On the second page they mention that him being immediately apologetic was mitigating for his penalty. Still a shitshow, though.

And when people jump to “yeah but Democrats are to blame” I know we’re usually already in Bad Faithville. Both Sides and all that.

Just no. This is not about both sides in any shape way or form. This is about agency. Fact is: There were ways to do this and the last three Democratic presidents (including the sitting president) have campaigned and outlined plans to codify it into law and didn't. Yes it may have taken people by surprise that the country and the world is regressing as early and fast as it is, but that doesn't take away agency, especially when they didn't even try to spring to action after mere lip service to garner votes.

The thing is: The conservative, religious right, openly formulated and has been following their plan of judicial activism for decades. The lower courts haven't become this biased towards Republican policy over night. It was due to bad luck, bad faith acting of McConnel and the other Republican senators and stubberness of some involved people on the other side of the aisle that Trump was able to nominate this many people to the USSC. It would have happened at some point.

Yes we've seen a lot of this. That's exactly the point. These problems aren't new and the calls for change aren't either. In fact, Alonso warned of exactly this behavior and the problems that come with it years ago.

To the point of allowing a collision to happen, I'm reminded of a somewhat different situation of 2019, but one which should have been a slam dunk penalty: Leclerc forcing off Hamilton in the braking zone of the second chicane in Monza. The implication of the stewards' reasoning was that because there was no contact, there wasn't a time penalty. And there was only no contact, because Lewis took to the grass to avoid the collision. So yes, this problem has also existed for a long time and yes, inconsistent ruling makes it only worse. The fact remains though, that under the current regs, you can get away with throwing your car in somewhere and counting on the other driver to avoid a collision.

I did say that I live in a democracy with more parties, not that it does not include elections where there is the "first past the post" principle, so I'm familiar with the spoiler effect.

Trump is worse on genocide Although that might be true in some sense, please try to understand the people affected here. If your family is the one affected, it doesn't get more dead, than dead. I'm not saying, I would vote the same way, but I can understand not wanting to actively vote for killing your family.

It is not only economic cost though. As I've mentioned, materials are also limited (on the same level as: There isn't enough copper to wire all motors needed to replace all cars today with EVs). And it needs alot of surface area compared to the concentrated power plants of the past, which means an even bigger impact on the biosphere (especially if not done on rooftops in cities but in mountain ranges or fields, etc.). Don't get me wrong; solar energy, if done right, is the only source that doesn't interfere with natural cycles and does not increase entropy of the planet (which makes it actually sustainable). Using it inefficiently though, means inefficient use of other resources which are limited. (Not only economic. But on that note: Public infrastructure is always built with costs in mind, because we shouldn't waste tax money, so we can do a better and more comprehensive job with what we have.)

So if there is a more efficient way to store energy for long periods, then it should take precedence over a very inefficient one. This will get complex since it is very much dependent on the local conditions such as sunshine, water sources and precipitation, landscape, temperatures, grid infrastructure and much more. As an engineer, I would throw in though, that if you need this secondary storage, that is not much cheaper, doesn't have some very essential advantage, or doesn't mitigate some specific risk, but is much more inefficient over your primary storage, then the system's design is... sub-optimal to put it mildly.

For the argument of exploring everything: We simply can't. More precisely we could, but it would need much more time, money and resources to arrive at the goal. And since climate catastrophe is already upon us, we don't have that time and need to prioritize. Therefore a technology that has a physical, not human-made, efficiency limit loses priority as a main solution. That doesn't mean, that H2 should not be looked into (for specific purposes, where it is essential or the reuse of existing infrastructure is the better option), but that we have to prioritize different avenues, with which we can take faster strides towards true carbon neutrality.

P.S. it doesn't help, that today's H2 is almost exclusively derived from natural gas.

I agree that H2 can have certain applications as a bridge technology in some industries, but there is a very important parameter missing in your premise.

Even if solar power seems "free" at first glance it really isn't. It needs infrastructure, e.g. Photovoltaic Panels and lots of it. So just having H2 instead of a battery for an application means, it needs thrice the PV capacity or even more and with it the grid capacity. Now add to that, we aren't just talking about replacing electricity from fossil fuel plants by PV, but about primary energy as a whole, which makes the endeavor even more massive. Also H2 will not magically become much more energetically efficient in its production, transport, storage and usage, because there are physical limits. (Maybe with bacteria for production) The tech could and should get better concerning longevity of the electrodes for example. Also as the smallest molecule out there, storage will never be completely without losses. And long term storage requires even more energy and/or material.

