A few months back I visited the part of London where I grew up. The 3 pubs nearest to my childhood home are all dead.

Where I live now there have been no pub closures for as long as I have lived there, about 8 years.

Some areas of London kill pubs, others keep them alive. Without serious study it is not easy to say why the difference.

Computers use humans to solve problems, eg. when a drive fails in a RAID array, the computer asks a human to change it.

MegaJoules are for children's toys.
I want Gigawatt-Centuries.

Question: What is the time?

Answer: The time is an indication of the apparent position of the sun.

At this time, details of how the government plans to carry out this taxation are scarce. Maybe they don't know themselves.

The issues I see with this are:

1) Apparently it is to be a flat rate per mile, irrespective of car size. I drive a 6-seat Tesla MX, my mother drives a 2-seat Smart. For her to pay the same rate as me seem rather unfair.

2) If I take my car abroad, for example a summer trip to the south of France, I will pay for French motorways by the kilometers and I do not think I should also also be paying the British government for that distance. There has been no mention of this by the government, but there does exist a general principle against double taxation.

It seems likely to me that the government has not worked out any details and is not going to do so until very close to the time when this goes live. This to avoid giving citizens any opportunity to protest and/or mount legal challenges against unfair features of the way it is to done.

The real problem for most people is "Where do I plug it in?"

If you have a drive/garage/reserved parking space you can charge your car conveniently using low rate power overnight. You probably spend less time on this than many people spend pumping gas once a week. And it costs a lot less.

But if you have to rely on public chargers... well, they are unreliable (even if it is working, will there be a free port when you roll up?) and expensive

Given this issue, the difference between today's batteries and next year's tech is irrelevant to most people.

The boomers were born sixty-odd years ago, so they are reaching retirement age about now. As the Government has apparently made no plan to be ready for this, might we think that this is taking then by surprise?

My bank allows me to create virtual debit cards at will. I get a card number, expiry date, CVV number but no physical card. The virtual card is linked to a subaccount of my actual account and is limited to whatever funds I have moved to that subaccount.

I tend to use these for subscriptions. If anything is too much hard work to cancel, I simply delete the virtual card that feeds it. This is almost no effort and has instant effect.

I use similar method for regulating spam. When a company asks me for an email address I give them something like BlogsTimber@mydomain.org. When I start to get adverts for questionable pharmaceuticals addressed to BlogsTimber@mydomain.org I simply delete that email address. The list of deleted email addresses builds over time to make a useful list of companies that have proved themselves to be untrustworthy.

The only justification for a smart fridge that I can think of is to have it reduce the temperature of the freezer section when electricity is cheap, it can then work less hard when electricity is expensive. In order to do this properly, it needs some kind of interface so another machine can tell it that there is spare solar power at the moment etc. Obviously such a machine should have a method for setting times of day when power is cheaper, for those who have cheap rate power at night.

The amount of "smart" required is trivial and can be achieved without a screen at all. A 2x32 character display and a few buttons would suffice.

This is the sort of "smart" I want in my household appliances - features that improve performance or reduce running cost. If I want my fridge to display stuff I can simply attach my choice of display device to it... currently the display device on my fridge consists of a couple of sheets of A4 with my daughter's school timetable printed out, attached with magnets. Insanely reliable, low initial cost, no running cost, very hard to hack, doesn't "phone home" and never displays adverts.

Although it is true that modern cars do alert you to many problems, I have yet to see a car that would refuse to run when it has bald tyres.
Yes, some garages do give a bit much "benefit of the doubt" in exchange for some cash in an envelope, but few will allow you to get away with a seriously dangerous defect.

When I get phone calls out of the blue from tax authorities (1) my financial advice company (2) or others (many) and they start by asking for a security check, I always ask them to prove that they are who they say they are before I will divulge any information at all. So far, the only organisation to be sensible about it was the company that gives me financial advice.

The number of organisation that appear to be training their customers/clients to respond to phishing phone calls with real data is frightening.

"Hello, I'm FirstName LastName calling from SomeCo and I need to confirm details of your recent order. Before we start can I ask a few security questions?"

"Certainly! Can you start by proving to me you're calling from SomeCo?"

or

"I can't talk now, I'll call you back. I have SomeCo's number."

The spec sheet gives this:

Does something dreadful happen in a leap year?

Far back in the mists of ancient time, I used a PDP11/05 at work. This machine came with a full set of manuals including a schematics and commented listing of the microcode. It also had a comprehensive write-up of the principles of operation. There was enough information there to replicate the entire computer apart, perhaps, from the metalwork.
In terms of understanding how a computer worked, reading that set of manuals was probably more valuable than many college courses.
These days you get almost nothing. I have seen "user manuals" that consist of a URL and a QR code on a sticker and nothing else... which might be fine for a fridge, but sucks when the item under consideration is the computer you might have wanted to use the access the 'net.

My daughter buys from these people. The stuff they sell is cheap and cheerful, it doesn't last long. Which is fine for a child of 11 who is still growing.

  As she gets older and stops getting taller I will try to get her to understand the value of clothes that last more than 4 months, but for now the Shein sheit meets her use case pretty well.

I wrote code for an air traffic communications system. This stuff had to be reliable.

The code ran on the metal - no operating system - which helped. I devised my own memory allocation strategy, used the MMU to leave unmapped pages between allocations in the hope that bugs would show up sooner rather than later, took extreme care with casts and pointers and blah, blah, blah.

And one day I came within 12 hours of forcing a major airport to close because I had made a booboo.

For cases where it really does matter (and I would argue that anything to do with aviation counts here) an additional layer of checking is worth using if it is available.

No, I'm not going to go back and rewrite the whole thing in Rust - I'm retired now - but I would hope that whoever is writing safety critical code these days has the sense to consider it.