I don't think most people appreciate how automated commercial vessels already are. The ship navigates autonomously from port to port. If you have a twenty man crew on a commercial vessel, they are split across two 12 hours shifts, you may only have one officer on the bridge during on watch, a few engineers below supervising the engines and performing preventative maintenance while underway, and able seamen will be doing the rounds checking nothing amiss such as loads moving etc. The crew are largely there to respond in the event of a crisis as commercial vessels are such an expensive asset.
I think it's better to think of the crew doing underway asset management than "sailing" the vessel.
If the automation is there, is there a reason why more container ships at least partially utilize wind for locomotion? Is it just that retrofitting a giant sail isn't feasible onto existing ships?
Flettner Rotor sails appear to be becoming a thing, they partner well with electric ships, similar to how some electric planes use multiple propellers and EV automobiles can do independent 4 wheel drive.
The author compares the day of the Texas Energy Crisis to the same day of the previous year, but I'm taking his word that this is a fair representation of an average mid-February day for the Texas power grid.
There were issues with some natural gas generators having supply issues due to the cold weather, but natural gas provided 91% more electricity (measured in MWh) compared to an average winters day, and was down only 7% from what it provides during the peak summer demand. Wind was down 72% compared to an average winters day.
Renewables do have some downsides despite all their benefits, and maybe there should be an honest discussion about how public policy should address this. Subsidies for intermittent energy supplies should probably be partly contingent on also providing grid storage.
There are wind farms currently running in Alaska[1] which is arguably colder than Texas. The cold-related downsides seem to be well known and already addressed, so it's definitely not a technical issue here.
The natural gas plants are built to pick up the slack. The energy operators know that during the winter there will be several cold, windless weeks, so they don't count on wind power providing very much to the grid. When wind and solar are good, the gas plants can be shut down since the power from natural gas is more expensive than the renewables.
If China can cause a denial of service attack on a country by remotely bricking all the network infrastructure or even slowing it down to a degree, this would still be economically devastating at the least.
I think there's a difference worth noting between subtle monitoring & coersion vs. a full out act of war. By the time China is trying to denial of service the UK's 5G infrastructure we've got other things to worry about.
But they don't need to dos the whole country, just interfere up to the point of plausible deniability. They could do targeted outages for some UK firm at a stratetic moment or something.
Also in the case of an actual war, it's surely better to not have your entire nations communications under enemy control.
Probably not to be honest, she deserves the merit she is getting for the work she did. However, the Apollo program in the 60s at it's peak was 4% of the US government budget compared to 0.5% today. The federal government was had a fire hose full of greenbacks aimed at NASA so I'd assume they were hiring huge numbers of engineers directly, and also indirectly through all the aerospace/defense manufacturers who were working on the space program while also simultaneously getting huge contracts for designing ballistic missiles.
NASA has a much smaller budget today so I wouldn't be surprised if you've got to display much more merit in college or your career to get selected as an engineer.
I think it's better to think of the crew doing underway asset management than "sailing" the vessel.