The celebrity comes with the award (Australian of the Year). He could have refused the nomination if he had wanted to.

> If we ever manage to cure cancer ... then people will die of something else.

Well yes, people will still die, but in the process average life expectancy goes up. I think Aubrey de Grey once said that if you cured cancer and aging then the average life span would be seven hundred years or so, based on death rates due to accidents and murder, etc.

There's an old saying in biology: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" [1], which is how the developing embryo of an animal (the ontogeny), goes through stages resembling the evolution of the animal (phylogeny).

I sometimes think that would also be a great way to educate kids when it comes to technology. Start them with simple old tech (sticks, stones, string, camp fires) and gradually add new tech over time, so that by the time they are adults they have a basic knowledge and familiarity with a wide range of technology, not just the current stuff they are surrounded by.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory

They should know tech well by soph/junior year of high school or you do a disservice to them

> cassettes for music

Yes. Lots of mentions here about CDs, but cassettes are a better tech for small children. Mine loved playing tapes, and could use a cassette player well before they could read. The bigger physical buttons help too.

Also, most cassette players are also recorders — get them some blank tapes and show them how to record — they'll love it.

> Kids don't really use phones anyway

My kids used the home phone for many years before they got their own cell phones. They would call their friends and grandparents. (The grandparents loved it)

That's great but nobody has a 'home phone' anymore.

Re VoIP phones: don't most home routers come with a phone port that you can just plug a regular old phone handset into? My ISP provides a home phone number with the router and it just works as it aways has. I guess technically it's VoIP now but originally i think they shared the audio line with a splitter?

I was a kid once, we had no floppy drives. 'Borrowing' your Dad's Playboy or Penthouse mags was the thing.

> The www is an ad network. Not a great place for non-commercial activity

No, hard disagree. The web is great for indie content. Anyone can publish anything, at any time. And there's still plenty of great content out there.

Ads can be blocked, surveillance can be blocked, and social media sites can be avoided.

"No, hard disagree."

OK it's not an ad network

"Ads can be blocked, surveillance can be blocked and social media can be avoided"

Yes, hard agree

But if it's not an ad network then why would anyone need to "block" and "avoid"

It's an ad network

That's why the "blocking" and "avoiding" is necessary

201 MW for 53,000 homes is 3.8 kW per home. That's 10 x 400 W panels. Seems low.

It would be better to put them on the houses and save the land for crops.

Doing both sounds more effective. There's a lot of arid, scrubby land in Texas west of the 100th meridian that doesn't make for good farming without intensive water infrastructure. (I live just the other side of it in hill country farmland.)

The major issue is that there aren't a lot of good owned outright with grid outage battery supplied solar installers. The TX market is flooded by lease, lease-to-own, and rental solar scammers.

The largest solar installation online in Texas is 650 MW. There 9 installations currently under development that range in generation capacity from 800 MW to 1.2 GW.

The power needs of a house of course vary with many parameters. Our 100 square meter house in Nordic climate draws 1.2 kW on average over a year including charging the car. What are common numbers elsewhere?