"Solution: Don't allow non-conforming companies to connect to the American telecom network."
You have no idea how telco call billing and routing works. That's essentially impossible because it requires a degree of cooperation that simply doesn't exist. XYZ non-conformant company might pass through 2 or 3 intermediaries (the PSTN version of tier1s) before entering "the" North American network (actually a bunch of different networks all with their own rules and routing)
The entire global telephony routing/billing system works on the assumption that anyone with connectivity at routing or interconnect level is inherently trustworthy. Despite most telcos having large fraud departments, those are entirely focussed on _customers_ committing fraud, not on fraud originating elsewhere within the public switched telephone network. It's effectively eggshell thins security and an uncooked egg inside that.
Making large changes to this is a slow laborious process. The issues with rogue telcos have been known about for 30 years (routing fraud was used extensively in the 1980s and early 1990s to do bogus international billing for porn lines) but neither the telcos, or the ITU have been willing to step up and deal with the problem.
The irony is that the PSTN routing system looks a lot like the Internet's BGP4 system and when fraudulent activity started to be detected in the BGP system, security protocols were drafted and implemented very quickly.
There are things individual telcos can do to filter fraudulent calls, but as common carriers they're treading very fine liability lines if they're filtering for _any_ reason other than "we're being defrauded and not getting termination income". The slightest hint of jeopardising their common-carrier status will have most carriers backing off rapidly.
FWIW in a similar vein, the USPS started refusing snail mail from Nigeria, not because of the torrent of scam letters or because 2/3 of the stamps on the incoming mail were counterfeit, but because the Nigerian postal service was only paying them to deliver the ones with genuine stamps (the counterfeit ones were being added to the mail stream after official counts had been done). If they'd been paying per-piece-landed in the USA then the USPS would have continued delivery as they'd been paid to do so.
Unless the entire premise of the call is a scam then there's a local(ish) bricks'n'mortar outfit being promoted.
The TCPA makes the caller _and the hirer_ jointly and severally responsible for breaches and the penalties are statutory per-call ones to avoid them trying to weasel out of it.
One of the reasons for that is to avoid businesses simply flitting between fly-by-night spam outfits and claiming ignorance of the problem.
Calls with scam-as-a-premise are invariably bilking the telcos by providing forged billing and routing data (that's a couple of levels lower than CLID), meaning that the telcos don't get their cut of termination revenue and in turn they're starting to sit up and pay attention to their origin.
"what the market will bear" is a very important consideration, as is targeting consumers with money to burn on premium products where reliability is secondary to image.
Case in point: Remington electric razors. The company was profitable when Victor Kamman bought it. He immediately doubled the price and marketed them as a premium product. Sales skyrocketed and it became even more profitable.
The point about Tesla (and upmarket German cars) is not that it's a Halo product, but that it's a premium and desireable halo product. Production difficulties, reliability issues(*) and low availability play into that market and perversely make them more desirable.
(*) Tesla have a great warranty policy but they need to. The list of things replaced "free" under warranty on most of the cars is quite extensive and would bankrupt a lesser owner if they had to pay for the parts. Most makers with long warranties have them because there are few claims. Even with the Tesla warranty I'd regard the actual reliability as low due to the amount of workshop time they've tended to require and the sheer expense of the components being replaced. Drivetrains in particular are something that seldom require replacement for the life of a normal vehicle (8-15 years), yet it seems to be a dice throw about needing replacement on a Tesla in the first 2 years (my 15yo vehicle is on original engine clutch and gearbox, as are most of this age and very few have ever had the head or sump off either).
You could argue that Tesla can't afford to come downmarket until they solve their reliability issues.
"I think we're hitting the point now where phones are good enough for a lot longer than two years"
They are. For the last 15 years I've bene updating my phones at around the 5-6 year mark and the only reason I updated a Note4 to S9+ "early" was because it'd been flakey(mmc issues) and eventually the display failed (black screen of death), so I couldn't rely on it even if it was resurrected.
"instead, the EU allows Samsung to have its cake and eat it, too."
No it doesn't. The case was most definitely _not_ a win for Samsung despite how they painted it.
The judge effectively refused the case on the basis that you can't sue for "what might happen", only "what has happened". If the Plaintiffs reword their application they may find it accepted.
The issue of Samsung refusing warranty on rooted phones has also been getting coverage in the EU. The concensus is that unless the phone is physically damaged, it's illegal to do so, however they are within their rights to insist the phone be reverted to factory image before they handle software problems.
Anything solar powered is going to have trouble outside the tropics and near-tropics. That 1kW per square metre that people love to quote is only valid when the sun is directly overhead at midday and outside of that atmospheric attentuation means that it drops off with the cosine of the sun's angle to the ground (effectively this means that you only get viable power in the 2-3 hours each side of local solar noon)
Unless it has a stupidly large solar panel, a robot trundling down fields is going to spend a large chunk of its time simply sitting and recharging after each weed blast and generally proceed at a pace on par with the mars rovers.
The very best humans can beat ABS under the very best conditions if they're prepared for it.
As soon as the road gets slippery or the braking effectiveness differs from one side of the car to another (eg: one wheel on paint) ABS _will_ stop you faster. In the latter case a human will virtually always spin the vehicle.
Not all of them, but a lot of them. Militant unions (like say, teamsters and dockworkers) which wield power disproportionate to their size and end up with leadership with political ambitions are the ones which end up in the headlines for the wrong reasons.
Most engineering unions, for starters, along with most technical ones, seldom if ever end up taking industrial action.
Teaching and Nursing unions are another group who take a lot of provokation. When they do start taking action you can be assured they have some very real axes to grind.
" there is no panic nor suffocation, but you just fall asleep, to never wake up again."
You're not a paramedic, or you'd never say that. About 10% of CO cases attended show signs of exactly that (panic and violent reactions), along with violent projectile vomiting and diahorrea.
H2S is a more reliable poison if you want to do things that way.
Air embolisms in the blood stream are also not painless, nor is it particularly effective. Air microbubbles are actually injected in some medical diagnostic procedures.
The USA's fixation with "revenge" and "retribution" is really out on show with the methods and displays of its executions or of its other methods of punishments which have almost zero intent to rehabilitate or reconcile or reintegrate damaged individuals into society. Justice is not served by these and it is little wonder it has the highest crime and incarceration rates in the developed world along with the highest recidivism rates.
Holding personal information about someone, then not being a registered data handler, denying the subject access to information about themselves, denying it exists or refusing to delete if there is no good legal reason to hold it can be a criminal matter under EU law.
If the individual EU countries affected enact long-arm statutes for their individual versions of those laws then being in the USA or anywhere else in the world may mean that claiming "no jurisdiction" doesn't come into play.
As examples of Long Arm statutes, the UK kid who hacked into the Pentagon from the UK never set foot in the USA, but was arrested and extradited and the UK's Computer Misuse act has similar Long Arm clauses for hacking of UK-owned resources (which don't even need to be physically present in the UK)
Some countries take personal data handling seriously enough that they may be willing to put these kinds of clauses into their books in response to this kind of "service" being offered, which also puts the operators in the firing line for "conspiracy" and "facilitation" charges.
"UK health and safety regulations aren't what you think they are."
'elfin safety' is _the_ most frequently used reason for refusing to do a job someone doesn't want to do. 'data protection' is the second most frequently used reason.
It's fun to ask them to cite the relevant regulation, then pull it up on the government website and ask them to find where it says that. Yes I have them bookmarked.
Telling people that they're making it up as they go along has some interesting reactions. Telling them that they can't stop me filming those reactions and that they're going to face an assault charge if they try is even more amusing. I've even offered to call the police for them when they claim being filmed without consent in a public place is a criminal act.
"You don't understand how "health and safety" has taken over the workplace (and many other situations) in the UK."
I do and I work in academia AND I trip over carpenters all the time.
They don't give a shit about books. If they're in the way, they move them - none-too gently either. The carpenter was looking for an excuse not to do the work.
Having the shelves in a dangerous state and books piled all over the flloor is a health and safety issue. The fastest way to get situations like these resolved is to call in the local authority safety inpsector and watch how fast those shelves get fixed.
(We're going through a similar problem with lighting - the university won't fix the external lighting due to costs. People are tripping up in the dark. The Local authority won't just pick up on the lights, but also the dozen other things that can land the organisation with six-figure fines, so calling them in tends to have galvanising effects on the people in the maintenance department who are taking the piss. By refusing to authoirise necessary repairs they can be found personally criminally liable if someone's injured)
"while the old timer's work ethic could be rewarded by getting paid more"
Without the union the old timer wouldn't be paid more, would be working flat out overloaded all day/every day and would be sacked just short of retirement, so that his pension is void.
The problem isn't the union. The problem is the asshole.
It may surprise you but a _responsible_ union spends most of its time telling workers who slack off or get sacked for slacking off not to take the piss and that they have no case against their employer. They save the big stick for when it's actually needed - when the employer's actually behaving in an illegal an dunfair manner.
Without unions to combat exploitation and provide the ability to collectively negotiate wages, you can be assured that sweatshops, on the job injuries/deaths and starvation wages would still be "A Thing". If the neolibs who business seems to worship at the feet of have their way, that scenario wlll happen again.
petty vendetta "Demarcation disputes" are an indication of a toxic corporate culture and if unions are engaging in them, then it's an indication that they have become toxic. There many are unions that nobody has ever heard of because they've spent decades solving industrial problems amicably and never needed to call a strike - their members prefer it that way and would leave in droves if things became confrontational without a very good reason.
"Fast forward a number of years and I see that Ford are essentially throwing in the towel in the passenger-car market."
In the USA, domestic automakers can afford to do this because of the Chicken Tax.
The reason America loves its trucks, vans and SUVs is because it's been told to love them and that's because the USA is a captive market for such vehicles - anything imported in these categories has a 23% import duty applied (vs 2% for cars).
Thanks to lack of competition (the "foreign" makes competing in these US market classes are almost entirely built in North America), the profit margins on these vehicles was so high that after the Chicken Tax took effect in 1963, Detroit stopped caring about passenger car sales as there's no money in it by comparison.
The Chicken Tax is a classic example of the laws of unintended consequences and how a trade spat over one product (cheap chicken putting german farmers out of business) leading to tot-for-tat retaliation (targetting VW microbusses) that was overbroad has had majorly damaging long term consequences.
"I know a bunch of people who buy cheap stuff or don't take care of things"
These days, sale price is not a good indicator of internal quality.
One of the interesting things about Remington razors is that the first thing that Victor Kamen ("I liked it so much I bought the company") did after purchase was to more than double the sale prices with no other changes - playing to the perception about price and quality.
You can see this in the long term reliability of certain german "premium" car brands.
"Usually they last a long time but they are also usually pretty expensive so most would prefer not to have to chunk a $700 device for a $0.50 part."
It's been like this for a long time though. Nissan has a problem with Sentras/Sunnys back in the 80s where a 5c part failure deep in the gearbox wrote the car off because the labour cost was higher than the replacement gearbox (and usually higher than the value of the car when the part failed - wouldn't have been so bad but not having reverse is kind of limiting)
"I suggest we spend the money on finding an alternative to fossil fuels before they run out. "
Effectively, they'll never run out, they'll just become more and more expensive to obtain - to the point where you need to expend almost as much energy to obtain the energy as you get.
The bigger problem at the moment is that we already developed a workable solution (Molten salt nuclear power) in the 1960s and then threw it away for political reasons.
All the handwaving about renewables ignores the simple fact that renewables can almost replace existing electrical generation capacity but cannot expand generation capacity the 8-fold over that required to account for replacing other carbon emission sources such as heating, transport and industrial processes.
