Spain and Morocco already have a 1.4 GW DC interconnect and the XLinks project intends to connect Morocco and the UK.

The only real problems with long distance electricity transmission are political and to a lesser extent financial. Technically it is solved problem.

The Desertec project could have turned a relatively small patch of Libyan desert into a solar farm that could supply all of Europe's electricity except that politics makes it impossible.

Latitude is not everything. Oslo, which is further north than all of Denmark gets more insolation than Hamburg, which is further south than all of Denmark.

And don't forget that storage is getting cheaper so it will get more and more practical to save a some of that midday solar energy to be used in the evening.

> except long distance trucks) can be electrified now.

What do you call long distance? And why do you think it can't be electrified now. Both Volvo and Scania have electric tractor units.

Scania has trucks with over 500 km range at 42 t GTW. In Europe you can't drive more than 360 km in one go. See https://www.scania.com/group/en/home/products-and-services/t...

My exact area at the moment, the problem is not the distance but recharging because the infrastructure for fast charging Electric Trucks has not rolled out broadly enough yet. Other than that the technology is completely ready its literally just missing some infrastructure that is being built right now.

The thing that winds me up about credit card input is that it won't let me enter it as it is written on my card, in groups of four digits.

The same applies to fields that expect telephone numbers. They should all accept arbitrary amounts of white-space.

If you don't allow me to paste a card number in I might well not buy from you.

Why median income? Why not the income of the individuals concerned. Any fixed value fine simply means that the wealthy can just treat it as a cost.

That's what I meant in the second sentence.

It's not just about fines, many countries have support for families with children. I don't think the rich should get more money per child. For fines, it absolutely makes sense.

A harsher alternative is to stop using fines altogether and instead give "prison micro-sentences" - a few hours or days in prison. It makes perfect sense - when you pay a fine, you lost a bit of your life by working and not having anything to show for it at the end. So why not make it direct and just take a bit of time directly from the person. It nicely sidesteps various tricks how the rich hide their assets, too.

Of course, the administrative overhead would be much larger, but then the offenders could take some part in maintaining the prison. Nothing would be more humbling to a privileged person than cleaning the prison toilet.

Most other hobbies are only significantly dangerous to the practitioner.

Distilling on the other hand can easily harm, or even kill, friends, relatives, and casual acquaintances.

Brewing is very unlikely to do anyone any harm other than by overconsumption of alcohol.

Trump and co. are ignoring every other law so why not this one too?

Even when their edicts are overturned by the courts they suffer no consequences.

Most of the reason was corporate decisions. My wife was perfectly happy writing a novel in WordStar under CP/M on our Osborne. But in offices you have to use what you are given so when our company switched from WordPerfect to Microsoft Word that's what everyone had to learn to use.

This March (2026) in Norway was nearly 4 K warmer than the preceding thirty year average for March, and 0.6 K warmer than the previous record set about 10 years ago.

So I could easily believe that we are already at +2 K for the year as whole.