As with any technological advancement , there are risks, but if humanity is ever intending to become a spacefairing species, we will have to make peace with nuclear energy. It’s the only technology that comes anywhere close to making interplanetary travel feasible at large scale.

• Hottest 14 days ever recorded so far…

So true! Whisker stress is a real thing.

Nuclear tech is still tech, even if it’s not something that we’ll personally encounter.

PDA- yes, plenty of Palm devices over the years. Pretty sure I had an IBM WorkPad 30x, a Zire 71, and a Tungsten T3. They were great devices, absolutely fantastic for the time period.

DVD recorder- yes, both for the TV and DVD burner drives in PCs.

Web TV- not me, but we did get a setup for my grandparents back in the day. What an absolutely terrible way to browse the internet.

3D tv- never saw the need personally.

Raspberry pi- oh yes, been playing with them since they came out.

Internet Radio Player- no, never did. By the time this made sense I was fully invested in the iPod world and had hoarded enough music to not make it worthwhile.

It may make the economy less efficient on paper, but that doesn’t take in to account the external costs of trade. In return for cheap products, we gave up a strong manufacturing career base and replaced it with low quality service industry jobs which pay less overall. It’s one of the factors that’s led to wage stagnation, which is WAY more damaging than more costly products.

That’s not even to mention the environmental costs of shipping. The literal tons of heavy fuel oil that are burned to get the bananas from Farmer Fred are now causing sea level rise and changing weather patterns, which makes both Bob and Fred lose in the end.

This is some great news. De-industrialization has created a skills gap in the trades that is going to take a generation or more to overcome. So many industries are utterly dependent on skilled people that have many years of experience, and those people are aging out of the workforce too rapidly to be replaced.

The culture shift in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s which treated “blue collar” as something for young adults to try to avoid is partially responsible, but without the demand for those jobs there was no push to fix that.

Lol. Carrot is always on point.

This has been a “thing” for a while now. Here’s a Hackaday article on it from 2018:

https://hackaday.com/2018/07/02/using-an-ai-and-wifi-to-see-through-walls/