Alvin Weinberg's water-moderated nuclear pile was a good starting point/proof of concept but far too dangerous to scale up to the sizes we have now. They're a giant steam bomb waiting to explode and Alvin Weinberg knew it, which is why he spent the rest of his life working on a safer alternative to the original system he developed - only to see the military hate it due to inability to extract weapons materials from the process and Nixon kill it because it didn't grease the right palms in the right locations.
Even with all their downsides, water-based nuclear systems are safer than the fossil fuel alternatives but MSRs are an opportunity to make that a few hundred(thousand? million?) times safer and remove the worst case scenarios that we've already seen play out several times - no hydrogen explosions, radioactive steam leaks, radioactive fires, meltdowns, prompt criticality steam events (or radiation events of workers), radioactive water leaks, etc - and a 90-99% reduction in input waste (that depends on the enrichment of the fuel but most uranium mined is thrown away before seeing the inside of a reactor) coupled with a 99% reduction in output waste, with what little waste is left mostly having a 10-30 year cooldown period before being valuable saleable materials such as helium and xenon. (Imagine the effects of widely available cheap bulk helium, for starters...)
They won't. The mechanisms will simply change a little.
The atlantic conveyor may slow, or descend below the surface before reaching Europe but it won't stop bringing warm water northwards even if it stops bringing warm weather. It's that water which matters as its where all the energy is. Weather is just what you see as a side effect.
Incidentally if it did stop or slow down dramatically, apart from the other effects noted one of the more obvious details would be a fairly dramatic rise in local mean sea level along the USA east coast, peaking at around 3 feet in Chesapeake Bay area. Oceanic currents "pull" water towards them kind of like a like a valley in the ocean surface.
Slashdot Mirror
"Solution: Don't allow non-conforming companies to connect to the American telecom network."
You have no idea how telco call billing and routing works. That's essentially impossible because it requires a degree of cooperation that simply doesn't exist. XYZ non-conformant company might pass through 2 or 3 intermediaries (the PSTN version of tier1s) before entering "the" North American network (actually a bunch of different networks all with their own rules and routing)
The entire global telephony routing/billing system works on the assumption that anyone with connectivity at routing or interconnect level is inherently trustworthy. Despite most telcos having large fraud departments, those are entirely focussed on _customers_ committing fraud, not on fraud originating elsewhere within the public switched telephone network. It's effectively eggshell thins security and an uncooked egg inside that.
Making large changes to this is a slow laborious process. The issues with rogue telcos have been known about for 30 years (routing fraud was used extensively in the 1980s and early 1990s to do bogus international billing for porn lines) but neither the telcos, or the ITU have been willing to step up and deal with the problem.
The irony is that the PSTN routing system looks a lot like the Internet's BGP4 system and when fraudulent activity started to be detected in the BGP system, security protocols were drafted and implemented very quickly.
There are things individual telcos can do to filter fraudulent calls, but as common carriers they're treading very fine liability lines if they're filtering for _any_ reason other than "we're being defrauded and not getting termination income". The slightest hint of jeopardising their common-carrier status will have most carriers backing off rapidly.
FWIW in a similar vein, the USPS started refusing snail mail from Nigeria, not because of the torrent of scam letters or because 2/3 of the stamps on the incoming mail were counterfeit, but because the Nigerian postal service was only paying them to deliver the ones with genuine stamps (the counterfeit ones were being added to the mail stream after official counts had been done). If they'd been paying per-piece-landed in the USA then the USPS would have continued delivery as they'd been paid to do so.
It doesn't matter _where_ the call centre is.
Unless the entire premise of the call is a scam then there's a local(ish) bricks'n'mortar outfit being promoted.
The TCPA makes the caller _and the hirer_ jointly and severally responsible for breaches and the penalties are statutory per-call ones to avoid them trying to weasel out of it.
One of the reasons for that is to avoid businesses simply flitting between fly-by-night spam outfits and claiming ignorance of the problem.
Calls with scam-as-a-premise are invariably bilking the telcos by providing forged billing and routing data (that's a couple of levels lower than CLID), meaning that the telcos don't get their cut of termination revenue and in turn they're starting to sit up and pay attention to their origin.
Hit submit too soon....
