> ... that 7 Eccles Street was a row house in Dublin, Ireland?

I mean, as the name, and the fact that it is a _row house_ (though, also, it's weird that the article, and I checked, it's like that in the real Wikipedia too, calls it that; they're usually called terraced houses here), indicates that, well, there were a few of them. It's actually notable because it's where Leopold Bloom lives in Ulysses.

Also, Mistral:

> Human consciousness is an evolutionary malfunction that manufactures suffering without delivering wisdom, making us the only animals cursed with self-awareness

Who let the robot read _Blindsight_?

It's just money, really.

In practice, you tend to build overhead lines once it becomes economic. This is pretty much just based on line usage; I think the normal rule is that anything over two to three passenger trains an hour per direction, the economics favour electrification.

Some DMUs and diesel locomotives can be economically converted to electric; most diesel trains these days are actually diesel electric anyway, so it's a matter of removing the engine and adding pantographs.

For shortish lines, you can even electrify before you roll out the overheads! Dublin's remaining diesel commuter lines are currently being electrified, and one of them (or possibly two) will use battery-electric trains until the overheads are fully in place (expected to take a while due to old bridges etc); they'll operate on overheads where they exist and battery elsewhere.

(The first one should start running mid next year; I'm really curious to see how it goes.)

This can be taken to ridiculous extremes. The new trains for the Dublin<>Belfast route will have diesel engines, _and_ batteries, _and_ will support running on 1.5kV and 25kV overheads. 1.5kV while they're on the Dublin suburban network, then diesel to Belfast, then battery within Belfast; the 25kV is to support the future Irish intercity standard.

All that said, battery electrics are probably unsuitable for freight; you'd really have range issues there.

This, I suspect, is a bit like 'clean coal'; I'm not aware that anyone has managed to make this, like, actually clean?

But also, the market is hitting a tipping point. In some product categories, even ignoring subsidies, electric cars are now barely more expensive than petrol/diesel, and this is against the background of soaring fuel prices with no obvious end in sight. It would be surprising if numbers were _not_ up dramatically.

Not sure about that one. The major alternative for footwear, leather, is such a dirty industry that starting new production in developed countries is now essentially impossible, and the existing production sites will become expensive chemical hazard cleanup sites in the future.

Got kids? The way things are going, they’ll live in a barely habitable world. If they’re lucky; otherwise they’ll just die in it.

I’m baffled that anyone is _not_ concerned about it. I suppose if you’re pretty confident that you’re going to die in the next decade or so and don’t care about other people at all, sure, whatever, carry on, but everyone else should be concerned.

(As Ireland is a PR-STV country, this leads to _extremely long_ vote counts. I think the most recent European Parliament election didn't assign all the seats for about a week.)

Brand name changes actually quite rarely take, in the long term. No point being over-eager to adopt them.

Like, c’mon now. This is far from the weirdest open source restriction.