This is one of the weakest discussions I've seen on here. Fake burgers don't appeal to vegetarians and vegans. Once you learn how to cook without meat, the last thing you want is some hyper processed fake meat. They are for a select few knuckle-daggers who think they should eat 'less' meat. Secondly, all livestock that enters the supply chain in the first world had been through a feedlot. Your bucolic fantasies about family run farms are just that. The tiny exception is high end restaurants and butchers who manage thier own supply chain. Feed lots are hell, I guarantee anyone who is not a psychopath would give up eating meat if they went to one.

Are you a paid fossil fuel shill? This is exactly their strategy now - wokewashing. Point out how any anti-fossil fuel discussion is disadvantaging the poor and disenfranchised. Stupid argument, and disingenuous.

umm. No. The civilized world uses kilowatts. It's only the quaint ol' USofA that talks about horse power.

How about you simply run your phone out of charge and put it in your checked in baggage? Are they going to sit around waiting for it to get to minimum charge after fishing it out?

Gun Control: Control of access to various types of firearms by the general public with a system of licencing, registration and monitoring of the ownership of firearms. There you go. We did it in Australia after a handful of massacres in the mid 90's and there has not been one since. The world didn't end. I have 4 guns, kept under lock and key, registered and inspected very infrequently by the police. I'm pretty happy with the compromise. I guess the difference is no one in Australia shares the American fantasy that an armed public is somehow a deterrent to excesses by the state.

The map is interesting but not relevant. It shows the tidal range in open water. Tidal ranges where the tide interacts with the geography of the shore are much larger than indicated. For example the Australian North East coast where the tidal flow is trapped by the barrier reef has a tidal range of 8m, yes you read correctly 8m or 26 feet. The Bay of Fundy in Canada has a range IIRC of 13m. Finding sites where there is enough height range to the tide is not hard, its just that many of them are not near population centres.

Spoken like a man who has been through this more than once. I totally agree, you can custom code stuff, but its going to be seriously expensive and take way more effort on the part of the client that they expected. My strike rate (in the last 18 yrs) would be around 3 out of 200-300 projects that actually kicked and made the client money.

I am, or was a car guy. I couldn't wait to get my licence. I restored old sports cars on a shoestring budget, I bought and made tools to extract engines and re-build suspension. I drove hard, but not crazy hard. I drove everywhere. When my business made money I bought a Porsche, then another one. But at the same time changes were happening on the road. Speed cameras everywhere, traffic everywhere, parking a complete nightmare. I started riding my bike to any appointment less than 20km's away. I now very rarely drive, and when I take the Porsche out, its still enjoyable, but the traffic is still there, and the parking is still awful. I look forward to a future where cars are a rent-as-you need commodity, and the large proportion of under-skilled drivers are relieved of the task of guiding their two tonnes of metal and plastic safely through congested streets. Of the kids I know who are just old enough to be driving, there is a distinct lack of interest. They don't see the car as the symbol of and means to achieve freedom that I did at their age. I have to think that I was on the arse end of the American Graffiti era, where cars marked a right of passage. I am pretty happy about this, I think in general cars have been a necessary evolutionary step, but we have the technology to replace the model where every family has two cars doing nothing for 90% of the time. The idea that there is a new future where mechanised mobility is still readily available and convenient but car ownership is rare makes perfect sense.

I've used LED lighting on a boat extensively, and my findings were that they are very voltage sensitive, any over voltage causes them to give off more light, but die quickly. This is on 12v systems so the LED's don't have mini transformers in them. There are some fairly pricey units that are used for mast-head lights. You don't want to have to replace these frequently for obvious reasons. The justification for the expense that each LED has a different voltage sensitivity at the time of manufacture and a number of LED's are matched after testing to produce the correct overall rating for the group. The cheap units can blow up fairly quickly, as I can attest after swinging around 60ft up in the air replacing them. I expect the good manufacturers test the chips more accurately before throwing the fittings together, and the cheap ones are subject to some degree of luck.

irregardless is not a word

I pick this as the biggest shift we will see in the next mid-term, say 15 years. The availability of easily deployable, programmable robots that allow SME's to do what the big industrial companies have done. I can't see the ethics debate that's being had here is really relevant. This game is on, so get ready to throw your clogs, or work out how you can get involved.

The answer is yes. Malaria only lives in mosquitoes and humans. It has no 'sylvan focus', i.e. it doesn't live in any wild animals. If we could isolate all the people with malaria, and stop anyone being bitten by mossies for 2 weeks, the disease would be eradicated. This would be long enough to interrupt the parasites lifecycle. Another interesting thing about malaria is that it was endemic in Europe up to the first world war. It was eradicated there by spraying and management of sitting water.