AC is not common in Europe. There’s a variety of heating systems: gas boilers, direct electric heating, district heating, etc. Heat pumps are a growing market though.

Technically any Catholic male is eligible to become pope, it doesn’t even have to be a cardinal. But yeah cardinals are the only ones voting so they always elect one of their own (with a few historical exceptions)

I’ve always heard it referred to as infringement, in a legal context. I’m sure game publishers (and music, film, etc.) would like to equate it in the public mind with common theft of physical goods, but it’s all just propaganda.

We’re just playing games with words at this point. The law is pretty clear, that distributing a copyrighted work such as a copy of a video game is illegal. I don’t know why people like to repeat this line, that “if buying a game isn’t owning then piracy isn’t theft.” Maybe it is a moral/ethical argument? It’s not going to help you in court.

As a European, the idea of a bank having a drive-through is just absolutely wild.

Another big factor is that every plant is effectively a completely custom design. Because of how few nuclear plants are constructed, every new one tends to incorporate technological advancements to enhance safety or efficiency. The design also has to be adapted to the local climate and land layout. This makes every single plant effectively one of a kind.

It also tends to be built by different contractors, involving different vendors and electric utilities every time. Other countries have done better here (e.g. China and France) mostly due to comprehensive government planning: plopping down lots of reactors of the same design, done by the same engineers. Although these countries are not fully escaping cost increases either.

You are completely correct that regulation is also a big factor. Quality assurance and documentation requirements are enormously onerous. This article does a pretty decent job explaining the difficulties.

I think holding more helium in a smaller space is the opposite of what you want. The lifting force is equal to the weight of the air being displaced, so you want as little stuff as possible in as big a volume as possible.

Maybe if you went the other way round and compressed the atmosphere?

I did not come away from this article with a very positive opinion on Clarkson. He strikes me as the type of guy who is incapable of recognising a problem that he himself is not personally facing. Climate change wasn’t real until he tried his hand at farming. Driving electric vehicles won’t solve the climate problem, science will (did science not develop the battery technology needed to move away from gasoline cars?). Farmers are struggling and will be forced to sell to millionaires and capitalists (is he himself not the capitalist that bought a hobby farm from a struggling farmer?).

I don’t think he’s seeing his own hypocrisy here. Farmers have been facing these problems for years and no one paid attention. He calls up his buddy in Westminster, immediately gets a full cabinet meeting, and as if by magic the government starts moving in his favour (taking away power from local government, I might add).

This isn’t a black and white issue and there is merit to Clarkson’s point that local government can get captured and corrupted by personal conflicts and interests. But I don’t agree with the image he appears to project as a defender of the common man and poor farmer. He’s a millionaire who has never given a single shit about farmers until he personally owned a farm.

I think it’s more so that the kind of people contributing to these projects are on balance not that interested in doing the marketing work.

Fun quote from an interview with Chris Sawyer:

Latterly the machine code came back to haunt us when the decision was made to re-launch the original game on mobile platforms as RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic a few years ago, and it took several years and a small team of programmers to re-write the entire game in C++. It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier.