You sound like one of those people who think peak oil means no oil.

No I'm an engineer. I have a brain.

Peak oil by definition is the maximum output of oil based on the current level of technology. That value has been re-evaluated and raised every decade since they started pulling it out of the ground. When the easy stuff is gone, they pull the harder stuff, etc. We will never reach a point where they pull all of the oil out of the ground. The funny thing that people do not realize is that the planet is constantly making more oil. (Algae is the base stock that eventually turns into oil.) Of course we have out stripped that supply a long time ago. Eventually all the technologically easy stuff will be pulled out of the ground. After that we will have to start synthetic production.....which has already been a thing for 100 years. I do think within the next decade you are going to see a rapid shift away from oil as a fuel for any small device and for automobiles, but there will never be a time in the future where oil is so rare and so expensive that all industry tied to it will have to shutdown. If you have a source of carbon you have oil. Plenty of CO2 in the air according to the NPCs that we can use to make oil.

House prices are a result of two government actions land zoning and regulation, and the subsidy of the banking industry. Loosen the regulations and quit printing money and you will be shocked how quickly the inflated prices of homes will fall, along with half the fake economy, but thems the breaks.

Wild ocean fish has always been more expensive, but it is a lot cheaper and available everywhere unlike when I was a kid. You wanted fresh ocean fish, you weren't going to get it in Missouri. The only reason is that it seems so expensive is that chicken and farmed fish are so much more incredibly less expensive than they used to be.

I have a commute 6 miles and it takes me 30-45 minutes by bicycle each way, depending on my motivation and the weather. It always takes me 30-45 minutes regardless of traffic.

By car it takes me 15-20 if traffic is light and 30min to 1 hour and 15 minutes for the same commute depending on the number of retards that can't drive are on the road. This is in Tampa Florida so it is a highly season thing. It is opposite of what you think is true. The locals are by far the worse drivers I have ever come across in the US. Even worse than Los Angeles. They can flip a car in a single vehicle accident on a straight road on a dry sunny day. Don't ask me how but they do it all the freaking time. The snow birds and the tourists that flock down here for vacation just add to the stupid that is already inherent in the system, but are hardly the cause of it.

I've converted over to commuting by bicycle because of the outdated stand your ground laws don't consider a person with their head up their ass (phone) randomly changing lanes in a 3000lbs piece of mechanized steel at 60mph in a 35 to be a lethal threat and justification enough to be countered with the use of lethal force.

Even with the dodge-em I have to play with the cars, commuting by bike consistently takes less time, has a more predictable ETA and is by far more gentle on my sanity than commuting by car. Self driving cars can't get here quick enough in my opinion.

I arrived on the planet since 1971. We've been running out of one thing or another every year since then. Fresh water, oil, coal, forests, landfill space, non-communist countries, people who believe in Jesus, people to fill hi-tech jobs, people willing to do shitty jobs, people willing to work, people willing have more people (babies), rare earth elements, cool temperatures, arable land, affordable housing, steel, aluminum, wetlands, darter snails, coast line, owls, money for schools/retirement/fire/police/road/military, we've run out of time to save the Earth.

You know what has actually run out since 1971. Not a god damn thing. Not once, not ever.

Every time it has been corporations whining that they had to pay $.04 per ton for something instead of $.01, or people who want to pay $100 a month for rent in a city where the cheapest 400 square foot apartment costs $500,000 to buy and rent is around $1900 a month, or people who want you and the gov't to fund their pet program so they don't have to do honest work. They get all worked up and make a lot of noise hoping to get idiot politicians to support their cause and pass a law that forces things back or provides them with a subsidy, in other words steal money out of your pocket to put it into theirs.

The only thing that has run out since then is my patience. Socialism and crony capitalism needs to be once and for all labeled the environmental toxin that it is and steps taken to get rid of it. We could treat it like we do any other toxic waste, load it up on ships and dump it in the 3rd world.

Somalia would be perfect.

An Arduino, a bunch of amber colored LEDs, and pre-recorded BEEEP BOOP Star Trek sounds.

In Florida eh no. Half the houses around here have no heating at all. Dropping in a many thousands of dollar system to heat the house at night for 3 months and maybe for a month during the day, not even remotely worth doing. They will never save enough money to justify the expense. Space heaters are dirt cheap and better yet old PCs in my garage are free. The extra cost in electricity is maybe an extra $20-50 a month. If I ever build my own house I'll make sure there is plenty of solar water heating and electric, but retrofitting it on my current home is not practical.

Besides the heating is a secondary bonus, the primary bonus being science gets pushed forwards to maybe come up with a few solutions that would be useful to humanity, and the PC parts skip getting shipped off to some 3rd world country or the landfill for another 5 years.

As a child of the 70s and 80s yeah the Sears catalog with the Christmas toy section was pretty much as good as it got.

My personal favorite is Gridcoin. Your CPU/GPU time are being used to provide cycles for research on the projects of your choice through BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).

So the colleges get access to what amounts to a supercomputer

I get some crypto. I was doing this for nearly a decade before they added the crypto so it is either actual money in the future or just another way to keep score.

The last bonus is I had a stack of old machines in the garage collecting dust. A fresh OS install and BOINC and now they are set to wake up at night and crunch numbers to keep the house warm. It doesn't even matter that they are very outdated, any number crunching is a bonus, and the money that would have been spent anyway for the exact same thing. One day when I get motivated I'll rig up a thermostat that turns the software on and off so I can have better temperature control.

