Dragons' Den is the show that Shark Tank is based on. It has run for many seasons in the UK and Canada (and short runs in Australia and Ireland and elsewhere). Episodes can be found on Youtube.
In turn, Dragon's Den was based on a Japanese show (The Tigers of Money).
The province of Alberta, Canada (more than twice the land area of New Zealand) is free of rats.
In their case, it was largely by stopping rats entering from the east (Saskatchewan) in the 1950's - there are natural barriers on the other three sides.
Still, NZ could be divided into areas that have natural barriers, and peninulas (plenty of them), and start intensive poisoning barriers in those areas, expanding towards the sea.
Doesn't need gene editing, which certainly has unknown risks.
Interesting that there are no current transpacific cables at all landing in western Canada. Makes the area very dependent on the neighbour to the south (which is an earthquake risk, as well as a political risk).
I've had domains registered for over 20 years already, much longer than gmail has existed.
You can renew a domain for ten years in advance and easily transfer between registrars (and email providers, I use Fastmail), so it's a lot more reliable for the (very) long term than a third-party service.
Unfortunately very few people have their own domain for email (although they should!).
When companies have kindly sent me their entire customer list (by using CC in place of BCC) I see there are very few domains in it outside of the major free email providers, and those that remain are mostly for their work or small business. A personal or family domain is very rare.
An interesting one for London is Train Times vs House Prices [1]. Shows how prices are affected by commute times (and the raw data is downloadable if you want to plot the times on a map).
It was the only number that could not be dialled by accident by letting go of the dial too early. The aim wasn't to dial quickly, it was to avoid accidental calls.
Rotary dials in New Zealand were the other way around (sending ten minus the number dialled pulses) so the emergency number there was (and still is) 111 for the same reason: the hardest to dial by accident.
In the UK, when I renewed my driving license online I was offered the option to have them pick up the photo from my passport record, rather than send in a new photo.
Since the passport had been issued about 9 years before, the new driving license contained a picture already 9 years old (and identical to the passport).
Nearly ten years later (nearing expiry), it therefore contains a photo about 19 years old. I like to think I still look like that youthful person, of course.
Digital Ocean started as a lower-priced clone of Linode (Vultr did the same later). They started with just a subset of the services (finally catching up now), but had good developer marketing and a lower starter rate.
It'll be interesting to see if they can continue to grow now that Linode have reduced prices to be lower than them. That's one big catch with coming in at a lower price, the incumbent probably has the scale to lower their prices below you, if they consider you a threat.
I've registered hundreds of domains over the years, and still have a few hundred. Most were brought with a specific idea for a site in mind, but I ended up focusing on the few sites that made serious money, and the rest ended up just sitting there.
Parking websites was a thing around the turn of the century but hasn't made any real money for many years now, there just isn't the type-in traffic. Same for quick template sites to throw ads on, getting traffic to the domain isn't worth the effort for the tiny returns.
I've sold domains in the past, mainly on Sedo and more recently Flippa. Some have sold for five figures, many for four figures, so overall I've made a profit. But it's hard to get offers over 3 figures nowadays (unless it's a super-premium name).
Only my .coms have ever received offers, there's no real resale market in the new extensions (or even .net, .org), again with the exception of really, really good names.
Those new extensions are cutting the resale demand for even .coms, and making the offers smaller. It's got to the point where I'm letting names expire rather than mess around with the selling process for a hundred or two dollars (more buyers fail to pay now as well, wasting even more time).
In short: unless the name is a really exceptional .com, there's no longer much of a business in buying domain names to hold and resell. Only buy the names you need.
Plan A would be to send some robots to try building using this technique.
If it doesn't work, you're only out a few robots (who may be able to be repurposed).
If it does work, leave them to it building a habitat which can be fitted out by further waves of robots later. By time that's all done the hard part of sending humans there will be more possible, and they'll have a base ready to move into.
I've been travelling on a road trip in NZ for the last month or so (with a few more weeks to go). Even now, tail end of the summer season, the country is packed.
I like to drive around with just a rough route, see a place I like and stop for a while, but that just hasn't been possible if I want somewhere comfortable to sleep. Motels are mostly very small (6-12 rooms) so there's not a lot of availability. I've had to book in advance (and have a super-flexible route, skipping some full towns and even regions) to be able to get anything at all.
There's chronic under-investment in hotels and motels. It doesn't look like much (outside the cities) has been built since the 60's and 70's. It's like if the US never built Holiday Inn Expresses, Hampton Inns and so on and was just relying on mom-and-pop downtown motels to house everybody, or if there were no Premier Inns in the UK and it was still just seaside B&B's.
That does give what little accommodation there is more character with a more personal service, but it's still mostly poor quality and a tiny number of rooms. With some motels (luckily a minority) it's been clear that the near 100% occupancy all the time means they just don't care, somebody will rent the room however bad it is.
I don't think it would be much different with a motorhome or camping, official campsites look full and unofficial campsites are everywhere (and many of those campers do trash the place, giving campers and tourists a bad name and building some real dislike of them in the country).
There are also a few high-profile cases of tourists driving on the wrong side of the road (or just badly) and causing accidents and deaths.
The growing (and very understandable) anti-tourist feeling in NZ should correct the problem in the long run, as tourists feel less welcome and tell their friends that.
It would have been better if the government funding for attracting people to NZ (too fast) had instead been spent on infrastructure (including help with building brand-new motels).
Canada still has pricing to the penny, and if you pay with something electronic (like a card, or online transfer) you still pay the exact amount, to the penny.
It's just cash that gets rounded. This means there is no reason for shops to adjust their pricing for rounding (basically impossible anyway as GST/HST/PST tax is added later) since only a minority pay with cash. It's a good way to avoid any side effects of getting rid of the small coins.
Starting from the other end, who would use a DMOZ successor?
Clearly DMOZ hasn't been getting a lot of real user traffic, which I think is because newer users (that's most users) have only ever used search, never been introduced to the concept of a directory.
So, the focus should be on who it's being built for, and how they would find and use it, rather than just replicating something from a different era.
For example, it could be a blog where guest bloggers (or blogger teams) each submit a carefully edited post describing the top sites (and perhaps apps) in a niche, and what's good about them. And then keep the posts up to date.
Quality could be maintained by a moderating team that only accepts the best posts, and ensures that they are maintained (otherwise deleted).
The resulting post when found in a search engine would be more readable, and probably more useful, than a directory listing page.
In turn, Dragon's Den was based on a Japanese show (The Tigers of Money).