Given the dominance of state level actors in fossil fuel extraction (a role they did not have in horse based transport), to deny states have a role in decarbonizing energy seems naive. I don’t see what’s unreasonable to suggest that the current massive resources states put into supporting fossil fuel consumption and spending on wars to protect its production and distribution be redirected towards accelerating the adoption of modern clean energy production and use.

Both UTF-8 or UTF-16 are supported, yes, but that doesn't solve the problem because XML parsers have to deal with other encodings. A document that initially looks like UTF-8 could be almost any of literally hundreds of encodings including all the common ISO 8859 encodings. Which is why XML processing/parsing code has to go through multiple phases: a "try to determine the encoding" phase (using heuristics like those described in https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-guessing) and then switch to a "parsing" phase after rewinding to the start of the document.

I did some work for a bank once which were in the process of moving to using XML as the universal messaging format (message bus architecture) and this wasn't some theoretical issue - it was a genuine pain as the message sources and sinks included a bunch of machines with different native encodings including a bunch of IBM machines (EBCDIC), old Windows machines, proprietary Unices like HPUX, along with Linux, etc.

This is a well known problem with XML.

And wind turbine power scales with the square of the blade length. Which is why turbine blade designs have completely displaced this sort of "wind catching surface" device which scales linearly at best in terms of materials. Solar PV scales linearly which is what makes small and domestic PV practical.

The advances in wind power over the last decade or so have come from engineering bigger and bigger blades.

I don't see domestic wind power ever being practical at all but especially given the competition of solar PV even far from the equator.

Probably I am getting overly sensitive about what seems to be creeping casual xenophobia even in mainstream media. The way the story is presented, the sketchy “foreign” aspect of the money is apparently central to it having this undesirable outcome.

I am not.

Benn claims that the papers say one thing when in fact, if you read them (even the abstracts), they mostly say the exact opposite. It's that simple.

I thought it was a joke of some kind and eventually he would give the "reveal" but no, he finished the video without ever considered that USB is a host/device connection - and although USB-C confusingly introduced a symmetric cable, you cannot connect two devices back-to-back (one end has to be a host) and expect anything useful to happen. And that's why Apple sells a "camera" kit to allow an iPad to act as the host to USB devices.

Seeing him use an oscilloscope to diagnose an Ethernet issue in an earlier video had given me the expectation that he was technically knowledgeable and interesting. So it was shocking that he could present conclusions with such a confident and knowledgeable air, having missed such a basic and fundamental fact about USB.

And there was no push back in the comments that I could see at the time - so seemingly half a million viewers would have finished the video feeling they had learnt something.

I was an independent contractor for a large bank. My contract kept getting rolled so I ended up there for a few years even if the original piece of work was an 8 month job. A new CIO was appointed during my stint and a huge new IT initiative was launched to replace the decades old core banking system with a "modern" off-the-shelf "bank in a box" product that Oracle had recently purchased. This product was new and had been "successfully" launched by a tiny 8 branch bank in Ghana. The bank I was working for had hundreds of branches in multiple western countries. The product did not fit in any way/shape or form the existing processes in the bank, it's technical infrastructure, the regulatory regime, its retail products nor employment law (employee time is expensive in western countries - so solutions involving throwing bodies at menial repetitive tasks are not viable).

I had been at the coal-face for nearly a month of day long meetings with the vendor to try to get a single niche savings product supported on their system and it was torture. I could see it was never going to work. I had no notions that my lowly opinions would have any sort of impact but I made my opinions clear to my immediate manager - especially over lunch and when we would occasionally go to a nearby bar to watch sports after work. I eventually convinced him of the folly of the entire enterprise.

At some stage, he then spoke up to his manager expressing reservations who then called me in for an aggressive grilling on why I thought the new strategy was bound to fail. I explained - but he seemed unhappy with me and I was sure my contract would not be rolled - not that cared at that stage, I was hating the work at this stage.

I later found out that I must have had some impact because this manager brought up some of the reservations and issues at the next C-level meeting. He was promptly told by the new CIO that either he was either going to be a team player and get fully behind the initiative or else he was out as there was no room for saboteurs and passive blockers.

He got in line. I left of my own volition anyway. Two years later, the project was cancelled, the CIO fired and an $80m lawsuit with Oracle was the result. No real "moral of the story" - just that at some point up the hierarchy "push back" will meet the "owner" of the initiative and the pushback will quickly die.

VAT is based on flows of cash so is trivial to calculate and to collect. Wealth taxes require valuation and are just too easy to minimize and are expensive to calculate, and difficult to extract. (E.g. I own shares in a family member’s small business via a loan I provided. What’s that shareholding worth for the purposes of a wealth tax?)

VAT acts also as a sales tax as well as a tax on “added value” - business profits - so replacing two separate tax regimes with a single trivial-to-calculate, difficult-to-avoid (requiring two parties to conspire together), easy-to-collect (cash-flow based) tax.

Without getting into the politics of taxation, it’s the best designed tax there outs.

I know how to _use_ bazel effectively to do my work. I'm comfortable with its well-designed surface but whenever I've tried to understand the inner machinery I've given up - especially when presented with a bunch of custom skylark rules code.

It's like an anti-git in some regards - the surface of git (the CLI) is an abomination in many ways but the the mechanics of the tool are so ingrained and the model is so clear and simple - I never feel uncomfortable.

I've a need to have some comprehension of the inner machinery or the underlying model of my tools.

Our bazel system is full of custom skylark code so understanding the build means effectively reading a bunch of ad-hoc code written with varying degrees of competence and with confusing dependencies. I’m kinda ashamed I don’t have a deep understanding of a tool I use daily - but every time I try reading the documentation I quickly give up.