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.
Driving too fast for the conditions (but within the limit) would usually be considered Driving without Due Care and Attention even if you don't crash (although the likelihood of anyone being around to enforce it on a deserted country road is pretty low).
The slide feeder is good but it's worth being aware that if you have slides mounted on cardboard (I had a lot of old family photos like this I used it for) it will often grab a couple at once. You can fix that by clipping eg a driver's licence in the right place to narrow the gap it pulls the slides through, but it will still need some manual supervision.
If you get one, have a look at VueScan on the software side - the original software needs (I think) a Windows XP virtual machine to drive it.
All businesses used to get votes in local elections in England and Wales (by virtue of being ratepayers) and boroughs/cities had separate Aldermen and (Common) Councilmen. The City of London (ie the square mile, not the metropolis) retained the old system when it was abolished elsewhere (in favour of only residents voting and a single type of councillor) because the number of residents in the City then was absolutely tiny by comparison to the number of people who use the City daily (after much of the residential population left, partly due to war damage during WW2).
What changed more recently was the allocation of which individual people get to exercise those votes - "business votes" became "workers votes".
The election of the Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs is separate though. This is still done at Common Hall (and the franchise is still Liverymen), but that election is very very rarely contested.
Not sure but I think I read a while ago that they were removed due to unreliability (it's a while since I've been there myself).
It was very clever how they did the acceleration/deceleration - the "tiles" of the walkway fit together in such a way that each could slide on top of the next one, and at the two ends the tiles would gradually slide closer together (decelerating) or further apart (accelerating).
At least some of the problem is the level of costs which are spent on admin activities instead of teaching (research is supposed to be separately funded although in reality it's messy). That's where I'd start.
More than this, employers are already required to verify right to work when they employ someone, either by physically seeing a passport or by means of an existing government system which allows them to verify visa status with an online "share code". They can be fined if they don't.
There's zero reason to believe employers which currently ignore this requirement (and likely minimum wage etc as well) will suddenly start complying because there's a "digital ID" instead.
The physical card is sufficient to prove you have permission to drive. This code is for them to check how many points you have on your licence and what for. There used to be a paper counterpart to the card which showed this which they withdrew a few years ago.
In reality I've never been asked for the code when renting cars (outside the UK), the physical card seems to generally be sufficient for the hire companies.
I think you've missed a big part of maths - yes knowing those things is necessary. But then you also need to be able to see how a difficult or complex problem could be restated or broken down in a different way which lets you use those techniques. Sometimes this is something as trivial as using the right notation or coordinates, sometimes it's much more involved.
Solar has this problem to a much greater extent though. If you have a market where solar is >100% of demand during the day then it will be dispatching at or below $0/MWh for almost all of its life.
But of course the marginal market is not the whole story. In reality solar largely receives effectively fixed prices in most markets (via CfDs or PPAs). Nuclear does the same and can also take capacity payments and sell into flexibility markets where those exist.
The article doesn't really explain what the lawsuit was over. It's about rules for private sector investment fund reporting. What the court ruled on is whether nuclear (and gas) can be classified as "sustainable investments" under the "EU taxonomy" rules[0].
This may mean that more private investment capital will end up in nuclear power, although my guess is that the impact of the EU taxonomy in driving investment decisions on this type of thing is likely quite small (I suspect the few funds which are out there which have hard requirements around EU taxonomy likely wouldn't invest in nuclear anyway).
Run-of-the-river hydro in all but a handful of sites tends to be quite dependent on rainfall levels. This means production levels can vary quite meaningfully both seasonally and more importantly year-to-year.
It's definitely reliable in the sense that hydro stations can basically last forever if properly maintained (there are plenty of hydro stations operating today which are more than 100 years old) but it's not quite a silver bullet.
Nuclear can be turned up and down relatively easily. It's on/off that takes a long time. And you can supplement nuclear with pumped storage hydro to steepen its turn up/down curve in extremis.
This doesn't measure the cost of providing dispatchable electricity though. If I want 1MWh of electricity at night provided by solar, it's going to cost more than solar's LCoE because I will also need to pay for a way to store and dispatch it.
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.