By that comment I mean that the car is simply to get you in the door. They make money on interest payments and servicing.
Normal automive margins are 10% on a complete vehicle but most carmakers are in the business of selling finance and/or car parts.
"what the market will bear" is a very important consideration, as is targeting consumers with money to burn on premium products where reliability is secondary to image.
Case in point: Remington electric razors. The company was profitable when Victor Kamman bought it. He immediately doubled the price and marketed them as a premium product. Sales skyrocketed and it became even more profitable.
The point about Tesla (and upmarket German cars) is not that it's a Halo product, but that it's a premium and desireable halo product. Production difficulties, reliability issues(*) and low availability play into that market and perversely make them more desirable.
(*) Tesla have a great warranty policy but they need to. The list of things replaced "free" under warranty on most of the cars is quite extensive and would bankrupt a lesser owner if they had to pay for the parts. Most makers with long warranties have them because there are few claims. Even with the Tesla warranty I'd regard the actual reliability as low due to the amount of workshop time they've tended to require and the sheer expense of the components being replaced. Drivetrains in particular are something that seldom require replacement for the life of a normal vehicle (8-15 years), yet it seems to be a dice throw about needing replacement on a Tesla in the first 2 years (my 15yo vehicle is on original engine clutch and gearbox, as are most of this age and very few have ever had the head or sump off either).
You could argue that Tesla can't afford to come downmarket until they solve their reliability issues.
The last good flu epidemic (1918) set us back no more than a decade.
The next will be about the same.
"I think we're hitting the point now where phones are good enough for a lot longer than two years"
They are. For the last 15 years I've bene updating my phones at around the 5-6 year mark and the only reason I updated a Note4 to S9+ "early" was because it'd been flakey(mmc issues) and eventually the display failed (black screen of death), so I couldn't rely on it even if it was resurrected.
"instead, the EU allows Samsung to have its cake and eat it, too."
No it doesn't. The case was most definitely _not_ a win for Samsung despite how they painted it.
The judge effectively refused the case on the basis that you can't sue for "what might happen", only "what has happened". If the Plaintiffs reword their application they may find it accepted.
The issue of Samsung refusing warranty on rooted phones has also been getting coverage in the EU. The concensus is that unless the phone is physically damaged, it's illegal to do so, however they are within their rights to insist the phone be reverted to factory image before they handle software problems.
"EU law stipulates a warranty for at least two years as of time of sale, that is different!"
It's very different, That warranty requirement is imposed on the SELLER, not on the manufacturer.
Did you buy your Samsung phone direct from Samsung?
Anything solar powered is going to have trouble outside the tropics and near-tropics. That 1kW per square metre that people love to quote is only valid when the sun is directly overhead at midday and outside of that atmospheric attentuation means that it drops off with the cosine of the sun's angle to the ground (effectively this means that you only get viable power in the 2-3 hours each side of local solar noon)
Unless it has a stupidly large solar panel, a robot trundling down fields is going to spend a large chunk of its time simply sitting and recharging after each weed blast and generally proceed at a pace on par with the mars rovers.
The very best humans can beat ABS under the very best conditions if they're prepared for it.
As soon as the road gets slippery or the braking effectiveness differs from one side of the car to another (eg: one wheel on paint) ABS _will_ stop you faster. In the latter case a human will virtually always spin the vehicle.
Not all of them, but a lot of them. Militant unions (like say, teamsters and dockworkers) which wield power disproportionate to their size and end up with leadership with political ambitions are the ones which end up in the headlines for the wrong reasons.
Most engineering unions, for starters, along with most technical ones, seldom if ever end up taking industrial action.
Teaching and Nursing unions are another group who take a lot of provokation. When they do start taking action you can be assured they have some very real axes to grind.
" there is no panic nor suffocation, but you just fall asleep, to never wake up again."
You're not a paramedic, or you'd never say that. About 10% of CO cases attended show signs of exactly that (panic and violent reactions), along with violent projectile vomiting and diahorrea.
H2S is a more reliable poison if you want to do things that way.
