Riedquat

What a load of naive nonsense in this thread, that fails to understand how the mind develops, and is also only capable of seeing things in their excessive extremes. The human mind develops instincts at an early age. Trip when learning to walk and the fall is unpleasant, but unlikely to be serious. We instinctively learn to avoid doing it to avoid the unpleasantness, which serves us well later on when we're bigger and a fall hurts more. It's the same sort of thing with a smack in the right time and place. It's why even animals will give their young a nip if they stray off in a dangerous direction. It's weird how people appear to think that children are small adults (in a time when we treat adults ever more like children - wonder why that might be happening?) That some people don't know what the right time and place is doesn't invalidate that basic concept.

Or scrap the bloody wind turbines and build some nuclear power stations. Then you can manage your storage much more predictably. There's still a good use to it, so you don't need to meet peak demand, but you can work out exactly how much is needed in total and thus work out how to balance that going in to storage during the troughs and how much you need to take out for the peaks. Overall you'll need rather less storage and rather less overall maximum generating capacity because you're not at the mercy of the weather and its inherent unpredictability. And you've not industrialised vast swathes of areas that have somehow managed to escape such desecration up until now. Win-win.

Sounds very likely. Narcisstic bully surrounding himself by yes-men, won't allow himself to hear anything he doesn't want to hear, whether it's true or not, ends up believing his own BS about how great and unstoppable he is, how everyone will give way to him, and runs head-long in to the real world.

Better than plastering huge areas with power generators that sit idle half the time whether you need them to or not.

Agree with that. 20 mph limits are politically-driven nonsense, spreading like a cancer throughout the UK, but I find it hard to believe they've got much impact on house prices.

Quite. It's already done too much damage. You can certainly argue that we've got a government hell-bent on maximising that mistake, and that's true, but that just brings us back to the point that the EU was one part of the problem. Freedom of movement is great when there's no particular pressue in any one direction. But when there is you've got to be a short-sighted selfish idiot to want it.

Oh, you've got to stand up to it, no question about that at all. If you don't you just hand the world over to nuclear-armed psycopaths (who'll probably use them in the process anyway, if they don't fear equivalent retaliation). But I won't pretend that it doesn't make me nervous.

Odd thing to do really, call for a war that'll get yourself killed. But intelligence has never been their stong suite.

Quite, but you surely don't expect the resident loonies who'd have been cheering Hitler on if they were around in WWII to admit that?

Whilst there are a few uses for driverless cars (for people who cannot drive e.g. due to medical reasons) the idea is overall an absurd waste of time, pushed ahead only by those who like technology purely for its own sake (fair enough, not that I share the sentiment), and those scared enough of our fellow human beings that they think it's a better world to remove us from everything, turning us in to a load of useless lumps of flesh served by machines for everything. Sounds like no sort of life at all but at least you'll be marginally safer, having removed some risks that aren't that large anyway if you're not an idiot. Come to think of it they might even increase the risks to non-morons - I could believe that a driverless care might (eventually) be safer than the small number cretins who cause the lion's share of accidents, but less safe than most of the rest. Net result overall fewer accidents, but an increased chance of one for the more responsible.

The enthusiasm for AI from some people really leaves me shaking my head in despair at humanity. It's sad and pathetic that we're so desperate to marginalise ourselves from as much as possible. Sure, it has some very good potential uses, such as part of medical diagnoses, but the idea it should be involved in any way in our day to day lives is ridiculous. Wish that means we'd see sense and it wouldn't happen, but no chance of that.

There are a lot of resources in Russia that I'm sure China would love dirt cheap access to. All China needs to do is not annoy the West so much that it cuts off doing business with China, and since we've made ourselves foolishly dependent on it China knows it can push quite far. It's easy to see China as being the biggest winner.

Quite. Swarms of drones, currently, some will get through. Those using them don't have any better defences against them, they've just not been on the same sort of receiving end yet.

There's questioning and then there's just blindly accepting anything that says differently, no matter how ridiculous. Few who bark on about the "official line" have any critical thinking skills whatsoever, considering what they'll blindly accept. Very occasionally they'll be roughly right, by coincidence. Overall it's best to simply ignore anyone who doesn't apply scepticism equally.

Interesting that those authoritarian regimes are now feeling very threatened by the idea of democracy. They've been able to pretty much ignore it in the past. I suppose from that point of view it's true that Russia is actually threatened by the West, but it's not a military threat, it's a threat of ideas getting in and threatening Putin's position, not the country. Whether China's in this because it also fears the ideology (Xi does seem a little paranoid) or simply because it's a good opportunity for it to get de facto control over Russia I'm not sure.