A bit more about the latter. Beyond organophosphates, the main other alternative is pyrethroids. These are highly toxic to aquatic life, and they're contact poisons to pollinators just landing on the surface (some anti-insect clothing is soaked in pyrethrin for its effect). Also, neonicotinoids are often applied as seed coatings (which are taken up and spread through the plant), which primarily just affect the plant itself. Alternatives are commonly foliar sprays. This means drift to non-target impacts as well, such as in your shelterbelts, private gardens, neighbors' homes, etc. You also have to use far higher total pesticide quantities with foliar sprays instead of systematics, which not only drift, but also wash off, etc. Neonicotinoids can impact floral visitors, with adverse sublethal impacts but e.g. large pyrethroid sprayings can cause massive immediate fatal knockdown events of whole populations of pollinators.

Regrettable substitution is a real thing. We need to factor it in better. And that applies to nanoplastics as well.

So, when we say microplastics, we really mainly mean nanoplastics - the stuff made from, say, drinking hot liquids from low-melting-point plastic containers. And yeah, they very much look like a problem. The strongest evidence is for cardiovascular disease. The 2024 NEJM study for example found that for patients with above-threshold levels of nanoplastics in cartoid artery plaque were 4,5x more likely to suffer from a heart attack. Neurologically, they cross the brain-blood barrier (and quite quickly). A 2023 study found that they cause alpha-synuclein to misfold and clump together, a halmark of Parkinsons and various kinds of dementia. broadly, they're associated with oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, protein aggregation, and neurotransmitter alterations. Oxidative stress is due to cells struggling to break down nanoplastics in them. They're also associated with immunotoxicity, inflammatory bowel disease, and reproductive dysfunction, including elevating inflammatory markers, impairing sperm quality, and modulating the tumor microenvironment. With respect to reproduction, they're also associated with epigenetic dysregulation, which can lead to heritable changes.

And here's one of the things that get me - and let me briefly switch to a different topic before looping back. All over, there's a rush to ban polycarbonate due to concerns over a degradation product (bisphenol-A), because it's (very weakly) estrogenic. But typical effective estrogenic activity from typical levels of bisphenol-A are orders of magnitude lower than that of phytoestrogens in food and supplements; bisphenol-A is just too rare to exert much impact. Phytoestrogens have way better PR than bisphenol-A, and people spend money buying products specifically to consume more of them. Some arguments against bisphenol-A focus on what type of estrogenic activity it can promote (more proliferative activity), but that falls apart given that different phytoestrogens span the whole gamut of types of activation. Earlier research arguing for an association with estrogen-linked cancer seems to have fallen apart in more recent studies. It does seem associated with PCOS, but it's hard to describe it as a causal association, because PCOS is associated with all sorts of things, including diet (which could change the exposure rate vs. non-PCOS populations) and significant hormonal changes (which could change the clearance rate of bisphenol-A vs. non-PCOS populations). In short, bisphenol-A from polycarbonate is not without concern, but the concern level seems like it should be much lower than with nanoplastics.

Why bring this up? Because polycarbonate is a low-nanoplastic-emitting material. It is a quite resilient, heat tolerant plastic, and thus - being much further from its glass transition temperature - is not particularly prone to shedding nanoplastics. By contrast, its replacements - polyethylene, polypropylene, polyethylene terephthate, etc - are highly associated with nanoplastic release, particularly with hot liquids. So by banning polycarbonate, we increase our exposure to nanoplastics, which are much better associated with actual harms. And unlike bisphenol-A, which is rapidly eliminated from the body, nanoplastics persist. You can't get rid of them. If some big harm is discovered with bisphenol-A that suddenly makes the risk picture seem much bigger than with nanoplastics, we can then just stop using it, and any further harm is gone. But we can't do that with nanoplastics.

