fertiliser is applied in tightly controlled doses based on aerial analysis
Gotta say, this should be a huge red flag for everyone. Soil quality is declining sharply, and fertilizers simply aren't making up the difference. Switching to robots farming will almost certainly accelerate this.
Use some Rokset on all your fasteners; the only way to break the threadlocker is with heat, and heat would also destroy the bodywork. So you could still replace damaged panels, but you couldn't steal them.
Well, yeah, it would be.
We would need to drastically increase taxes in order to have UBI for the poorest people in the US. Right now, across the board, all of us are paying some of the lowest income taxes since income taxation was introduced. After you consider things like the EIC, a lot of poor people have a negative tax rate. As it is, we're running a budget deficit every single year, and most of that deficit is entitlement programs (I'm not using that in a pejorative sense) like social security and Medicare.
(No, social security is not fully funded; people pay in far less than they end up getting paid back, and the system relies on a constantly expanding pool of people paying into it to fund the people that are currently drawing from it. To fix that, we would need to increase social security taxes, end the cap on those taxes, and probably set the retirement age higher.)
Even if we took every single penny that every billionaire in the US had, that would fund the federal gov't for something like eight months. Total. And then it would all be gone. (Plus the stock and bond markets would crater, but eh.)
Yeah, we need to bring back the highest marginal tax rates for sure. And we need to increase corporate taxes and eliminate a lot of the corporate cash giveaways. But we also need to increase taxes on the middle class. I'm saying this as someone that's at the lower end of middle class; I'm not paying enough in taxes for what i think this country should be doing for the citizens of the country. But man, if you told me my tax bill was going to go up by $8k, but I'd also get national single payer health care? And national public transit, and free public universities? I would cream my panties.
I have an earlier version of this (got it on sale from Costco, and it was the highest-rated model by Consumer Reports at the time); I love it. It's not great for carpets, but it's fast and easy for hardwood floors.
Would I have bought it if it needed to connect to my cell phone? Absofuckinglutely not. Not in a million fucking years. It could have been the best goddamn vacuum in the world at sucking, powered by a miniature black hole, sucking dirt to the event horizon, and I still would have passed.
I need LESS connectivity in my life, not more.
I quit flying (domestically, at least) over the x-rays and TSA bullshit. I'm driving 13 hours today in order to avoid that particular security theater.
Typical "both sides" bullshit.
Unfortunately most commercial farms aren't putting in what they're taking out, even with the industrial fertilizers. Most of the industrial fertilizers are just nitrogen, potassium, and phosphates, often as a liquid. You are absolutely right that you can't take and never return; that's why in pre-industrial revolution times, people would rotate fields between crops, and lying fallow/being used for grazing (where sheep, cattle, etc. were leaving free fertilizer) You also ended up with fewer years where all your crops got wiped out by a single pest, because you weren't farming just one thing. Efficiency in farming--esp. monoculture--is great for profits, not so great for the land itself.
Eh. High levels of phosphates end up running off fields into waterways, and then you get things like algae blooms. Waste water treatment plants will clean up runoff that goes into the sewers and storm drains, but it's not really cleaning up entire rivers. IIRC, that used to be a much more significant problem; I remember water in rivers near where I grew up--which was all surrounded by farms--often had white, sludgy scum anywhere that the current was forming eddies. If I remember correctly the high levels of that white shit was due to worse regulations governing agricultural run-off.