Texas famously had massive spikes in electricty prices and a near failure of the grid because of their electricity market structure, so it's not all sunshine and rainbows.
Other countries are not likely spending much less on the transition, it's just that they're paying for it more in tax and less in the electricity bill. The UK's strategy here basically means there's now a huge amount of investment in renewables even without government subsidies. And the nature of renewables and relying on gas in the meantime (which has pretty much always been setting the price of electricity, it's just gotten even more expensive recently) means that there's a relatively more painful period of investment before you get to the cost benefits of a nearly entirely renewable grid.
A lot of the value to homeowners is essentially arbitrage on the retail cost of electricity: when prices are high you're going to be paying a lot more to pull electricity from the grid than you would be paid to supply it, so you're better off using up the buffer yourself as opposed to paying for electricity from the grid.
The transition will probably be quite nonlinear: getting from zero to a few days a year of 100% renewables is about as much effort as going from a few days a year to most of the year.
You need something that's valuable, energy intensive, easy to stop and start, and cheap to build capacity for. Either or both of those last two tend to be the problem for most industrial processes (and also crypto mining).
I'm not sure who particularly cares about the stuff Signal is doing with SGX anyway. It always struck me as a 'because we can' move and if you're paranoid enough to worry about it then you're probably paranoid enough to not trust any manufacturer-based attestation anyway (All SGX does is make Intel the root of trust, and it's not like Signal would be less secure than any other third party if SGX were broken).
> I'm not sure who particularly cares about the stuff Signal is doing with SGX anyway.
Security researchers like Matthew Green seem to care[0], the Signal people surely do, I myself do, too. Isn't that enough to raise that question?
> if you're paranoid enough to worry about it
You make it seem like that's an outlandish thought, when in reality there have been tons of reported vulnerabilities for SGX. And now QC represents another risk.
> it's not like Signal would be less secure than any other third party if SGX were broken
That's a weird benchmark. Shouldn't Signal rather be measured by whether it lives up to the security promises it makes? Signal's whole value proposition is that it's more secure than "third parties".
I mean, if you're worried about Signal being a bad actor you also should probably be worried about Intel being a bad actor, and they hold the keys to SGX (especially because the biggest threat, if you're worried about this at all, is going to be governments compelling the involved companies to hand over data or attempt to intercept messages). And Signal is also a third party to your communications, that's how it works. But nothing about SGX makes me think Signal is more trustworthy, it doesn't meaningfully remove actions that they could take to compromise my communications.
Agreed, I never put much trust in Intel SGX, either. I was bringing up the whole topic rather because I'm secretly hoping it will force Signal to revisit the whole Signal PIN debacle and they will ultimately find a better solution.
The Manhattan project had a huge impact but it was not that big as far as efforts in the war went (they managed to hide the budget allocated to the project from most of congress, for example).
It was like 0.5% GDP. It wasn’t insane, but still, you are right.
It was very focused. What do we get out of the F-35 program? By comparison, it has eaten (projected total lifetime cost) 2 trillion dollars. It is 4.5% of the GDP. I had no idea. This is just a military and government contractor subsidy. What are we doing…
Violent crimes in general in the UK (at least) are more localised to who you are. Random acts of violence on bystanders are very rare, the vast majority are attacks by someone known to the victim, often gang related.
You don't generally stop such crimes by punishing them more harshly, you stop them by punishing them more consistently, which is a more expensive solution.
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