it's turned into west wall street basically.

It got stuck and needed a reboot two or maybe three years ago and has been rock solid since. Still nothing viable to replace it without having to use two separate devices.

But you didn't eat it

Well...

Can you imagine millennial parents giving their precious offspring pocket knives?

I was about to reply that I've seen a few young kids with pocket knives but their parents grew up in places like China and have associated more with older generations in the west than people of their own age.

I had my own .22 rifle by the time I was 10.

Maybe if we had more of that now people would see the things properly as tools instead of the NRA insanity of it being an external sign of manhood, patriotism and being ready to overthrow the USA in a minute.

From mucking about with it professionally (foundry sand packing test - pump mercury under a little bit of pressure through a sand sample) and reading a lot about mercury safety at the time it's the fumes that are the problem. Don't breath in mercury fumes and you'll be as fine as the gold miners working outdoors that used to stick their hands in the stuff and far better off than the hatters indoors that were poisoned by the fumes from heating the stuff up.
Washing it down the drain to where it can end up in small organisms then concentrated into top level predators that people eat is also very bad news.

Only if you do something as insane in hindsight as put lead acetate in the wine as a cheap sweetener. Lead pipes give you tiny trace amounts. Guzzling down cheap vino with a lead based sweetener like the Romans did is a few orders of magnitude more.
The lead pipes myth came from someone who knew about the poisoning but not about the wine so made a bit of a guess - lucky for us a wrong one since there's still some lead plumbing around.

And! and! and.... The generator costs money to buy use and maintain, and it has to be exercised, because that fuel has to be used - you don't want old fuel in an emergency generator, Stabil or no Stabil. Its just one more thing that the some folks don't take into account when they do their ROI's and other calculations based on something that they just don't like.

And if you want to see some real dollars go away, try replacing your entire house hotel load of power needs with an appropriately sized generator. Running a big freezer, an oil furnace, refrigerator, and all tungsten lights (assuming a person who hates this idea hates cfls or led lights too) is going to get you some serious bucks involved. Don't forget your capacity has to be enough so that you can handle the motor startups on the devices, plus you really need to have enough to handle the draw when a couple start at the same time. Don't forget you need to install a cutout system so you don't electrocute linesmen trying to get you your power back.They frown on that, although the ROI of a couple years in prison isn't too bad with those three hots and a cot

So what's the ROI on a whole house emergency power generator plus installation plus fuel plus maintenance?

Strategically, if I were at war with another country, I would hope that their power generation capacity was in as few locations as possible.

I'm all about conservation, but in the end, it is every bit as much a distraction as that stuff you don't like.

Because in all conservation efforts, the end is people using so little resources that it is effectively zero.

While I suppose you don't believe that, tell me, what is the amount of conservation of materials that compensates for population increase?

Let's say we all use 10 percent less of something. Let's say water.

Each new person on earth then uses up water to the same level the rest of us are using, which is 90 percent of what we used before.

So for every new person, how many people's savings in water have been used by this new person?

So we have to reduce all that much the next year, then the year after that, and on and on. Eventually no one uses any water.

Are you trying to say it will never be viable?

Its the new Slashdot, home for the reactionary status quo. These good folk will be clutching their hatred of anything new until they meet the actuarial tables.

Unfortunately, they get mod points, and in their world, anything they disagree with is marked troll or flame bait.

To quote a commenter above:

reality is there will be collateral damage in fighting terrorists sometimes

if you travel to the middle east, don't be surprise if terrorists grab you and hold/torture/behead you