People seriously need to think more about substitution risks when banning products. The EU in particular is bad about not considering it. Like, banning neonicotinoids and causing their replacement by organophosphates, etc isn't exactly some giant win. Whether it's a benefit to pollinators at all is very much up in the air, while it's almost certain that the substitution is more harmful for mammals such as ourselves (neonicotinoids have very low mammalian toxicity, unlike e.g. organophosphates, which are closely related to nerve agents).

If it's just a picture of an ID card it doesn't even need to be a very good fake. You can find a picture online of someone else's ID, or you can take one from your parents, scan it and put it back before they notice it was missing.
Same thing with a credit card, if you're not actually charging an amount parents are unlikely to notice if it was used unless they get an instant notification which still doesn't happen with all card issuers.

Getting an adult to physically break the law for you carries risks for them, and that person stands to face consequences for doing so. A lot of people won't be willing to do it.
Doing it yourself (eg by borrowing an id) carries very little risk.

The parents do, and the teachers within a school context, but noone else should.

If you want to operate a company you need to follow the demands of the current government in the location(s) where you operate. It's the same in every country in the world.
If you're too small for the government to care about you, that just means following the published laws.
If you're large then it means getting in favor with the current regime via whatever methods are available to you.

The "hide my email" function is to hide your email address from random companies that might sell or leak your address to spammers.
It's not to hide your address from law enforcement, and never was.

They do have low speed prop planes for shooting down shaheds, but they have a lot less of them than would have been available during WW2.

The V1s were a lot faster than shaheds, and a bit faster than most fighter aircraft of the day. The allies had to use tactics like steep diving to match their speed.
The shaheds are much slower, closer in speed to WW1 vintage aircraft so modern jets have trouble flying slow enough to keep them in gun range.

The so called "rules of war" are made by the strong to raise the barrier of entry and prevent smaller players from even bothering to go to war with them.
But the reality is there are no rules in war, it's a case of win at all costs. You're only going to face punishment for breaking the rules if you lose, if you win you can make up your own rules.

The US should know that well, during the war of independence they didn't play by the established rules under which Britain and France had been fighting for years, they used guerrilla tactics which proved highly effective.

If your only air defence consists of patriot batteries then you have to use them regardless of what's incoming. UAE may well have been unprepared for this kind of attack.
Their initial effectiveness against unprepared enemies is largely down to them being low tech. Air defences were no longer geared up to contend with low speed flying targets. If you'd launched shahed drones during WW2 or even WW1 they would have been very quickly taken out by fighter aircraft of the day.

Ukraine on the other hand has been facing shahed attacks for several years, and have developed multiple significantly cheaper methods to counter them. Most of these methods would not work against a cheap missile flying at mach 5.

Not worthless at all. They're cheap and can be built quickly, and while they might be easy to intercept, the interceptors are not cheap.

The shahed drones are cheap too, and yet they have done a lot of damage.
Ukraine is launching cheap drones based on converted light aircraft, these are also doing major damage.

If you can build and launch more cheap drones/missiles than the enemy is able to intercept, you can overwhelm their defences and get a few strikes through. The first missiles you send get intercepted, but also give away the launch sites of the interceptors. If you have the resources to keep lobbing cheap missiles then pretty soon the interceptors run out and you score hits.

Ships are an easy target to take out, and submarines very effective tools for doing so which cannot easily be targeted by hypersonic missiles. You'd not be able to launch missiles at the US from ships for very long, at most you'd be able to launch a one off surprise attack from some civilian cargo ships.

Those russian hypersonics are also hugely expensive... The chinese ones are a lot cheaper.
Sure a patriot battery will almost certainly be able to take them out, but how many can it take out and at what cost? Once you run out of interceptors your patriot battery is a sitting duck and so is everything it was trying to protect.
Annual production of the pac-3 is currently around 600 and that's split among all patriot operators globally. The wars in ukraine and iran have also significantly depleted stocks.

I hate all of this sales pressure BS - that the instant anyone hears your name you have to try to "convert" them to sales - and I literally run a webstore.

It's all so deeply anti-consumer, and I want no part in it.