All this is to say, that efficiency is still paramount to future energy supply, since also the material is limited or just simply because of costs of infrastructure and its implications on the biosphere. Therefore such inefficient energy carriers as H2 or what people call "e-fuels" should be used only where the enormous power and/or energy density is critical. H2 cars should therefore never be a thing. H2 or e-fuel planes, construction machines or tractors on the other hand could be more appropriate uses.

Oh my, yes. It is the next step to master. Although it is quite the adventure getting back to bed in that state.

The mistake in T16 shouldn't have cost him that much time. It was on the approach to T18, where OCO slowed down to let him past to almost a standstill, causing a yellow to come out and Lando backing off.

It probably wasn't that powertrain in the car for FP1. Usually the new engine makes in the car by FP3 or even quali. Even on normal weekends without a new engine, and especially later in the season, teams would run an "FP1 engine" on Friday to minimize mileage on a different engine for the more demanding circuits.

As an engineer I can attest that it is also useful for quick calculations and illustrations, especially at the concept stage. We also ran process "simulations" in it for fun, but of course something like SciLab would be better suited for it. The possibility to simultaneously work in the same spreadsheet was also a godsend during lock-downs.

I aim to motivate understanding, not assign blame. So I apologize if the tone was a bit aggressive here or there.

Please understand though, that personal and local experience with something so complex and global is the analogue of using anecdotal evidence to then ignore all quantifiable and statistical evidence. E.g. Because it snows where I live, the planet can't be warming. Because Aspirin give me nausea, it must be bad... And from that standpoint hurling the accusation of being sheep blindly following some agenda driven group (of which I'm not disputing the existence), well, it's not very scientific to say the least. And cementing that with that you have done your due diligence with talking to climatologists, and reading articles etc. can lead one to not see this as "just an opinion" but that you add alot of weight to it.

Please help me understand, how you formed the opinion, that climate change isn't "a serious concern". What kind of evidence led you "to different conclusions"? And what suggests the earth be cooling?

Sidenotes: Science in its essence is a pursuit of objective truth. Politics is not. Neither is the economy. And even if the scientific community faces its challenges, let me illustrate this over the mask issue during the last pandemic. We were faced with a new virus on which we didn't have data, hence why there were things believed true at first, which got corrected later, when more data was available. Add to that, that mutations changed properties of what we initially had to deal with. Opposed to that are politicians. In more than one country, the health ministers lied intentionally to the people, claiming at first that masks don't work, because they didn't want a run on that limited resource due to their failings in preparation. The data didn't suggest it. When availability improved, we then had mask mandates. It was not because of science, but politics which have to weigh several interests at the same time and where the agenda comes into play.

Journalists in today's sensationalist and outrage culture also misrepresent studies to generate clicks. This is why one can get the impression, that studies contradict themselves until one goes to the original text and sees that the claim being made in a news article (probably its title) is mentioned as one, that explicitly cannot be made without further research.

The main problem with Hydrogen is the efficiency. If we want to get off fossil fuels, we need to talk about primary energy, not only the electricity consumed today. That alone means that we need multiple of the electric production (the physicist in me shudders at that word) of what we have today.

So instead of the finite resource of oil or gas, there's a bottleneck in energy production and its infrastructure, which means that we need to be efficient with the energy we have. With Hydrogen, you first need energy for Hydrolysis, then cool it down and pressurize it which uses a lot of energy. And then converting it back in the fuel cell to usable electric energy is again lossy. On a good day that's an overall efficiency of about 30% (which is around the peak efficiency of the combustion itself in modern ICEs). A good LiPo Battery (which comes with its own problems, and for industrial applications energy density is less of a problem) has a roundtrip efficiency of 98%. So you'd need triple the production infrastructure (PV, wind mills, geothermal, etc.) for your storage, if you'd do everything with H2 compared to everything with batteries.

Which means, that if there aren't major breakthroughs, like a totally different technology (e.g. photosensitive bacteria) to produce H2 at a multiple of the efficiency of today's tech, then H2 and E-Fuels in general have to be reserved for the applications, where energy and power density are un-negotionable (like airplanes, some construction equipment, or for some agricultural applications).