timellis-smith

I found my dad's Psion 5mx in a drawer the other day. They were really fantastic devices

Colour me a bit cynical but we use plastic massively in healthcare and food industries precisely because it is non toxic.

Given the massive prevalence of plastic on just about all our food, if it was really such a threat I would expect life expectancies to have dropped.

Personally I regard this all as fear mongering.

I seem to remember I was on the FBI watch list for subscribing to Linux Journal back in the day.

Strange, I live in the North of England and that has hardly been my experience of late. Most trains have been at least 1 or 2 minutes late.

For me this is also a major failure of poor competition policy.

If Google's smart home system were an independent company, it would love or die by its ability to do its job. But Nest can just piggy back on Google's brand power.

Fracking for all it's bad press has been immensely helpful in reducing greenhouse emissions.

If it weren't for natural gas we would still have massive coal fired power plants.

If you look at UK emissions which have been declining steadily since the 1990s, this has been in no small part due to the move to natural gas.

While it would be great to move to carbon neutral immediately, we can't do that without driving up energy prices massively and causing widespread poverty and disruption, so there is definitely room for some middle ground compromises.

As far as I know, South Africa hasn't been involved in anything since Angola. The current military probably couldn't find enough working vehicles to even get to a conflict let alone fight one.

That doesn't matter because it's not like you can double renewables to increase redundancy (no wind is no wind no matter how many turbines you have)- you need another more expensive energy source as well.

Oh and while we're about it interconnects just increase the systemic risk of multiple regions experiencing Dunkelflaute at the same time. And it's not enough to say that this almost never happens because in a system that expects many 9s of availability almost never is just not acceptable.

Of course and that needs to be factored into renewable supplies which massively increases their cost. When you have periods of Dunkelflaute you potentially need to have full grid redundancy either through inter-connects, other energy generation sources or battery backup, none of which are cheap.

Apologies if I misunderstood your post.

If I understand you correctly now, then we are in agreement.

Because it is important.

The more egalitarian countries show more differentiation across career choices than less egalitarian ones. I.e. men show a greater prefence for thing based careers and women show a greater prefence for people based careers.

If you've ever watched kids playing you'll realise how self evident it is, from a very early age before kids are remotely aware of cultural norms.

This flies in the face of all predictions that roles of sex are purely cultural.

Yes, but it gets harder the more the odds get stacked against you.

The school system and university system is increasingly run by females for females.

Critical theories designed to dismantle the 'patriachy' both attack males and put in place gender quotas and limits to men.

Males are told that their very essence of being is toxic.

I really don't envy boys growing up these days and an very glad I have a daughter.

Very true, and we are mostly formed by our genetics, and it really helps to keep that in mind.

But as parents that doesn't stop us from overly attributing everything bad that our kids do to our own bad parenting.