The author Terry Pratchett had some of best error messages in his Discworld novels. The Hex computer could produce the following

++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.

+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++

+++Whoops! Here comes the cheese! +++

And that’s before we look at whether the participants form a quorate group (sufficient people are present to make a valid choice).

Then we could consider whether all participants have the same voting power. My son has a strong vote on what to paint his room but much less on where to go on holiday.

Need to consider whether the votes could be hidden and revealed at the end to avoid intimidation.

For me, not so much a decrease in quality but more of an evolution as the landscape of sentient beings expands. The paired covids in the last book, were a great addition.

Don’t normally buy a hard cover or kindle (I like the paperback) but I may do that for book 4 “Children of Strife”

If the wells have been throttled back or stopped. There can be issues when production is reduced (or even worse stopped), restarting & resuming the previous production rates can be very difficult and time consuming. There’s a lot of complex multi-phase physics that can prevent the restart. Sometimes wells, just don’t restart.

I hope that you are right and we are just filling the storage tanks and waiting for the straits to re-open, so the hit to the market is minimised.

Iran do seem to be losing but that doesn’t mean the US is winning. The US needs to get the oil/gas moving through the straits and on the market, otherwise there will be big hit at the gas pumps and other economic factors.

Producers have already been announcing force majure to legally stop production.

Qatar gas being the big one for LNG. It'll takes them two weeks to restart four to get to full production. So a tight LNG market has 20% of the world production out for three weeks.

We did the poem in secondary school as well. While we didn’t have the acting skills of your teacher, we deconstructed and reviewed each line and it really had a powerful impact on the class. The tortured helplessness of the dying soldier was a lasting memory.

Later, I thought that the job of a soldier wasn’t to die for their country but to make someone else die for theirs. Perhaps that more cynical view was influenced by the poem and the other war poets that we covered.

Just reacting to the headline (not a telegraph reader). While initially the idea of energy security and base load power is attractive, having worked (as a contractor, long ago) on a nuclear power station simulator for a uk energy company, I came away with the idea that keeping the station running effectively (with maintenance and upgrades) was very difficult and expensive.

it also feels like a big security target when the uk is worried about both traditional enemies, the dependencies on other countries and companies. (See the worry about Chinese tech in our telecoms infrastructure.

Perhaps investing in multiple distributed facilities capable of grid level storage (of renewable energy, wind, solar) would be a much better investment for the country.

Maybe I am being unfair in comparison of old systems with the huge drop in costs of wind and solar. And while developments are happening in large scale storage are happening, it’s not quite a settled solution yet.

If you can get a cheap electric overnight home charging tariff in the UK, then the electric cost is lower. Mid week, I charged 43kWh for the cost of £3.04 (7p per kWh). My home charger does 7kwh in a hour. Usual mileage is about 4 miles per kWh (typical rush hour drive into Edinburgh). That should give me about 170 miles of range.

Scaling it to 400 miles (400 miles at 4 miles per kWh is 100 kWh which at 7p each is about £7. Pretty much an order of magnitude better than your estimate. I admit home charging is the best arrangement and I am fortunate to have it. I did a holiday trip to the highlands and used public/hotel chargers which were closer to your numbers but also much faster (up to 150kWh per hour capacity).

I think that even discounting hydrogen engineering difficulties, the infrastructure for electric is pretty much in place and the race of the technologies is over.

The problem is that using an EV makes living in the Highlands far more expensive even allowing for the cost of diesel, because you're forced to use rapid chargers at great expense - if they're available, and actually working - or a quick trip to the shops becomes an overnight stay.

While an interesting history, the actual truth is that the haggis is a small mammal which lives in the highlands. While they can be hunted (from St Andrews Day to Burns night), most commercially available haggis is farmed.

There is no truth to the rumour that they have 2 legs longer on the left side to easily run around the steep hills. Or that the males and females have different long legs so that they run around the hills in different directions and therefore meet.

People do tend to forget about the homing sea haggis subspecies - with each group returning to the area of the same whisky distillery where they were born.

Thanks for reminding me, I last saw some of those when visiting Harris in the Outer Hebrides. “The Hearach” malt is pretty good.

I thought it was kinda meh tbh, but I have hopes for their peated expression..

I wonder if the executives have realised this

Their legal teams will most certainly have been involved.