Air embolisms in the blood stream are also not painless, nor is it particularly effective. Air microbubbles are actually injected in some medical diagnostic procedures.
The USA's fixation with "revenge" and "retribution" is really out on show with the methods and displays of its executions or of its other methods of punishments which have almost zero intent to rehabilitate or reconcile or reintegrate damaged individuals into society. Justice is not served by these and it is little wonder it has the highest crime and incarceration rates in the developed world along with the highest recidivism rates.
Holding personal information about someone, then not being a registered data handler, denying the subject access to information about themselves, denying it exists or refusing to delete if there is no good legal reason to hold it can be a criminal matter under EU law.
If the individual EU countries affected enact long-arm statutes for their individual versions of those laws then being in the USA or anywhere else in the world may mean that claiming "no jurisdiction" doesn't come into play.
As examples of Long Arm statutes, the UK kid who hacked into the Pentagon from the UK never set foot in the USA, but was arrested and extradited and the UK's Computer Misuse act has similar Long Arm clauses for hacking of UK-owned resources (which don't even need to be physically present in the UK)
Some countries take personal data handling seriously enough that they may be willing to put these kinds of clauses into their books in response to this kind of "service" being offered, which also puts the operators in the firing line for "conspiracy" and "facilitation" charges.
"The users expect data retention to last forever."
And as long as they agree to it, it _can_ last forever.
The point is, you have to have their agreement.
"Sarah, to this day, does not know what she did wrong."
That's because you didn't make her pay the bill.
Wallets are a valid educational tool.
"UK health and safety regulations aren't what you think they are."
'elfin safety' is _the_ most frequently used reason for refusing to do a job someone doesn't want to do.
'data protection' is the second most frequently used reason.
It's fun to ask them to cite the relevant regulation, then pull it up on the government website and ask them to find where it says that. Yes I have them bookmarked.
Telling people that they're making it up as they go along has some interesting reactions. Telling them that they can't stop me filming those reactions and that they're going to face an assault charge if they try is even more amusing. I've even offered to call the police for them when they claim being filmed without consent in a public place is a criminal act.
"You don't understand how "health and safety" has taken over the workplace (and many other situations) in the UK."
I do and I work in academia AND I trip over carpenters all the time.
They don't give a shit about books. If they're in the way, they move them - none-too gently either. The carpenter was looking for an excuse not to do the work.
Having the shelves in a dangerous state and books piled all over the flloor is a health and safety issue. The fastest way to get situations like these resolved is to call in the local authority safety inpsector and watch how fast those shelves get fixed.
(We're going through a similar problem with lighting - the university won't fix the external lighting due to costs. People are tripping up in the dark. The Local authority won't just pick up on the lights, but also the dozen other things that can land the organisation with six-figure fines, so calling them in tends to have galvanising effects on the people in the maintenance department who are taking the piss. By refusing to authoirise necessary repairs they can be found personally criminally liable if someone's injured)
"while the old timer's work ethic could be rewarded by getting paid more"
Without the union the old timer wouldn't be paid more, would be working flat out overloaded all day/every day and would be sacked just short of retirement, so that his pension is void.
The problem isn't the union. The problem is the asshole.
It may surprise you but a _responsible_ union spends most of its time telling workers who slack off or get sacked for slacking off not to take the piss and that they have no case against their employer. They save the big stick for when it's actually needed - when the employer's actually behaving in an illegal an dunfair manner.
Without unions to combat exploitation and provide the ability to collectively negotiate wages, you can be assured that sweatshops, on the job injuries/deaths and starvation wages would still be "A Thing". If the neolibs who business seems to worship at the feet of have their way, that scenario wlll happen again.
petty vendetta "Demarcation disputes" are an indication of a toxic corporate culture and if unions are engaging in them, then it's an indication that they have become toxic. There many are unions that nobody has ever heard of because they've spent decades solving industrial problems amicably and never needed to call a strike - their members prefer it that way and would leave in droves if things became confrontational without a very good reason.
"so much so, I have trouble finding a bulb that works for my lava lamp"
40W controllable heater, no problem.
