Even more shocking is that most people believe that it's impossible for that to be true.

One of the things to notice is that playtime / the level of sport in many schools in many societies has reduced vastly since even the early 2000s, let alone, e.g. the 1950s. Playingfields and sports in UK schools have been cut vastly. Add that to kids using smart phones during breaks instead of running around. It's quite likely that a whole bunch of children who could sit still for 1 hour are now being asked to sit still for 4 hours.

I need you to provide proof that you aren't a Republican party strategist.

Definitely. Scousers are great. However the Sun newspaper is a particular grudge with them (and you don't want to get on the wrong side of the Scouse). The newspaper lied like hell about the victims of the Hillsborough disaster that the police killed. There is a fully justified and unforgiven hatred of the newspaper in Liverpool.

Making it an option increases costs by requiring the planning, design and infrastructure to be in place anyway and then only using them in a proportion of cases. Mandating makes it cheaper per home. There are also various schemes in the UK where companies buy the long term output of solar panels. If the problem is up front cost rather than long term, you could have these companies pay the price differential and then take the benefit of the solar panels themselves. Obviously that means the home owner doesn't get as much money long term as if they got the solar panels themselves, but they still have more money (through a cheaper house) than if no solar panels were installed at all.

First declare that I haven't done the calculations myself yet, so I don't know 100% if this is a great idea overall or not. However, if I'm looking at this discussion, all through there are a bunch of made up objections coming up which don't have any basis in the actual scheme. In fact, in this case the opposite. Current rooftop solar installs void warranties because they are done after the original build. This idea solves the main problems with rooftop solar by firstly making it much cheaper and secondly ensuring that it's included within the housing warranty. That's the whole point. The same goes with the battery problem. That's orthogonal - as long as the solar power can be limited by dynamic pricing and switching off in the case of negative prices then you can decide later if you want to install more batteries or not.

I think the way people are invoking problems unrelated to this scheme real sign that the opposition is not based on logic but things like emotions and fear or anti-solar propaganda.

Oh, I don't know. If you give them the chance they'd probably happily burn it down completely.

Quite a bit of the UK (North / Scotland more so, but everywhere to some extent) often gets sunny weather in winter. It's alternation between overcast, windy, even stormy and then a blocking high pressure which gives you some days of cold but sunny weather. It's much much nicer than August / September when you can get continual rain.

Currently, people I know in the UK with new solar installs get hourly dynamic pricing. I think some even get five minutes pricing which can go negative. At that point they can (and do) simply switch off their panels which may be cheaper and more effective than installing batteries. If the price of installing alternative renewable energy sources that can match with gaps in UK solar is less than the price of installing batteries then simply switching off is a great solution.

The UK is beginning to get to the stage where it produces more wind power than it's own needs. Wind is more or less limited by the transmission network. Wind also tends not to match as well as solar with air conditioning loads that are becoming more important in the UK as global warming increase temperatures, so you need to build more, more widely distributed wind to support that reliably.

The transmission network is difficult to extend because you have to do it over land, which is expensive in the UK, because overhead pylons are ugly and politically unpopular whilst underground cables are expensive and international links that give you good load balancing require international agreement which is problematic for a country which has done silly things like Brexit and so is considered an unreliable partner.

This is of course happening also, but some more solar power in the mix makes sense.

You sound like a badly programmed bot that just regurgitates random words from comments off 4chan. If I thought you were a human I'd have to think of a more exciting syndrome to attribute to you than just a "derangement". Maybe psychosis?

Oh, and given the way he gives away tarrif reductions to people who just happen to have recently bought large amounts of Trump coins, I'd never accuse trump of failing to "sell policy actions for political donations". That would just be silly.

Worth remembering that Bezos is one of the billionaires that sponsored Trump's run to power and used his media control to ensure that Americans forgot what had happened and didn't understand what was to happen. This is the point where the insiders are beginning to realize that they have messed up bad.

Under this definition slashdot "doesn't matter". We have been attacked by bots, but nobody cares if they don't work properly.

You have a point, but the real truth is that Reddit is that we hear about this mainly because Reddit is the only place where this matters and at the same time they are trying to combat it. Most other services are just adopting the "if it's good for Musk it must be good for our bottom line" idiocy.

Think that there's lots of truth in what you are saying here. I think though that this is really really a sign of being bad at technology. One of the key things with being good at technology is dealing with teaching the "low tech" people in the company so that everybody comes up to speed.

The other thing is tech choices. If you go with Office 356 you end up with documents you own and lock. That makes collaboration difficult. Just use Google office and multiple people can be editing at the same time, which eliminates the need for coordination and leaves your communications for other more important issues.