It won’t just make the USA irrelevant in the oil domain: it’ll impact the entirety of the OPEC group who’ll have to massively scale back production to keep the price high enough to sustain their economies.

The petro-dollar will be replaced with the electro-dollar (that is if the US dollar remains the world currency). So a different group of rare earth rich countries will emerge that’ll become more relevant than OPEC in the energy domain but not quite to the same extent as countries that are both gifted with geography to make them major energy exporters and have neighbouring countries/super-grid connections/renewable storage export capabilities will emerge as big players as well.

Both heavy and light oil will still be needed for other processes and products that can’t be replaced/way more difficult to replace than fuels. But decoupling oil from energy and transportation will have a huge impact on the market and be better for everyone in general.

UK here, NHS is constantly being underfunded and gutted by contracting out to private companies, it still works but just barely.

For example, ambulance target response time for a cardiac arrest, not a simple heart attack but full on unconscious not beating not breathing, used to be 8 minutes or less. Now they aim for 20 minutes and only achieve that 60% of the time.

I’d much prefer a Norwegian style model where you pay say £30 per doctors/non-emergency hospital visit up to a cap of £150 per year with those who can’t afford that getting those fees paid for by the government.

Some additional things I would add would be a slowly increasing VAT on private healthcare until it reaches double the normal VAT, paying student nurses/doctors a full wage and full living cost loan for the duration of their studies, whilst working they do not pay the interest on those loans, then if they move abroad before the university loans are paid back they have to pay the interest back as well.

This would massively increase funding for the NHS by taxing those who can definitely afford the burden because at double VAT the only ones who’d still opt for private healthcare are those who employ workers and therefore no matter how much they try to wriggle out of paying tax they can’t avoid this one.

The second would increase the number of medical students and stop the current drain of young medical professionals leaving for other countries.

That sounds familiar, I take it that was in Neuromancer? It’s been a while since I read that book and The Difference Engine.

Who do?

Eh can one really copyright the idea of an emergent machine spirit when engineers from the industrial revolution were already ascribing personalities to machines and Assimov had already wrote about machine ghosts?

I have seen machines develop ghosts and I believe all electronic devices could develop said ghosts but only if built with quality components that have large tolerance between normal operation values (voltage, current, etc) and fail values. If not then they fully fail to function before they start operating outside of normal parameters.

With the rise of bio computing currently by using rat neurons which I think will collide with LLMs with their hallucinations to produce full on machine spirits within the next 20 years.

I say this has no foundation as the only “evidence” I have is my own anecdotes and the rest is merely a hypothesis.

National Geographic producers are rubbing their hands knowing that future seasons of Air Crash Investigations are secure.

I genuinely don’t like eating steak.

I’ll eat it if it’s put in front of me but I genuinely just don’t get the appeal of a giant slab of meat that’s that chewy (even after being tenderised) and fights you when you cut it.

Steak chunks that have marinated in a sauce for a long time until they melt apart in your mouth is devine.

But a giant hunk just slapped on the plate isn’t my thing at all and I don’t understand why people like it.

Even asking for unlimited youth is tricky for the monkey paw could just make you forever a baby.

Now that wouldn’t necessarily mean you’d end up being an adult brain in a baby’s body, just straight up a 1 year old that never develops, always reliant on someone else. You’d literally have 1 year before you’d be surrendered to some sort of institution as a medical oddity whilst you comprehend nothing doomed to overwhelming stimulus forever.

Best you could hope for is specifying an age in your life you consider to be what your physical peak was and just deal with the lack of mental development completion if that physical peak was before being roughly 25 years old.

Bitches love cannons.

Now put me on a plane so I can put 'em in a hearse!

It’s both, because reducing the number of people and the options they have available to work the system is both usually cheaper to operate and it makes key performance indicators that their bosses have set go up.

The latter is where the stupid comes in and is usually more insidious because everyone always forgets that when a metric becomes a target it ceases to be an effective metric. The end result is a rats-nest of perverse incentives and compliance theatre. But the c-level bosses don’t care because arbitrary numbers went up.

Where’s my emotional support coupling capacitor? I can’t function without my emotional support coupling capacitor!

Hand drawn PCBs from the 60s: look at my beautiful curved tracks, don’t they just accentuate my thick copper fills?

Any PCB since Gerber: you’ll take my 45 degrees and like it!

Glares at high-speed DAQ electronics and high-frequency analogue sensing circuits

PCB cries in EMI

But who the fuck is actually introducing these bills? Which entity/organisation/individual/company are they getting the ideas from?

Sorry to be pedantic but strictly speaking “shareholder profit” isn’t the issue with capitalism because that would include worker-owned cooperatives which are not causing the same problems.

The issue is the legal obligation of a private or public company to make an increase in returns for shareholders year on year.

This is why decisions like downgrading quality, design by committee to appeal to focus groups, everything becoming a subscription service, and firing staff to reduce wage overheads in the last financial quarter exist.

Because it’s easier for the company directors / C-level executives to make these decisions which make line go up, rather than try to justify to shareholders why a steady or small dip in returns is necessary for longer term investment and growth.

This is compounded by the shortsightedness of companies only planning quarter to quarter then governments + central banks basing all economic decisions on GDP figures.

Because the easiest thing to make national line go up is to give tax cuts to the owning elites for them to shuffle even more money around in the stock and commodity markets, they buy up all the assets of the working class, the middle class, and the governments selling them off.

But funnily enough, centralising all the apparent wealth in the hands of a few silver-spooned arseholes is not a basis for a functioning society.

It’s how I talk to everyone when I’m not masking or following social scripts. It’s the most fun I get out of social interactions.

I’ve already adopted the transparent frame: nothing to hide, only my undivided attention if they’d like to geek out about their special interests or just want someone to listen.

Not so much a hero but I admired his work the projects he is associated with: Elon regarding Tesla & Space X.

I had heard that he was a bit of a nightmare to work with but I just chalked that up to the usual tech CEO being a bit of an arsehole but still delivering the vision. So admired the projects but wouldn’t personally work for him.

The first time I came across something that gave me the impression something was off with him was when he called one of the Thai cave divers a pedo after the diver rejected using an unproven single person extraction canister Elon proposed.

It was just so uncalled for. Then the more I read and saw stories about him my opinion of him wained further down to a spoilt nepo-baby cosplaying as a design engineer who’d do best to get out of the way of the actual engineers trying to do the work.

Now I think the world would be better off without him and I hope the talented engineers currently work for him leave to find fulfilling employment elsewhere in the space and electrification industries as soon as possible.