My definition of woke, if you ever need it:
When a person who enjoys an entitlement advocates for other to be allowed to do the same for no personal gain.
If anyone ever criticises 'woke' - especially in a group - I always, always press them for their definition. Not examples; definitions.
Everyone know hotdogs should come in jars.
+1 for SFF/USFF computers. £100 will get you a compact and reliable refurbished machine that is easy to upgrade too, and if you use software like Proxmox and outgrow the box it's easy to slide over to something bigger.
Haven't you done well?
That really does seem to be a US thing. From a distance your country does seem to have a very weird corn fetish.
Economies of scale. Generating power - whether it's fossil fuels, wind turbines, hydro, whatever - is more efficient at scale. To put it another way, a single 1MW generator will use far less diesel than a thousand 1KW generators. Also, electric cars are insanely efficient compared to combustion engine cars, so even if all your electricity is generated in diesel power stations it's more efficient than burning it inside the car. Additionally, large centralised power stations are better maintained, not constrained by weight and can have offsetting/capture systems attached that are impossible in a car that must, above all else, be small and light enough to move.
Renewables and nuclear are still the way and a carbon-heavy grid makes it take longer for EVs to break even but even then EVs are a no-brainer.
Dialects are weird, right? But, personally, if I'm referring to the fictional Belgian adventurer I say tin; if it's the French burlesque dance routine it's can.
This is... kind-of right, but not entirely.
If the phone was registered with Apple Business Manager or Google Enterprise Management and pushed into an MDM with well-written enrollment policies this is 100% true and is how any self-respecting organisation managed their devices. But you can't enroll devices retroactively, and this is a totally unmanaged personal device that was being used for high-stakes government business without being declared - the sort of thing that you or I would get fired and maybe prosecuted for, but this mop-haired fucking cunt will just shrug off.
"Well, duh", but I mean it in a constructive, approving way.
I always saw HS2 as less about speed and more a about freeing up capacity on existing railways for regional, local and freight services. I see why they tout the high-speed part of it since it's a headline-grabber, but it's the first long-distance line that's we've had in, what, 100 years?
With regards to the East-West link: 100% agree. HS between Liverpool - Manchester - Bradford - Leeds with upgraded links to Hull, Sheffield, York and Newcastle, if you please. Chop-chop.
One other thing I like about buses you mentioned is that they can provide a very local service but they can also run grade-seperated like a metro service; there's a bus from Manchester to Leigh that runs semi-autonomously along a guideway for much of it's length but the buses can peel off the guideway when they want to wind through towns and villages.
This is why it's always essential to press people for their definition and never let them fall back on examples.
"Okay, but if you saw behaviour you'd never seen before, how would you know it was woke if you weren't told? How do you define it? You are making your own decisions here, right?"