Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose. Decline -> Your subscription will be terminated, no further monies will be debut from your account, are you sure?

I'll post the google/ai summary, but this mostly it:

Your Main Rights by Timeframe Within 30 Days: You have the right to reject the item and get a full refund.

After 30 Days and up to 6 Months: You must give the retailer one opportunity to repair or replace the item. If that repair or replacement fails, you are generally entitled to a full refund. The law assumes the fault was there when you bought it unless the retailer proves otherwise.

After 6 Months: You can still request a repair or replacement, but the burden is on you to prove the fault was present when you received the item. You have up to six years (five years in Scotland) to bring a claim for faulty goods in court.

Any space telescope with a mirror, is a different story, e.g.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/webbs-mirrors/

The RST has an 8ft mirror. The mirrors have to be ground and polished in a clean room to tolerances that are the highest in the world. I vaguely recall it's a square law or worse - for radius-to-time-to-polish. So you're paying for time, and you're paying for the expertise of one or two custom built places that can manufacture them.

A leave voter would argue for exactly the same thing - a clear majority need to vote to remain. If a majority vote isn't a majority vote, what's the point of calling yourself a 'democracy' and virtue signalling to the rest of the planet how great your governance is?

> a well defined outcome with known good and bad points

How so? What was the well-defined defined outcome of the UK joining the EEC in 1973? What's your time horizon? Was that outcome still true in 1980, 1999, 2026? How does being a member of the EU make you immune to probability and chance? Was a 'well defined outcome' in 1973 that, under the Blair government, we would allow East European nationals with freedom of movement to migrate en-masse to the UK, and that, ironically, is claimed to be one of the reasons for the leave vote.

It's actually quite sad to me that in 2026 the whole thing is still so tribal. Everything promised by either side largely never came to pass, and it's now a decade on. I just wish both sides would recognise that it's been over three decades of continuous poor Government that's the root of most of the UK's problems, and spend their energy fixing that instead.

As for 16 years old voting, I'd argue the age to vote should be raised to 21.

> Some particularly pernicious lies on the leave side too convincing

Both sides lied, both sides exaggerated.

The referendum to simply leave or remain would never have happened if UK Parliament went to the public more often with referendums about various treaties such as Maastricht, Amsterdam and Rome. Giving people the illusion of choice would have been enough.

The UK seems to be an outlier for an arrogant Parliament that thinks it knows best, in spite of public sentiment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_related_to_the_Eur...

https://www.space.com/astronomy/stars/betelgeuse-betelgeuse-...

Last major volcanic eruption around lots of humans: Krakatoa - 1883 Last major M9 earthquake before Sumatra: Chile - 1960

and so on. Things seem a bit more 'major' now because there's 7bn+ people.

This month a 'hunger stone' appeared in the Danube, indicating the levels for pre-20th century famine.

And various other markers in many countries for 'the water reached this level', ironically, on the side of existing buildings.

Yet we build closer and closer to rivers because (flash) flood events happen rarely, and typically not in our lifetime.

https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

Or maybe 'code' just gets pushed down a level like assembly did when C was invented, for example. As a percentage very few people look at assembly in comparison to the 1960s-80s.

That is of course, one of the big problems of 'going green' - electricity production is low hanging fruit and understood by the general public.

When that's 'solved' (solar, wind, geo, nuclear), how do we solve the other 97%?

Oil really isn't going anywhere. It will be a slow tail, perhaps too slow to stop emissions.

https://www.iea.org/world/oil

Whilst current models can't 'intuit' and come up with conjectures, they can certainly disprove some of them very quickly through the kind of grind that humans can't do. I suppose there really are some mathematicians out there today, whose last few years of study, have just been up-ended by this.

--

"Yes we are," insisted Majikthise. "We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this machine off, and we want it off now!"

"What's the problem?" said Lunkwill.

"I'll tell you what the problem is mate," said Majikthise, "demarcation, that's the problem!"

"We demand," yelled Vroomfondel, "that demarcation may or may not be the problem!"

"You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?"

Maybe? But more likely their 'surprise' will be that it's actually happened, because the people doing this kind of thing must surely know it's wrong and won't be telling their bosses, and/or their bosses definitely won't be passing that info up the chain. Just like movies, 'plausible deniability'.