Bridges are a perfect example of engineering.

The purpose of Engineering is Deskilling.

If you can build a bridge you can eliminate the skilled workers required to operate the ferries to get people across the river.

1/n

@JugglingJelly By eliminating the skilled ferries it means that the cost of crossing rivers is lowered, making it accessible to more people.

2/n
@JugglingJelly More accessibility is good for the economy because it means that more people can do business by crossing that bridge.

3/n
@JugglingJelly The single market was a economic engineering. It removed requirements by aligning and agreeing standards. It deskilled the customs industry by removing the requirement for expensive customs "ferrymen".

4/n
@JugglingJelly Brexit has had the effect that it has burned the economic bridge that we had with the single market meaning we're having to rapidly increase the skills of the customs agents in an unrealistic timeframe.

5/n
@JugglingJelly Imagine having to train a whole bunch of ferrymen how to navigate a boat (which they'd never sailed before) across a river ... you'd end up with an irregular, poorly managed service with sinkings and crashes at ports.

6/n
@JugglingJelly Sound familiar? That's essentially where we are with haulage now.

7/n
@JugglingJelly The thing about bridges is that they're expensive to build, they cost money to maintain and they _have_ to be maintained otherwise you end up with them collapsing with disastrous consequences.

(I'm sure I can torture this analogy even further?)

8/n
@JugglingJelly Successive UK governments have failed to maintain the bridge that the Single Market provided.

Some of them have actively sabotaged the bridge with dangerous rhetoric about how we don't need bridges across rivers and that the currents will be easy to navigate.

9/n
@JugglingJelly I don't see our government acknowledging (for at least a political generation) the negative impact that this has had on our society and committing to the cost that it'll take to rebuild that bridge once again.

10/10

More from Tech

A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.
There has been a lot of discussion about negative emissions technologies (NETs) lately. While we need to be skeptical of assumed planetary-scale engineering and wary of moral hazard, we also need much greater RD&D funding to keep our options open. A quick thread: 1/10

Energy system models love NETs, particularly for very rapid mitigation scenarios like 1.5C (where the alternative is zero global emissions by 2040)! More problematically, they also like tons of NETs in 2C scenarios where NETs are less essential.
https://t.co/M3ACyD4cv7 2/10


In model world the math is simple: very rapid mitigation is expensive today, particularly once you get outside the power sector, and technological advancement may make later NETs cheaper than near-term mitigation after a point. 3/10

This is, of course, problematic if the aim is to ensure that particular targets (such as well-below 2C) are met; betting that a "backstop" technology that does not exist today at any meaningful scale will save the day is a hell of a moral hazard. 4/10

Many models go completely overboard with CCS, seeing a future resurgence of coal and a large part of global primary energy occurring with carbon capture. For example, here is what the MESSAGE SSP2-1.9 scenario shows: 5/10

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