Given most people think "dams, reservoirs, and turbines" when they hear the word "hydro", it's also worth pointing out that the UK has a lot of untapped tidal potential as well; the Severn estruary in particular is one of the largest tidal bores in the world, twice a day, and its energy potential will only increase as sealevels rise. Combine that with some suitable storage system, and you'll have another clean (once set up) and predictable supply capacity to offset some more of the current carbon-based baseload.

If the hardware is still present, but is disabled, you're still carrying around the hardware. Most importantly, you're probably still powering its logic even if it's inaccessible to you.

BMW, like most German cars, is overcomplicated and overpriced garbage sold only to self-proclaimed car enthusiasts who wouldn't know how to change a tire let alone a timing chain. BMW got themselves into a bit of controversy by including heated seats which only functioned by subscription.

Now, say I had bought a BMW but didn't want the heated seats. I don't pay for the subscription. There's no additional cost to me, the purchaser of the car, because the profit from the people who do opt for the subscription are the ones paying the cost of the extra hardware in my car, correct?

Wrong. I am now carrying around an extra-beefy alternator to power the heated seats. I am now carrying around all the extra wiring to power the heated seats. All of this impacts my performance and my fuel efficiency. And all of this extra complexity adds a failure liability when something damages part of the heated seat hardware. All for a feature I specifically did not ask for by refusing the subscription.

With a disabled chunk of logic embedded in a processor, is it a negligible cost and a negligible risk? Maybe, but as the purchaser, it's crap that I didn't ask for, and you are imposing on me. If I have to carry it around and power it up, I expect to be able to use it.

If the manufacturer doesn't want to supply a feature then they should not supply the hardware. Leave the spots on the circuit board unpopulated. In the case of a chip, leave it off the die.

My middle child, when she was age 25-30, could easily pass for 15.

Lawsuits abound from this.

Again, you're being willfully obtuse by taking a "very loose definition" of what (or, rather, does not) "probably" constitute "ultra processed" and attacking on the details. Everything on your list (again, other than coffee and tea, along with some spices) has been "produced at home" for millennia, and the things on your list that haven't don't have anything to do with whether they could be, but only the geography of where they could be. Just like your follow up "but I don't have land" bullshit.

"Milk" is not an ultra processed food (or, rather, it doesn't have to be). Something containing "red dye #5" is. You need a factory and a complicated supply chain for the red dye #5, but not for the milk. See how easy that was?

With regard to your follow up WRT cheese, come the fuck on. Cheese is nothing more than a way of preserving milk. You can make some in your home today, and the knowledge required to do so can be obtained by watching a five minute Youtube video. Really, five minutes. That's all. Will you have Le Grand Gruyere? No, you'll have farmer's cheese, or ricotta, or mozerella, or maybe a nice gouda if you're feeling frisky and want to wait a bit.

So... Did you work on Microsoft Excel, the Intel Pentium, or both?

You jest, but it truly is terrible. Take this bit (if true): "(According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn't divide a fraction by two." My immediate reaction to that was "WTF!?" You just need to double the denominator and simplify if possible and it's all integers no matter what, but, even if you don't simplify, 2/6 and 1/3 both answer the question "what is half of 2/3?".

That's not just a failure in maths skills, it's a failure in basic comprehension and ability to conceptualise a problem, which is far more wide-ranging and impactful than just being bad at math.

"It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another." --Malcolm Reynolds

(Ironically applies well to Joss Whedon himself. Kind of wonder if one of the show writers was thinking about Joss when they wrote that...)

The only single-source point of failure is me.

Most of your list could be "produced at home" by most people. Tea and Coffee are the largest problem on the list, but the only reason is geographic and not "processing" related. I'm pretty sure you know that, though, and are being purposefully obtuse for some reason.

I think I saw someone swimming in some sewage en route from scraping a bear carcass off the road, let me go check.

1. I got asked once if I played world of warcraft since they say a guy with the name "thegarbz" playing. I said no. By the way I know exactly who that person is because he impersonated me as a joke. I found that flattering and funny, but it has no impact on my life beyond that.

Reminds me of my first email account ;) One of my professors said we all had to register for an email account (this was in the mid-90s) so we could submit our homework to him, so I registered his name at hotmail.com to mess with him ;)

I don't trust single points of failure.

Yeah, this. If I have to sign up to some site that I don't care at all if it gets hacked, I use a throwaway password. Oh noez, someone might compromise my WidgetGenerator.foo.bar account and generate some widgets in my name, heavens to betsy!

Has anything actually stored hashes in /etc/passwd in the last thirty years?

"Yo, dawg..."