Thunderfoot is all mouth no brains.

Hyperloop an impossibility? Why then is it that the ground work for it is already being laid out? While the tunnel systems he is in the process of building right now, are not hyperloop, all the tech and research that is being generated by his tunnel projects can be applied to making it work.

While it would be cool to travel across the US in a vacuum sled at 1500mph, and very unlikely we'll be doing it anytime in the next 10 years, I'll be more than thrilled if I can just go across town at 50mph, without stopping for lights, or getting caught in traffic, or even having to drive.

Everything past that is gravy.

Heck no. A real honest to goodness fight would be a nice change of pace. The problem is down here in Florida nothing interesting ever happens. No SJWs/NPCs/Anti-fa etc march in the streets or riot. That's because we have stand your ground laws and they know people will shoot their dumb asses if they get out of line....and the police will just shrug and walk off to go get some body bags out of their patrol car.

Not even a little bit true. Most repairs cost so much is people don't bother trying to do it themselves. It's amazingly simple to implement most car repairs these days with a modest tool box and a copy of the manufacturer repair manuals for the car. Combine that with the fact that you can order parts online for a fraction of what the dealer will charge you. My last air conditioning repair took a $25 (fried relay). The dealer wanted $750 to do the same fix that took me longer to type up in this comment than to do. (Open the hood, took off a plastic cover over the fuse box, found the relay, pulled it out with a pair of pliers, stuck the new one in.)

That is not very nice calling people Trolls....call them by their real name. Socialists, Communists, Progressives, Liberals, The Left, Anti-fa, Facists, totalitarians, Democratic Socialists.
If none work for you try "Douche Canoes"

Look up Creality Ender 3 PRO. Those can be had for $200 these days, and can print all the parts for the "toy" gun. It's not so much that they are ready for prime time, its the fact that a printer of the same capability would have run you $25,000 just ten years ago.

The metal printers and reinforced plastic capable printers, that can actually print all the "real" gun parts, yes including the tungsten rails and rifled barrels, run about $100,000-$200,000 today. So we are talking about $300,000 (one of each) to start up an automated gun manufacturing facility in your garage. I bit rich for my blood, but it is getting closer to affordable for the small businessman.

Myself and my fellow student engineers are experimenting with printing with fiber re-enforced nylons at home on our sub $1000 printers. I'm sad to say that MagPull probably sold me my last assessor this year as we are getting some great results. As a side note I haven't bought plastic parts for just about anything else since I started printing my own 3 years ago.

What is starting to spook people is they are realizing these things will be cheap enough to be in most enthusiast homes within another decade. Sure $25,000 will buy you a good sized arsenal for your bunker, but a $25,000 printer could keep a local population set in terms of guns, parts, and accessories outside of any gov't control.

Now take that one step further and have the same printers cost $5000. Who wouldn't have one?

How about when they get below $1000. Who wouldn't have two or three?

They can always flag your purchases at Home Depot for people trying to make pipe guns. Little harder to tell if little Timmy is printing toy Storm Troopers or handguns on daddy's printer in the garage.

That scares the shit out of the control freaks in government.

There will end up being some inane law that requires the printers to make an identifying mark inside the material. Something that you can't get at. That will be the standard commercial fair. Then your enthusiast will simply print new parts for his printer and jail brake the software that causes this and neatly go around it.

Same deal if they mandate some sort of microtag to be laced into the filament. People will just simply make their own.

I don't think our gov't overlords get it yet....they are about to lose almost complete control of manufacturing once this gets cheap/good enough in the near future. Once it is cheap enough and good enough to be on par with what you now buy in a store.

A nice metal printer that fits in your office and can produce actual gun parts will only set you back about $150,000. A nylon re-enforced polymer printer is about the same. That was something that was millions of dollars just a decade ago. They are rapidly approaching parity with the old school manufacturing methods in terms of speed/cost, especially since it only takes 1 person to run a few dozen of these machines and maybe 1-2 more to keep them serviced. You could print out all the parts for a modern handgun, including the tungsten rails (yes they can do that now) and the barrels with rifling, with those two printers taking up the space of maybe a decent sized bedroom. Obviously there is a little more to it than that. They aren't good enough to print everything together assembled, and the parts will require some finishing, but parts wise companies are starting to look at these for more than just prototypes.

Using those two machines at $200 a gun, printing 5 guns a day, a very reasonable amount for the ones I've seen, you are talking about ROI on those machines of less than 1 year. That is off the shelf now. Just imagine what they'll be able to do in another 10 years.

Agreed Ubiquiti equipment works very well for the price. Myself and my brother in law both installed their gear to cover 1/2 lots inside and out in wifi. A must with the ever increasing number of devices and wireless home automation. Using standard consumer grade stuff was hitting its limits too quickly and had nowhere near the coverage needed. The AC-PROs can handle something like 150 connections each .

The user can input a single login and then just walk around hoping from one access point to the next.

The controller software makes it pretty easy to setup and manage.

It's exactly what you are doing when you set up filters for your email inbox.

Of course the flip side of that would be that your employer finds out you automated your job, copies your work, and then fires everyone but you, so that you can make sure the automation still six months later, and fires everyone else in the office. Is that ethical?

Sure.