... you mine it and process it.

So all the price inflation in the world isn't going to do much until more copper mines and smelters are in operation - which is a decade-scale investment.

and that is why fucking around with the global commodities markets on a faster-than-monthly basis is a good way to fuck things up for decades.

Well done, Dear Leader, for acting like a Tangerine Shitgibbon. So glad to know you'll still be in power (or your appointees, as the Alzheimers bites) to try to sort out your own self-inflicted problems.

It's not just copper - a lot of high power grid lines are made of aluminium conductors with a steel core - you can get more conductivity for cheaper pylons carrying less weight. But it still needs mining and smelting.

The game changer would be if someone succeeded in inventing a sufficiently conductive carbon-based polymer. With some genetic engineering, we should be able to harvest the raw materials instead of mining them. I've been hearing about incremental advances in "plastic conductors" since I was literally in school. Sounds like it's poised for a revolution some century soon, because nobody has put any real effort into the problem. Assuming, of course, that such a thing is actually possible, of which there is no guarantee.

There will be knock on the door from the Thought Police for you in the near future. How dare you contradict the Dear Leader until he contradicts himself?

FTFA :

"My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don't fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven't been able to find any of those yet either,"

What's that saying about "when you hear hooves, expect horses, not zebras". Note that the effect seems to be occurring in the particles caused by the interaction of a (notoriously unreactive) neutrino with a boring rocky particle (proton, neutron, electron, in roughly equal numbers) ; but those reaction products are boringly reactive particles, which is how the produce the showers which are behaving weirdly.

FTFS :

leaving Russia controlling roughly half the world's enriched uranium market.

A quick Wiki (verb) (because I noticed a similar claim in a non-America story recently and thought "I should check that") gives me :

Rank .. Country. . . . . Annual tonnage . . % of global total
1 . . . Kazakhstan . . . . 21,227. . . . . . . . 43.01%
2 . . . Canada . . . . . . 7,351 . . . . . . . . 14.89%
3 . . . Namibia. . . . . . 5,613 . . . . . . . . 11.37%
4 . . . Australia. . . . . 4,553 . . . . . . . . 9.22%
5 . . . Uzbekistan . . . . 3,300 (est.). . . . . 6.69%
6 . . . Russia . . . . . . 2,508 . . . . . . . . 5.08%
7 . . . Niger. . . . . . . 2,020 . . . . . . . . 4.09%
8 . . . China. . . . . . . 1,700 (est.). . . . . 3.44%
9 . . . India. . . . . . . . 600 (est.). . . . . 1.22%
10. . . South Africa . . . . 200 (est.). . . . . 0.40%

(There has got to be a better way of doing tables in Slash's crippled subset of HTML. But it's a rare-enough need.)
So, Kazahkstan (yes, it's a former SSR of the USSR ; but it hasn't been part of Russia for a generation now, and they'll be looking at Ukraine, reading the "Ukraine Lesson", and collaborating with whoever they can trust (DPRK, Iran, Pakistan?) to trade some of that lovely fissionable material for nuclear weapons technology) is by far the largest producer, with another former SSR on the list ahead of Russia (the Russian Federation). Haven't the Kazakh's changed from the Cyrillic script to the Latin script in recent years? Yes, I thought so.

If I were in an anti-proliferation inspectorate, I'd look at those production rates for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan with the proverbial fine-tooth gamma-ray spectrometer. The amount of happy-happy-joy-joy they could mutually share with Iran (or Pakistan) by trading some lies on the export paperwork for the tech to low-enrich some of their uranium (destined for Iran (or Pakistan)) to, say, reduce by half the amount of enrichment that both themselves and Iran (or Pakistan) has to do.

Does Israel have planes with the range to bomb the further reaches of the 9th largest country in the world? I bet that question gives them twitchy arseholes in Jerusalem. Along with the question of how to get other distant countries to allow their bomber and tanker planes silent overflight.

The next administration could simply revoke that executive order and it all comes crashing down. Would you invest in a scenario like that?

S/next administration/next revolution of Trump's braincell/

As if there's going to be another "US administration", this side of the 3rd or 4th American revolution (depending on your opinion of 1/6). Hilarious.

We will likely be synthesizing hydrocarbon fuels with some regularity soon. I know there are doubters because hydrogen from electrolysis is so energy intensive. My answer to that is to not get hydrogen from electrolysis, there's more efficient methods using heat.

What's wrong with getting hydrogen from water, the way plants (and other photosynthesisers have (mostly) been doing it for the last 2-5+ billion years?

To remind you of your kindergarten chemistry : 2 CO2 + 2 H2O -(through a chloroplast)-> 2[CH2] (an approximation to "hydrocarbons") + (some) O2 - which is the basic reaction of oxygenic photosynthesis. You still need to do a degree of methods using heat to convert the mixed organic gunk coming out of a bioreactor into something that a regular IC engine can handle, but not a huge amount. There's a reason that most of the world blends alcohols (mostly ethanol) into their petrol (gasoline) supplies to reduce smog-forming emissions. It even works without the corruption in the US agricultural industries.

