Re: Taking a Stand in the War on General-Purpose Computing

Is he? (Man, I'm a Kraut, me.)

Why should I fake them?

-- /¯\ No | Dipl.-Ing. F. Axel Berger Tel: +49/ 221/ 7771 8067 \ / HTML | Roald-Amundsen-Straße 2a Fax: +49/ 221/ 7771 8069  X in | D-50829 Köln-Ossendorf

Except that they work:

Except that they too work, and year-on-year produce more electricity than they did previously.

FALSE on a number of accounts ...

Firstly, where is your *EVIDENCE* that gas killed off the nuclear industry? One suspects that half-a-century of the Chernobyl legacy followed by Fukushima were much more cogent forces in weakening it commercially and politically.

Secondly, perhaps unfortunately, perhaps not, here in the UK the nuclear industry is not dead, and is still getting government subsidies in the form of inflated feed-in-tariffs at double the rate of the next most expensive option, off-shore wind.

FALSE! What killed off Maggie was the Community Charge, aka the Poll Tax. No government can survive taking 6m, I think it was, of its householders to court. I knew of a couple who were stalwarts of the local Conservative Party who resigned from it and fought the tax.

The anti-poll-tax organisations encouraged non-payers not to register, to clog up the courts by contesting local council attempts to gain liability orders, and ultimately, not to attend court hearings arising from their non-compliance.[8] In November 1990, South Yorkshire police said they were planning to refuse to arrest poll tax defaulters, even when instructed to by the courts, because it would be "physically impossible for the police because of the large number of defaulters".[9]

Political consequences

After the poll tax was announced, opinion polls showed the Labour opposition opening a strong lead over the Conservative government. After the Poll Tax Riots, Conservative ministers contemplated abolition of the tax but knew that, as a flagship Thatcherite policy, its abolition would not be possible while Thatcher was still Prime Minister.[12] Kinnock had vowed to abolish the poll tax if he won the next general election.[13]

For this, among other reasons, Thatcher was challenged by Michael Heseltine for the Conservative leadership in November 1990. Although she prevailed by a margin of fifty votes, she narrowly missed the threshold to avoid a second vote, and on 22 November 1990 she announced her resignation after more than a decade in office. All three of the contenders to succeed her pledged to abandon the tax."

It has shown a year-on-year increase in the proportion of our electricity generated by renewable sources.

Hopefully you won't, but sadly many people do, including one in particular participating in this subthread.

During WW2 there were posters in bars and other public meeting places which said something like: "Careless talk costs lives!", designed to warn forces staff off discussing operational matters in a public space where they could be overheard by potential spies.

"Fake news kills!" is my adaptation of that to modern times, in response to the increasing amounts, and increasingly dangerous types of, fake news that were and unfortunately are still being propagated in response to the pandemic.

"Loose lips sink ships" IIRC.

The long time that it took for many parts of the US East Coast to get proper blackouts in place didn't help, either.

I've always considered this ironic. The Three Mile Island meltdown was physically so well contained that I think of it as a demonstration of the safety of nuclear power under worst-case conditions. At least if a plant is well designed and decently run - Chernobyl is the other side of the coin. But poor management can make a disaster of any design - at your next seance, ask those 346 passengers on two 737 MAXes..

Pronounced "nook-yoo-lur", of course. :-)

Sad but true.

No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. -- H.L. Mencken

Not here in the UK, I've never heard that one before, my version was hazily remembered from a book by Nevil Shute, and the examples below show my memory to have been correct:

You're right that one originated in the USA.