If you don’t consent you can just hang up, but that basically means the deal is “give consent or you get no support”.

I thought that was methadone, or did Trainspotting lie to me?

I’d like to thank a childhood of having no friends to offer me any drugs for keeping me away from a lifetime of addiction.

“Having trouble quitting heroin? A little bit of heroin can really alleviate those cravings!”

You have Donald Trump as a president and masked goons snatching people off the streets.

You’re right it’s changing, and it’s not for the better.

“Hey, we may have assassinated non-white people in the past for saying communist things, but we’ve totally changed now!”

This thing has been trained on social media. Is that really wise?

Nah, the mainstream media will just stop reporting on him, the social media algorithms will be tweaked to hide him, and when it comes to the election, people will go “Ugh, who is that Muslim sounding guy? I’m voting for Barron Trump.”

Yeah, read a couple of sources and take the average.

Always bear in mind who funds it.

Well look on the bright side. AI is about to become really good at drawing penises under fat bellies.

A bizarre decision.

Every paywalled news site is a news site I don’t read.

I mean, nobody likes adverts, but I think even fewer people like paying.

The US may have effectively banned it, but everybody else is buying loads of it.

As far as I can tell it’s operating at capacity. China’s installing it for the same reason everyone else is. It’s cheap as chips. Power stations take a lot of planning and management, while you can take a few acres of fields and effectively turn it into a money generator with no moving parts.

I’d have got some myself, but my house faced the wrong way to get in on the free solar panels boom, and the up front costs mean it won’t pay itself back for like 20 years. I was tempted once the prices went through the roof when Russia invaded Ukraine, but I moved to a tariff priced every 30 minutes or so and the benefits vanished. I might as well let a local farmer build it all instead.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?time=2000..latest&country=CHN~OECD+(Ember)

(chosen OECD because it makes the numbers easier to compare, and doesn’t cherry pick EU countries which are actually better than places like the US)

A lot less coal, which is about twice as bad as gas for CO2 emissions per kWh.

Places like the UK have got rid of coal completely. The last remaining coal power station shut down last year. When you look at the graphs for the UK, we’ve actually reduced electricity consumption as a whole, despite a growing population and the growth of electric vehicles.

Still plenty to be done about gas. I can see why China still uses enormous amounts of coal. They don’t really have any oil, so it’s the cheapest fossil fuel they have access to. In fact, cost is mostly why solar is getting popular, because it’s become extremely cheap. You can’t rely on it completely though, unless we all agree to turn off our power at night. Power storage is not a solved issue by any means.

China also never embraced nuclear power. They really got big on the world stage right around the time Chernobyl happened, and it was already getting too expensive even then.

MWAAAAH the French!

They were also responsible for 95% of the world’s new coal construction (2023). With just 1/5th of the world population.

I’ll give them props for solar. They build a lot of it, and thanks to us outsourcing practically everything to China over the last few decades, they build most of our solar as well.

You could certainly have both systems in place, with it always picking the lowest.

But you do want to avoid daft things, like seeing a parked lorry with “I’m speed to limited to 50” written on it, with the 50 in a red circle, and the car goes “50? Brilliant!” and zooms off past a school.

3 times as much solar as the EU.

Has 3 times the population.

🤷

They are using 50% of the world’s coal though, so maybe let’s not start tugging each other off just yet.

I don’t know why you didn’t just fund NASA properly.

It’s almost as if we need a nationwide GPS driven speed limit detection system, rather than relying on some crappy cameras.

That way manual drivers can be warned if they’re exceeding the limit as well.