Can't help you with the matter of your personal taste though.
"Fast forward a number of years and I see that Ford are essentially throwing in the towel in the passenger-car market."
In the USA, domestic automakers can afford to do this because of the Chicken Tax.
The reason America loves its trucks, vans and SUVs is because it's been told to love them and that's because the USA is a captive market for such vehicles - anything imported in these categories has a 23% import duty applied (vs 2% for cars).
Thanks to lack of competition (the "foreign" makes competing in these US market classes are almost entirely built in North America), the profit margins on these vehicles was so high that after the Chicken Tax took effect in 1963, Detroit stopped caring about passenger car sales as there's no money in it by comparison.
The Chicken Tax is a classic example of the laws of unintended consequences and how a trade spat over one product (cheap chicken putting german farmers out of business) leading to tot-for-tat retaliation (targetting VW microbusses) that was overbroad has had majorly damaging long term consequences.
"I know a bunch of people who buy cheap stuff or don't take care of things"
These days, sale price is not a good indicator of internal quality.
One of the interesting things about Remington razors is that the first thing that Victor Kamen ("I liked it so much I bought the company") did after purchase was to more than double the sale prices with no other changes - playing to the perception about price and quality.
You can see this in the long term reliability of certain german "premium" car brands.
"Usually they last a long time but they are also usually pretty expensive so most would prefer not to have to chunk a $700 device for a $0.50 part."
It's been like this for a long time though. Nissan has a problem with Sentras/Sunnys back in the 80s where a 5c part failure deep in the gearbox wrote the car off because the labour cost was higher than the replacement gearbox (and usually higher than the value of the car when the part failed - wouldn't have been so bad but not having reverse is kind of limiting)
"I suggest we spend the money on finding an alternative to fossil fuels before they run out. "
Effectively, they'll never run out, they'll just become more and more expensive to obtain - to the point where you need to expend almost as much energy to obtain the energy as you get.
The bigger problem at the moment is that we already developed a workable solution (Molten salt nuclear power) in the 1960s and then threw it away for political reasons.
All the handwaving about renewables ignores the simple fact that renewables can almost replace existing electrical generation capacity but cannot expand generation capacity the 8-fold over that required to account for replacing other carbon emission sources such as heating, transport and industrial processes.
Alvin Weinberg's water-moderated nuclear pile was a good starting point/proof of concept but far too dangerous to scale up to the sizes we have now. They're a giant steam bomb waiting to explode and Alvin Weinberg knew it, which is why he spent the rest of his life working on a safer alternative to the original system he developed - only to see the military hate it due to inability to extract weapons materials from the process and Nixon kill it because it didn't grease the right palms in the right locations.
Even with all their downsides, water-based nuclear systems are safer than the fossil fuel alternatives but MSRs are an opportunity to make that a few hundred(thousand? million?) times safer and remove the worst case scenarios that we've already seen play out several times - no hydrogen explosions, radioactive steam leaks, radioactive fires, meltdowns, prompt criticality steam events (or radiation events of workers), radioactive water leaks, etc - and a 90-99% reduction in input waste (that depends on the enrichment of the fuel but most uranium mined is thrown away before seeing the inside of a reactor) coupled with a 99% reduction in output waste, with what little waste is left mostly having a 10-30 year cooldown period before being valuable saleable materials such as helium and xenon. (Imagine the effects of widely available cheap bulk helium, for starters...)
"So when will the poles stop warming"
They won't. The mechanisms will simply change a little.
The atlantic conveyor may slow, or descend below the surface before reaching Europe but it won't stop bringing warm water northwards even if it stops bringing warm weather. It's that water which matters as its where all the energy is. Weather is just what you see as a side effect.
Incidentally if it did stop or slow down dramatically, apart from the other effects noted one of the more obvious details would be a fairly dramatic rise in local mean sea level along the USA east coast, peaking at around 3 feet in Chesapeake Bay area. Oceanic currents "pull" water towards them kind of like a like a valley in the ocean surface.