Of course, you don't have to release O2 if you don't want to - there are around a dozen non-oxygenic photosynthesis systems for turning light and CO2 into "fixed" carbon (with a lot of bound-in hydrogen) and some other organic gubbins that can generally be burned. And indeed, multiple groups are touting modest variations on the theme and trying to get from lab scale to refinery scale. But there's no good reason to go to synthesising hydrogen by electrolysis when you've got biological catalysts around to do the job for you. Unless you have some biting need to build high-pressure high-temperature heavy-iron chemistry sets for some other reason instead of atmospheric pressure glorified buckets. (Such a reason might be supplying hydrogen for ammonia synthesis, as a precursor to the explosives industry. If you want that, say it.)

There's an effort - whose details I don't much follow - to develop a biofuel replacement for Jet-A1, which may be the first such system to make it to "refinery scale" manufacture, because it's got some relatively coherent global backing. The aviation industry tout that one quite often, because many tourists feel guilty about drowning the tropical islands they flock to to do their lobster impersonations. That might get the refining ("downstream") end of the oil industry quite upset, if it approaches fruition.

Global population will begin to decline in 2080.

The best sort of problem : someone else's.

However, the population of people 40 and under *has already peaked* and is declining. That means *not enough people working* to pay for benefit programs for people over 60 starts *today* .

Ditto. I've paid my whack. I'll take what I'm due.

"after me the deluge"

This is Scotland. "Toujours le deluge!"

But having 5 billion seniors, 2 billion adults, and 1 billion kids isn't going to be healthy.

Someone Else's Problem.

I can tell you are a flat-earther type.

Nope - geologist. Firmly rooted in reality.

How do you arrange to use a word processor to handle text input on a web page form?

Doesn't necessarily happen on school premises. Indeed for application forms, the school doesn't have any duty of care at all.

Thinking back to a classmate who struggled to get around the Department when he was in his wheelchair, there being only one lift which didn't cover all floors of the Department. The uni didn't have any duty of care, because he broke his literal neck on the second day of his summer break, and first day of his holiday, in another country, and another nation. The "listed building" status of the college as well as pure economics made putting in additional lifts a non-starter. The short sets of steps between building phases had mostly been ramped away in the 1950s updates.

US politics is getting madder, and is probably more likely to get us all killed now than it was last month. Situation "normal", for insane values of "normal".

You've got to hand it to Putin - he's bossed the "getting an agent into US politics" achievement. One of these days, I really should watch the "Manchurian Candidate". That's the original - there was a re-make recently, I think, and they're never worth watching.

It doesn't stop cheating on homework with AI, but it does mean that at some point the information has to pass through the human's brain to get to the writing hand.

Corollary : handwritten application forms - against which your hand-written essays, papers, etc will be compared. So you need to get your handwriting reasonably stable several years before you apply.

OK - you've just broken your arm, or had it ripped off on the rugby field. That's OK, you should be able to get a medical release for that. Ditto if you don't actually have hands.

If that means that school kids have to start handwriting essay etc too, big deal.

Nonsense.

Current strategy is to encourage as much legal immigration as possible (about 10 times the current level of illegal immigration), and process the immigrants into SoylentCrete for building the nuclear plants (and a new palace for King BigEars the Second, whichever one survives the duel)

I don't know how much uranium and thorium they can mine in the UK

Oh, a geological question.

There are small deposits of uranium minerals in both the Lake District and Cornwall, but the net amount is somewhere between fuck-all and two-tenths of that.

I can't think of any reported uranium mineralisation at all from Scotland. There are pegmatite-y areas which were evaluated for various minerals in WW2 (and rocks are not renowned for getting up and wandering the landscape) but I don't recall a uranium report At the clearance level of the geologist walking the hills with a hammer in his hand, nobody would have conceived of it as being important for anything more than a source of yellowish dyes and pigments.

In some distant galaxies, they have detected both a redshift from the light emitted by the galaxy (measuring specific emission lines, and the Lyman Alpha break in the galaxy's spectrum) but they also have absorption lines from the light passing through a gas cloud at lower redshift, with some absorption. This is quite commonly seen in lensed galaxies, where there is a lensing galaxy (or galaxy cluster) around half-way between us and the object of interest. This imposed features at two different redshifts on these galaxies light. Which is very hard to explain if you're trying to have your redshift from a physical motion in the rest frame rather than a cosmological redshift imposed on the universe.

This galaxy isn't one of those dual-shift galaxies - it only has one set of redshifted features in it's spectrum - but in the 1950s and 1960s respectable hard core astronomers tried to make the case you're making. They failed, and kept on failing until they accepted the reality of cosmological redshifts, or they retired.

Penzias and Wilson's observation of the cosmic microwave background in about 1963 (Nobeled a few years later) pretty much killed that line of argument at about the time I was concentrating on potty-training. If you want to resurrect it, feel free to dig up papers from the time and do some new observations that will bolster the argument that failed in half a century ago.

You're going to go all Address Resolution Protocol on us now, aren't you? (This is a bad pun! If you know, you know, and if you don't know, you'll have fun finding out.)

Why?

You're never going to see even a small fraction of a single million years. By the time a million years has passed, no one will remember Einstein, or Newton names (though their maths would probably have survived, in the machines). Plato will probably have disappeared into distant history along with every author from Home to Stephen King. Most cities that you have heard of will have sunk into the mud they are (mostly) built on. The Atlantic will be a few hours sailing wider, and the number of comets making close approaches to Earth will be almost exactly the same as 65 million years ago.