Your comment about the size of the earth is confounding. How is that relevant? Raising temps 4 degrees locally is a serious issue. Yes it will be worse if it scales but it doesn’t have to in order for us to care.

The tech companies could be building green data centers. Using renewable energy they are paying to add to the grid ( ie building the solar plant along with the data centers) and then flowing half the power they make back to the grid to lower prices. They could similarly work with water, purifying non drinking sources and adding to supply overall.

Costs would balloon but the negative impacts would go and getting a data center would mean jobs, lower prices for energy, less carbon and clean water.

Doing it the way we are - based on subsidies and pollution - is a choice.

Israelis, and their supporters, love to boast of Israel’s technical prowess and world leading capability in many areas.

Most people do this and Israelis are no different. However in Israel’s case there is evidence of its ability to build, hack and exploit technology at a very high level. The attacks on centrifuges and pagers being prime examples.

Yet when reports of these capabilities being used for influence appear suddenly Israel is being unfairly picked on? It doesn’t make sense.

Israel is very open about its use of propaganda. From AIPAC to “hasbra” to funding film and tv projects pushing particular viewpoints.

Russia and China do not have anything like the power to work like this Israel does. There is no Russian or Chinese AIPAC equivalent.

In every case costs have gone down and outcomes have improved.

You always build on what you have because you can’t pause healthcare for very obvious reasons.

Hence a lot of different systems all with the same aim. Controlled costs and universal coverage.

The idea the US is somehow different and cannot make the change is the result of propaganda and a mistaken belief that the current Us system is the worlds best despite its costs.

Healthcare reform is easy and there is an ocean of prior art.

It wasn’t a “paper” company because Musk himself valued it in order to get access to their IP and the assets which were the founders themselves.

Apple and Google had 2 founders. No one claims employee 3 or investor 1 is also a co-founder.

The UK via colonialism has deep connections to India and Pakistan going back hundreds of years. We have a very significant population from the Indian subcontinent plus many other people from all over. London is more diverse than New York.

Meanwhile John isn’t in the top 100 male names. Not because of a lack of “white” people, but because people now prioritize “uniqueness” in names and in the UK fashions move much faster than they do in the US.

Lyra is popular because of the Phillip Pullman books which most people haven’t read and is a name they know because a pop star used it for their daughter. Noah is popular because of a pop song from the early 2000s. Alfie is tied to a classic Michael Caine movie, a couple of celebrities, and yet another pop song. 40 years ago these names were unheard of.

On top of that despite being a Christian country, people in the UK shun most Old Testament biblical names bar those which have been anglicized by time and royalty. No Ezekiel’s or Methuselahs here.

Etc.

Degrowth doesn’t mean making people less wealthy. It means consuming less overall and not mandating growth as an objective in itself.

There is usually no scarcity of housing. People are homeless because houses aren’t efficiently distributed. We don’t always need more buildings, we need better use of the homes we have.

Infinite growth in a finite system is absolutely the dumbest way to plan and the reason we are pushing the climate into unknown territory.

They asked under £2,000 (not that much more than my Panama) and I was a fool for not taking them up on it.

Very few people are buying Toppers and most people inherit their’s. The British upper classes do not see spending money as proof of anything but foolishness. Extant hats can be repaired and reblocked. Signs of age are not shameful among people who are not nouveau riche.

The market for new hats is tiny. Most sold are plastic and those buying them are none the wiser and appreciate the robustness.

So someone cloned the market quality leader and you are suggesting that means the design, engineering and QA in the original isn’t valuable?

Show me those tools in 10 years.

The process of working out how to make them great is what you pay for.

Caution needn’t spiral cost. The reason US weapons cost so Much is because it’s profitable.

Building things that work 80% of the time makes sense in wartime. It doesn’t as a rule. Hence wartime production will always be cheaper.

Americas problem is that the military industrial complex is built to maximize cost and profit for private corporations, despite them being entirely dependent on government.

Until they are nationalized, and the profit margins are eliminated, you will always pay 20-50% more than you should and gains from efficient won’t be realized.

