Sam Bowman

Overall this seems very good to me, with a couple of important exceptions. Good: - Replacing ALARP, the principle of constant reinvestment of cost savings into more and more safety, with a safety threshold. - Introducing one-and-done assessments rather than requiring constant changes throughout the lifetime of a project - Indemnities for developers during Judicial Reviews (so they don't have to stop working while they're ongoing) and caps etc on JRs The two main areas I am concerned about: - The Habitats Regulations will be addressed with guidance rather than legislation. This means it'll be easy to reverse and won't give any certainty to new nuclear projects. - The "community benefit" provision, which would allow the planning system to recognise contributions made by nuclear power projects to local communities, is being dropped entirely. That means we can't get any bargaining between nuclear projects and local authorities. This model could help get data centres built as well. It's not an implementation "in full" as the Prime Minister promised, but it's certainly quite good and better than I expected.

- Put tens of billions in wind and solar costs onto energy bills - Prohibit fracking and drilling for North Sea oil & gas - Impose a carbon tax 50% higher than California’s and 6x higher than China’s - Borrow billions of pounds to pay for a “cost of living bailout”

- Put tens of billions in wind and solar costs onto energy bills - Prohibit fracking and drilling for North Sea oil & gas - Impose a carbon tax twice as high as California’s and 6x higher than China’s - Borrow billions of pounds for a “cost of living bailout”

Eid Mubarak to all my Muslim followers!

@daviddlow @vibeteknologist It’s not even fishing, it’s just sarcasm!

@s8mb @vibeteknologist The number of people caught by this fishing attempt is remarkable

Reminder: there's no gas to be fracked in Britain or the rest of Europe, and there's no oil or gas left in the North Sea. That's why we cannot give licenses to companies looking for reserves there and have to tax their profits at 78%.

@IGMansfield I think my estimate is closer than yours? The NFID says it has a CFR of 1-3 in 1,000 and a hospitalisation risk of over 1 in 5 in young children! nfid.org/infectious-dis…

@s8mb I think you're an order of magnitude off here - the mortality rate (in developed countries) is 1 in 5000, not 1 in 500. I do recognise there are other negative effects too from illness (I mean, I think we should vaccinate for chickenpox, purely for those reasons).

Far from a backlash, which some people predict, I think we'd find that the vast majority of parents who don't get their children vaccinated would immediately get with the programme if it affected them materially. Most of these people are just ignorant, lazy free riders.

If you give Claude Code access to your work calendar and Slack, you can pretty easily set it up to scan your calendar for tomorrow and tell you things like (a) where you need to be for your first appointment, (b) what you likely need to wear (tie/no tie, heavy coat/none), (c) any clashes you need to resolve, and (d) any documents you might need to read.

You have to account for children who are too young to get it, people who are immunocompromised, and children for whom the vaccines don't provide immunity as well. And even with 20–100 deaths, you're talking about 10–50,000 cases each year. (Opus 4.6 workings.) Death is not the only thing to want to avoid – measles can give children brain damage, make them deaf, give them permanent scarring, etc.

@s8mb As a quick Fermi estimate, kids get measles once per childhood, there are 750k births per year. At 90% vaccination, that implies 75k maximum population per year steady state, so c. 15 deaths per year if all non-vaccinated get it, not hundreds.

I don't think a clean "healthcare autonomy" principle exists at the moment (we already, rightly, prioritise childrens' welfare over their parents' wishes in extreme cases), and I don't think the slippery slope scenarios you fear are that realistic, because they haven't set in in cases where we already provide the MMR vaccine.

@IGMansfield That's with herd immunity! Take-up rates have already fallen below 90% for the UK and in London they are *70%*. London's rate alone predicts dozens of children dying per year; nationwide <90% predicts hundreds of deaths per year. We can't base decisions on historic data here.

Britain is vastly more generous to people on benefits and punitive to people on high incomes than it appears and most people believe.

This may sound alarming, but I think the Chancellor Ed Miliband will be a restraining force.

@conorduffy_7 Me too, it's insane. Every single example just seems really tragic and depressing

Another interesting post from Aria, who seems to be "keeping it real" on a topic polluted with bad advice.

@Joe___Allen Oh nice, hadn’t seen that. Good colours there.

@s8mb Also the cover of Clive James's Cultural Amnesia

Ad for AEG metallic filament lightbulb, Peter Behrens, 1907.

Announcing our first book: Silicon A beautiful coffee table book about the world of transistors, chips, and the greatest technology revolution of all time. 384 pages. Almost five pounds. Preorders open now, shipping in May: arenamag.com/silicon

@arenamagdotcom This looks incredible!

@IGMansfield I think measles is that bad. I may be biased, because I have a young baby and I'm quite unsettled by the reports of an outbreak in London, but it is an astonishingly bad disease and unbelievably infectious and hard to avoid. It is a disease that requires collective action.

@s8mb I'm not a complete absolutist. If smallpox took hold again, I might be up for a limited exception. Or a version of COVID that was ten times deadlier. But it's not a principle I'm willing to breach for 1-2 centi-road-deaths per year.