UK had to suddenly cut exports that had already been agreed and paid for, outside of normal systems. That puts it in a bad situation in future where allies may now do the same in reverse. A sudden unannounced cut in exports can be absorbed by the European grid but might not be absorbed by the British grid, which is smaller.

3. There were no EMNs issued and in the aftermath whistleblowers inside NESO claimed control room staff had been forbidden from taking notes or letting people know what happened. Information about this came out via newspaper articles in a drip drip months after the event. We're talking about this now and not in June because of this. That lack of transparency can't be said to be the system working.

4. The French were able to ship power hundreds of kilometers across France and under the sea to the south of England, but the UK couldn't move power the much smaller difference from its own north to south. That's another form of planning failure.

> Removing solar isn't helpful (that would just move the problem to earlier in the day.)

That depends what you think the problem is. The root of the event was forecasting errors, and the root of those come from the apparent difficulty of predicting how decentralized solar behaves especially at a sub-region level. Removing solar, or simply having never built it at all, actually would fix that problem.

All of this was predicted decades ago by conservatives so it's no good to just despair that they will "make hay" from being right (nobody will benefit from a big UK blackout, it will be bad news for everyone). They warned repeatedly that putting too much solar/wind into the grid will destabilize it and create huge price increases. Both of those warnings have come true in Europe. Solar/wind aren't reliable and so need thermal/hydro that's staffed, warmed up and ready to spin at a moment's notice but government policy ignores this and the stresses are now showing - both engineering and political (the apparent need for whistleblowers shows this).

N.B. the root cause of the Iberian blackout was a solar farm malfunctioning and desynchronizing from the grid, and when the control room tried to bring gas generation back online to stabilize things they couldn't do it fast enough because the plant was cold. It had been taken offline in the morning to make way for solar.

The problem with TNG wasn't so much the preachiness, which is still normal for TV. It's that the moral system behind it was actually quite poor. Picard's character was certainly not the paragon this thread is making him out to be - the more you look at Star Trek the worse it morally gets. It's one of those shows that works best when you don't think about the worldbuilding too much. And the Picard character only seems moral and superior on the surface because of the way Stewart acted him, and because his character is so unemotional, not because of what he actually does.

Consider the moral lessons of TNG and Picard.

Picard isn't married, has no family or children, and apparently no desire to change that. He's actually distinctly uncomfortable around children. Instead he married his job, which is all consuming. Right there that renders the character boring, overly intense and unrelatable for many people. When he gets assimilated by the Borg there's no emotional impact because it's not clear who cares about Picard being turned into an alien except his staff, whose only concern is professional duty. In fact when Riker decides to attack the cube with Picard still on board, he barely hesitates, and why would he? Picard keeps everyone around him at great emotional distance at all times. When the writers want to show Picard having an emotional breakdown about his traumatic experience, they have to show him running home to a brother he hardly ever sees or talks to, because that's the only character the writers have who might care about Picard as a person. Sad.

Picard is supposedly a culture maven, but neither him nor his crew ever creates any. They're obsessed with replaying stories and music old even when the show was made like Moby Dick, Beethoven, Shakespeare, detective stories set in the 1940s.

Although the Enterprise has many crappy jobs on it along with many scarce resources (e.g. holodeck time), crew are unpaid. Picard says everyone on the Enterprise is there because Starfleet is prestigious and he seems fine with that idea. This arrangement could never work in reality so he comes across as delusional, and worse, we are left to assume there actually are mechanisms that incentivize or force people to beam down into severe danger, but Picard pretends they don't exist.

By the 1980s Roddenberry was a Maoist and the Federation appears to be some sort of communist dictatorship. We're told it's abolished money and we don't encounter operating businesses or conventional democratic politics. There is notionally some sort of elected leader in the Federation but they don't seem to control anything and Starfleet does whatever it wants. For example, TNG doesn't show Picard being given new orders because the elected government was changed, nor does Picard ever wonder how his actions might affect politics back home.

Picard holds the capitalist Ferengi in contempt and makes dumb diplomatic mistakes, like referring to "civilized societies" when talking to a Ferengi captain despite that the Ferengi fly around in advanced spaceships. This is because Picard views trade as dirty and beneath him.

Although he does occasionally disagree with Starfleet orders, he slavishly follows the Prime Directive even when the outcome would be absurd, like the entire civilization dying. He never even questions this rule despite the writers realizing that it leads to immoral outcomes! Starfleet is ambiguously presented as sometimes a sort of scientific research org and other times a military that in DS9 implements full blown martial law, suggesting the normal military/civilian separation doesn't exist. Picard never questions the structure of Starfleet or Federation society, which he seems to view as automatically superior (Sisko does a lot better in this regard).

I just dumped my TCC database and the entries are mostly not path tied. The Chrome entry is as expected a bundle ID+designated requirement. Unless the local network permission inexplicably uses a different permissions engine, that statement is a misdiagnosis of what's happening.

     $ sudo sqlite3 "/Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db" "SELECT hex(csreq) FROM access WHERE client = 'com.google.Chrome';" | xxd -r -p | csreq -r /dev/stdin -t

    (identifier "com.google.Chrome" or identifier "com.google.Chrome.beta" or identifier "com.google.Chrome.dev" or identifier "com.google.Chrome.canary") and anchor apple generic and certificate 1[field.1.2.840.113635.100.6.2.6] /* exists */ and certificate leaf[field.1.2.840.113635.100.6.1.13] /* exists */ and certificate leaf[subject.OU] = EQHXZ8M8AV

CLI/developer tools in general often lose or forget permissions because they aren't shipped as proper signed Mac app bundles, so the OS has no stable identity to attach the permission grant to. You might find that even if you click allow, that gets forgotten too sooner or later.