This is how I do most of my holidays. I don't have the time to plan holidays in detail, so typically book flights to/from two different places, and go.
The other option is that I jump in the car and drive until I hit desert, jungle, snow, or whatever takes my fancy.
That looks to be a very dead Roomba or Scooba... which do not live on kitchen countertops, and have no means of knowing that they're going onto a hot surface, as cleaning your counters is not an anticipated use case. They'll also turn on and clean on schedule, if that's what you've set them to do.
This isn't a case of "Robot suicide", rather of wilful neglect and the "murder" of an innocent appliance.
No, it isn't, but it appears to be the endgame of representative democracy. I'd suggest reading Hobbes' Leviathan, or perhaps Hayek's Road to Serfdom, if you haven't already, as both anticipated this exact malaise. The US and the UK are in the terminal stages of decline.
The representative democratic ideal is ultimately revealed to be a fiction, and the rule of law is a falsehood - for without a universally applied rule of law, there is no rule of law - just authoritarianism - and our rule of law is decidedly not universal, and never has been. One set of rules for us, one for them.
All representative democracy eventually declines under the same disease of creeping authoritarianism due to the inevitable desire of entrenched power structures and bureaucracies to self-sustain and expand. This should not be mistaken for malice, rather it's the inevitable output of a system optimised for self-preservation.
The only solution to my mind while maintaining a democratic ideal is either strict sortition, or direct democracy.
Politicians have always run the police - a police force is the government's visible threat of violence and method of control over the population. They're not there to protect you. They're there to protect the establishment.
- Prop up the prison-industrial complex for the benefit of private corporations.
They are categorically not there to help you. They never have been. This is a misapprehension that has been around since the days of Peel. A police force is the state's visible threat of violence against its populace, in order to exact control and to keep the powerful powerful.
The UK is sadly becoming increasingly like defective ex-soviet states, where doing things in the "right, open and upfront" way is no longer possible, as one is actively punished for honesty.
Had a fascinating chat with a Latvian chap who was telling me how literally every business in the country keeps two sets of books.
Software development, metalwork, carpentry, all have the same base skills, of planning, patience, and perseverance.
I do all, and many more such engineering/mechanical/creative type things, and I know many developers who are as adept at hacking in the real as in the aether.
Anyway, my point I guess is that it's all the same domain, and the skills are eminently transferable, and the internet fills in the knowledge blanks to a large extent.
I've a friend who principally for a living shoots things - pigeons, rabbits, and other such pains-in-asses for farmers.
In the UK, there's a fairly complex framework as to where you can shoot, how much you can shoot, and when you can do it. To this end, he's developed, single-handedly, iOS and Android apps for hunters to manage such and record their kills, principally for compliance purposes but also for their own edification.
Either way, it's been fascinating watching him learn - his approach has been to learn on the go, and iterate. He's gone from hacked-together PHP obscenity to android/iOS APIs and frameworks in about two years.
2) Is very true. I crashed my first car aged about 7 on a friend's farm - old volvo estate, slammed it diagonally into a tree doing about 30, and rolled it down a bank. Terrifying, but a very, very valuable lesson in terms of just how much energy a few tonnes of metal at 30mph carries.
I walked out of it unscathed, but was a kid made of rubber. Dare say these days I'd have smashed ribs and so-forth from the same - at the least.