Briss

I've nothing to add except to wish you (and your cat) all the very best and to hope you get this sorted out with the minimum amount of stress and drama.

Au contraire... 😀

I'm not going to predict the future... I'll wait and see how AI develops. Or we can all make guesses (based on varying degrees of knowledge), and the one who gets closest can earn the kudos of calling it a prediction. “I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions.” – Wilbur Wright, inventor of the airplane

Exactly... if you make enough guesses then occasionally, by chance, one turns out to be right. You then call it a prediction and go round telling everybody about it. People are very fond of telling others how their favourite science fiction writer predicted the future... forgetting the fact that the books are full of "made up stuff" with a couple of things that occasionally get close to the mark. All the other "stuff" is conveniently forgotten about and their favourite author is a visionary. “The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.” – Francis Bacon

So are pictures on the wall, decorations, candles, background music.... but some people like them, it makes them smile, they think it adds something. Ambiance, atmosphere. Not everything has to be purely functional, perhaps that's the point.

New tech is always risky, but that's what "advancement" is all about. It could fail, but is that no reason not to try. I think there's enough people out there who think it could work to be spending huge amounts of money and time on it. I'm not missing the point as such... I'm making a different point that some people may find interesting about the future and the availability (or not) of fusion providing unlimited power, which was a point made by somebody else. See my above "quotes" post... I think that answers your final paragraph. And the people who made those quotes should've known what they were talking about. This is an internet forum for narrowboats... perhaps our predictive power about future technology isn't up there with the best!🙂

Just for fun.... “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” – Albert Einstein, 1932 “X-rays will prove to be a hoax.” – Lord Kelvin, Mathematician, Physicist and President of the Royal Society, 1883 “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.” — William Orton, President of Western Union – 1876 “A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.” – New York Times, 1936 “The horse is here to stay, but the auto-mobile is only a novelty, a fad.” – President of the Michigan Savings Bank, 1903 “Television won’t last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” – Darryl Zanuck, co-founder of 20th Century Fox, 1946 “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” – Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943 “I predict the internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” – Robert Metcalfe, Founder of 3 Com, 1995 “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” — Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, 2007 And this is obviously my favourite... “The Beatles have no future in show business. We don’t like your boys’ sound. Groups are out. Four-piece groups with guitars, particularly, are finished.” – executives at Decca Records in 1962

I have to presume you know more than me about AI as you're so fed-up with it. However; my understanding of AI is software that re-writes itself and can "teach" itself. An example would be AI "taught" itself to land a drone on an aircraft carrier in rough seas. It, of course, gets things wrong but then lessons get learnt and it gets better next time... which is how all technology progresses. AI can run simulations of fusion, "learn" from what went wrong and re-run the simulation. It can do this thousands of times and feed information back to the engineers. The engineers write the algorithms in the first place and the AI refines them. Engineers tend not to believe in magic and they wouldn't waste their time on it if it wasn't useful. It's an incredibly fast moving field and I would imagine the various competitors in the "race for fusion" aren't telling everything they know, but specifically stating that "AI is not going to solve these problems..." means that you're either at the forefront of AI research... or just making stuff up. History is littered with examples of that sort of statement proved wrong.

It has indeed... I lived just down from the JET project (Joint European Torus) at Culham, Oxfordshire in the 80s and followed it with interest. It was always joked that if the house lights dimmed then JET had taken all the output from Didcot Power Station again. However; just remember the massive advances in AI in the past 15 years which has been a real game-changer for fusion tech. Real-time control of the plasma containment is just one example.

There are big advances being made in fusion technology by the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, which in itself is advancing rapidly. Nuclear Fusion and Artificial Intelligence: the Dream of Limitless Energy One company working towards making nuclear fusion commercial is TAE Technologies (formerly known as Tri-Alpha Energy) and its CEO Michl Binderbauer claims that "commercialisation is coming in the next five years". Google Research's Applied Science branch has helped TAE discover new fusion techniques and CEO John Platt has said that "fusion has this potential for unlimited energy". Even though Binderbauer's claim was met with scepticism from the scientific community, AI could be the game-changer when it comes to nuclear fusion on Earth. EDIT: ...and this from a week ago... The fusion start-up Helion Energy announced a $500 million funding round on Friday. The round was lead by Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman, who put $375 million into Helion, his largest investment in a start-up ever. Helion Energy plans to use the $500 million to complete the construction of Polaris, its 7th generation fusion facility, which it broke ground on in July, and which it aims to use to demonstrate net electricity production in 2024.

Just wondering why one has to be an environmentalist to complain about fly-tipping ash. Seems a bit exclusive to me. What about litter? Does one have to be an environmentalist to complain about litter or can anyone join in?

With some pertinent other points too, me thinks... but definitely some overlap. 🙂 One can't always remember exactly what someone else said when developing one's own argument, and sometimes it becomes necessary to repeat previous points for the clarity of one's own argument.

Are these type of condensation traps effective?

If one of the stipulations laid down in applying for government grants, lottery grants, English heritage type grants, greening England type grants and all the other awarding bodies that require huge written reports before considering the benefits of divvying up their money between loads of different competing bodies is that they must show how they are addressing climate change or they don't get considered, then the CRT is going to churn out loads of stuff showing how they're addressing climate change. They'd be fools not to. And they're not going to tell us that they're only doing it to placate the awarding bodies... they'd be fools to do that, too. If the CRT can show that their plans benefit as many people as possible from all walks of life, from health and well-being, to nature and education, to heritage and the future then they're more likely to be considered for funding, and the more people they can benefit, the more funding they'll get. You might wish the modern world didn't work like this and go on and on about the good old days, but that doesn't get you funding in today's (changing) climate. So it might well be that the CRT is being canny and realistic in their press releases.

I thought it seemed a realistic assessment of the difficulties in securing funding. I would imagine there were many other sections filmed and different versions have been edited together to provided commentaries for different purposes. We've been shown the boaters' version. There's probably a "lottery funding" version and a "English Heritage" version etc. Or not?

"Woke", "politically correct", "playing the race card", "white lives matter".... all examples of what's sometimes called "playing the shell game". It allows people to dismiss the serious concerns of others about the systematic racism, sexism, homophobia etc that other people encounter in their day-to-day lives. Anybody who expresses empathy with the less fortunate or the oppressed; anybody who expresses concern with the state of the world, whether it be about climate, refugees, poverty etc; anybody who speaks up for the downtrodden, marginalised, dispossessed and exploited can be dismissed and their concerns ignored by using one of the above phrases.

Congratulations!

...and "mod cons" covers a lot of ground, like washing machine, tumble dryer, microwave, steam iron etc etc. This would be problematic, to say the least.

Glad I've just had my lunch!

Does that mean we've all got to start growing those huge Leylandii conifer hedges again?😀

Nuclear fusion, (not fission) is making huge advances. There is lots of research trying to use Artificial Intelligence to control the plasma containment. A headline from New Scientist: Why cracking nuclear fusion will depend on artificial intelligence: The promise of clean, green nuclear fusion has been touted for decades, but the rise of AI means the challenges could finally be overcome.

It's on t'interweb.... so it must be true....🤔 The world’s longest burning fires: China’s unseen story Coal extraction remains a higher priority than putting out China's huge underground coal fires

Er,no ... our discussion was about how coal was formed as from your first post!😀 Now I completely agree with the second part of your second post.... we no longer have the huge Carboniferous Period forests and swamps necessary for the large sale production of coal. Digging up all the peat bogs doesn't help either. Edited for clarity.