Look at the auto industry in the US. It’s protected by tariffs and still incapable of matching the Chinese and others on cost. It mainly survives because of incentives which subsidize vehicle types other countries don’t want (pickups) and Americans only buy because of incentives.

Iran is building drones for £3k. The US clones cost 30x that for “additional features” the spec didn’t ask for.

Meta requires tens of thousands of engineers to maintain a social media site. Google even more for an ad platform.

Never have so many achieved so little and the joke is all those clowns think they are “10x engineers”. Meanwhile WhatsApp got to global scale with less than 30 people (before Meta bought it and piled on the inefficiency).

Vibe coding is many orders of magnitude more efficient than the industry standard and that’s why it’s so disruptive.

I have decades of experience building products working with everyone from remote teams I have never met to FAANG employees in Silicon Valley.

Pretty much every product and site is a combination of good work, hacks and hope. When people attack LLMs on the basis of quality I don’t know what they think the standard is?

Outside 8-bit games which shipped in cassette and the Apollo flight computer most modern code only works because it’s been consistently updated and fixed in flight. It’s sad but true.

LLMs write code the way they write English. It’s not pretty but is of much higher general quality than the human average.

The US only has leverage over ASML due to other ties. If those are broken the leverage disappears and without ASML Americas tech industry suffers greatly.

Similarly Rolls Royce engines and BAE manufacturing are critical to the US military. The F-35 cannot be built without critical parts made only in the UK and which have no second supplier.

Europe doesn’t need to math the US military and wouldn’t want to in 2026. Look at what Ukraine is doing to Moscow. The US military is a machine built for a war that never came and now which never will. No one wants 11 carrier groups anymore because fighting that way is the past.

Europe is in many ways a mess, and I say that as a native born European with American citizenship who’s spent my adult life in the California tech scene.

However America is totally dependent on Chinese manufacturing, global supply chains and European partners and bases. America can’t produce N95 masks, nitrile gloves, or a chip fab to compete with Taiwan despite billions in government funding to accelerate these projects as critical.

Americas situation is as messed up as Europes and the US has fewer people, less land and fewer resources as a whole.

The popularity of cannabis doesn’t justify pretending it’s entirely harmless.

Consumed as an inhalant it’s impossible to claim that it won’t have similar negative impacts to putting anything in our lungs which isn’t clean air.

Consumed orally the harm will be in the dose. But there no evidence that the doses people consume for their pleasurable effect are within the safe range long term.

I am sure based on the available evidence cannabis is less harmful than alcohol, but it’s so unproductive that any research on its harms is immediately shouted down by fans who want to pretend it’s “water”.

No one can hear the difference between properly mastered high res files. I will happily put money on it.

That list is of the change in moving to cashless since Covid. Sweden is low in the list because it’s been cashless for such a long time already. Those places aren’t more cashless than Sweden. They are the ones that are moving towards cashlessness most dramatically in recent years.

When my coffee shop in Sodermalm’s card readers weren’t working they just gave me free coffee over taking cash. Cash in Sweden is a burden. Banks don’t want it and most won’t accept it.

I also think the days of cash being anonymous have passed. With cameras everywhere and the trivial ease with which numbers can be recorded and shared a government could probably trace the path of a bank note if it wanted to.

Hence tens of launches to make the moon and zero payload to orbit in a dozen flights.

This forum is full of fanboys but their arguments don’t hold up to reality. Saturn 5 had men on the mock. This much time and this many rockets in. Starship has launched a dozen times for $15B - over a billion per launch - and it hasn’t made orbit.

Say what you want about SLS, it works.

Musk is a conman and Starship is a failure. Like the F-35 supposed libertarians and conservatives will happily throw money at it until it achieves its targets, after multiple redesigns, and then claim success as if the neigh-sayers weren’t right all along.

Woodpecker are a better choice. Expensive but high quality.

Mafell and Festool get a ton of hate from people angry at the prices but they are totally worth it if you know. Feel and precision matter. Balance matters. “Design is how it works” applies here. You can’t tell how a tool is to use off a spec sheet, and numbers for things like torque are very easy to manipulate (what’s the load!)

Good power tools are a joy. They change what you think is possible.