Worth being aware that one of the potential problems with flooding (at least in the UK) is that it often leads to waste pipes or sewers becoming blocked and/or sewage mixing with flood water. This can still make replacing the building the most economic recovery option even if it's structurally fine.
Both the US and the Soviet Union actually experimented with "nuclear fracking" in oil/gas fields. The Soviet Union also used atomic bombs to put out fires in gas fields as late as 1981.
The idea was you could use nuclear bombs to dig canals. Or make harbors. Or really any large scale earth moving project. The U.S. did one test shot, a shallow buried bomb intended as a cratering charge. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.176944,-116.046111,4654m This ended up contaminating more people than any other test which put the breaks on that. The soviets had an equivalent study but tried a little harder and are now the proud owners of several new irradiated lakes.
I'm seeing 11 shots total,[0] though Wikipedia lists even more.
"Nine were for the purpose of developing an ultra-low fission thermonuclear explosive for use in nuclear excavation projects and one each was for the development of special emplacement techniques and for a small diameter, ultra-low tritium producing explosive for hydrocarbon applications such as Rio Blanco."
That whole effort was predicated on success of efforts to develop fission-free bombs. That never worked out, although the inertial confinement fusion program is in a way its descendant. The scale of ICF reactors shows why it didn't work out. A slight shame, since this might have made Project Pacer (exploding bombs in caverns to make energy) more feasible. There still would have been enormous tritium production/pollution.
They what?! Can we please get a link to this to read more?!
And yes, I have the same Google as you, but I'd love a link to your preferred telling of the tale of how the Soviets nuked a gas well fire just a couple years before I was born.
I recall we were seriously talking about using one during the early days of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. For a variety of reasons it wouldn’t have worked in that instance.
Wikipedia has an article about it[0]. Gas had been leaking for three years before they were able to use a nuke to seal the well. Estimated that it was burning 12 million m3 of gas daily.
> the explosive was detonated at a depth of 1,500 m (1,640 yd) on 30 September 1966. The hole that the explosive was lowered into had also been sealed with cement so as to prevent atmospheric radioactive contamination.
Yes, I do something similar (with Amazon SES in my case) but only for domains I know are problematic (Microsoft-hosted domains are the main difficulty - I've never had issues with eg Gmail).
As someone with a personal email on a Microsoft domain, I support this message. Microsoft is the worst. I regularly find that mail I should have received just never arrives.
If they would at least dump it in the junk mail folder, I could fix it, but no, some earlier step in the process makes it silently disappear.
That's (mostly) true for "primary legislation" (Acts of Parliament) but "secondary legislation" (regulations, orders, rules and so on) can be challenged and potentially overturned/similar in the courts. This partly reflects the fact that secondary legislation usually receives significantly less parliamentary scrutiny (and in some cases none at all). The legal challenge which Wikimedia brought here was to secondary legislation - regulations made under the OSA by Ofcom - not to the OSA itself.
Maybe it's a cultural difference but I remember before smartphones on the tube in London as well and noone talked to each other during the morning/evening commute.
I think the biggest difference is actually the lack of newspapers now. Plenty of people were plugged into headphones via iPod/Walkman/whatever was era appropriate. The people who stare at their phones today were staring at newspapers in the pre smartphone era.
The idea is that some of the current hereditary peers will be given new life peerages under existing rules which would enable them to stay in the chamber. Granting new life peerages is mostly within the gift of the Prime Minister (although there are committees which vet appointments and conventions about allowing opposition parties to nominate some), so this is not part of the legislation but a back-room deal by which the votes were secured by the government.
"Important" is quite a high bar in this case though if the House of Lords is insistent enough to actually vote something down. The cost in terms of parliamentary time for the government these days of using the Parliament Acts is very high (especially for things which government would normally do via secondary legislation), and it also requires at least a one year delay; by extension the potential political cost to the government of using the Parliament Acts to pass something unpopular or controversial is set at a high enough bar that it's an effective veto.
This feels like quite a sensible safety valve to me.
The thing is, the reason for the delays and inefficiencies is not really juries. It's mostly much more mundane things like the prison service not sending defendants to court at the right time, translators not turning up when they are supposed to, buildings which are falling apart, technology not working properly, and court time being double-booked. It's an administrative failure, not a problem with the system.
Alongside removing the right to trial by jury, perhaps more alarmingly the government are also planning to remove appeal rights from "minor" cases (from magistrates to the Crown Court). The current statistics are that more than 40% of those appeals are upheld.
The planned changes won't fix any of these things, but it will cause fundamental damage to trust in the system and result in many miscarriages of justice.
This is exactly how it works in the UK for purchases worth £135 or less which are shipped directly from outside the UK. The retailer has to charge UK VAT as if it were a domestic sale at the point of sale, and there is then nothing to pay at customs so no hold-up for that. It's only consignments worth over £135 where it ends up being stopped for payment at import.
On top of that, Amazon and other large online retailers also have a huge distribution and warehouse network domestically in the UK already so for higher value items mostly they import themselves to their warehouses before sale and then sales are purely domestic.
The partial closure of parts of the criminal justice system during COVID led to a backlog which in turn appears to have pushed the system to a point it has been unable to properly recover from - there are some very interesting statistics here [0].
As to why that is - the explanations I've seen generally feature incompetence amongst various parts of the system and a degree of underfunding (or perhaps poorly managed funding) - including the fact that there is a shortage of criminal barristers due to poor pay. Juries themselves don't seem to be cited as a huge problem.
