Congrats, you just broke privacy. An abusive husband can now check the vote of his wife, so she can be forced to vote in a way she doesn't want to.

Who's to say the robot hasn't been given bad-faith programming to never yield to assert dominance? What if the human had been blind or in a wheelchair, unable to move out of the way?

And in what world is it possibly driving around empty? Where's the owner, crawling around on the floor for fun?

If you ask me that thing is an autonomous motor vehicle, and as such belongs on the road and its use of the sidewalk is illegal. Just like it would be if its larger Waymo cousin tried to drive there.

Besides, that robot is also blocking and refusing to go out of the way of the human. There are no laws regulating who has to yield on a sidewalk, so good luck figuring our which one is in the wrong.

It's a standoff. She's literally just standing there. She doesn't move out of her way to let the robot pass - but neither does the robot move to let her pass!

So why should she be the only one arrested and incarcerated? Why not arrest the robot for the same crime?

Sidewalks are for humans to walk on, not dedicated travel corridors for commercial robots. If those robots can't play nice and yield to pedestrians, then they don't belong on the sidewalk.

Only when you completely ignore the cost of its externalities, of course.

Assuming we'd instantly switch from zero solar demand to unlimited solar demand, we'd need some kind of scaleup of PV manufacturing first, and with a fixed construction capacity of PV factories we'd see a linear rise in PV factory capacity - which would result in an exponential growth in yearly PV factory output.

But the same applies to the factories as well: the construction capacity is going to scale up as well, so as more PV factory part manufacturing becomes available we'll start to see an exponential growth in new PV factories, which would result in even larger PV factory output.

Scaling from "lab experiment and niche application" to "significant chunk of the grid" is a lot harder than scaling from "significant chunk of the grid" to "the entire grid" - especially with solar being embarrassingly parallel rather than requiring mega-scale deployments.

It's like trying to starve a country by bombing its supermarkets: you could try, but in reality you're mostly wasting bombs.

Take lithium batteries, for example. They were attractive for early BEVs because the consumer electronics market already developed an industry for them, and they were attractive for early grid storage because the BEVs scaled that industry up. But that doesn't mean you have to use lithium for grid storage, and when push comes to shove we could also use sodium-ion batteries, or iron redox flow batteries.

If your country no longer has access to iron and salt, I reckon you have bigger things to worry about.

"One-third done" sounds an awful lot like we're going to start seeing optimistic "we'll be halfway there at the end of the decade" headlines soon...

[0]: Things like the grid and car batteries don't operate at 100% but closer to 95%, but things like heat pumps operate at 300% efficiency, so I reckon that'll more-or-less cancel out for back-of-the-napkin math.

At a certain point it just becomes cheaper to build a brand-new one right next to it and decommission the old one, even with a nuclear reactor.

This house of cards obviously falls down when expansion ever slows down. The only solution is to raise the property taxes per yard of road, but that means low-density housing becomes unaffordable, which would force towns to increase density by building things like row houses and apartment buildings.

Solar is in a completely different position, as the solar itself is profitable. There will be no shortage of cash to replace it, only perhaps a shortage of labor. But solar doesn't really have a fixed lifetime and will happily operate a few years longer, and due to its highly distributed nature it doesn't require a risky all-at-once replacement like the Boston Big Dig either.

The global solar rollout is going slow enough that it won't be finished before the first units will reach the end of their economical lifespan. I reckon it'll just shift into ongoing maintenance as time goes on.

Even that is unlikely. Most nuclear power plants operate with a "strike price": they negotiate a fixed price, and the government makes up the difference between that fixed price and the actual market price.

For example, Hinkley Point C in the UK has negotiated a strike price of about €160/MWh. When the market trades at €100/MWh, the taxpayers will pay them an additional €60/MWh for every unit they produce. To make it even worse: the contract is for every unit they could produce. If the reactor is technically able to generate power but the grid operator, for whatever reason, decides to source it elsewhere, the taxpayers are still on the hook for €160/MWh for every MWh the reactor could've generated but didn't.

The result of this is that reactors aren't turned off when the prices go low and will always be the last to get throttled down. Low grid demand? The expensive reactor will keep running at full blast, it'll be the dirt-cheap solar which gets turned off.

This is why building new nuclear is such a horrible idea from an economic perspective: you are essentially locking in those high power prices for the next ~60 years, no matter what happens. Someone could invent a magical zero-point energy warp drive and provide us with unlimited free power, and we'd still be paying for those nuclear power plants!

Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market, don't come begging the government for a giant guaranteed-profit handout.

If those two are at the top, it means most of the others aren't even trying.

[0]: https://globalsolaratlas.info/

Those companies were building out fiber like it was a legacy telephone network: needing a massive amount of individual wire pairs to carry a massive amount of parallel transmissions. In reality the bandwidth per channel was rapidly increasing due to better tx/rx equipment, and with the rise of WDM it was suddenly possible to carry not one channel per fiber pair but several dozen.

When you were laying fiber on the assumption that a single long-distance pair was going to carry 1Gbps - and therefore laying hundreds of fiber pairs in a trench at once - it is quite a big upheaval when that single pair can now carry 100 channels of 10Gbps each. Your brand-new expensive fiber trunk can suddenly be replaced by a single spare pair some utility company had lying around already.

Turns out laying fiber isn't a great business when the capacity of existing fiber is doubling every year or so!

This dilutes the brand, and it is only a matter of time before the reputation of the cheap items will be seen as the standard for Tefal, which leads to the sales of their expensive items dropping, which leads to them trying to bring that back by lowering their price via lowering their quality. Congratulations: Tefal is now a brand where you can choose between cheap garbage and overpriced garbage!

Next steps: they shut down the European factories, struggle to compete on the budget market, and finally kill the business and sell the brand to a Chinese company interested in milking some cash out of what remains of its reputation.