> Amusingly just an hour ago I did a variation of 'pasta with sauce' what would be heart-attack inducing to anyone snobby enough about Italian cuisine: two big onions, chopped, steamed, fried, a bit of soy sauce, leftovers from a veg salad, harissa, tomato paste.
Just declare it as "Indian", "Phillipino" or something other south-Asian and it will be fine. There is a huge variety of cuisines there and there are less self-proclaimed experts on them in the western world.
Some parts of the market need to be killed, and quickly. Wasteful economy is killing the planet, and we need to dial down the produce-buy-throwaway-buy cycle.
There are standards for sizes of screws, washers, motors, cables, plugs, sockets, ...
Just create a bunch more of those standards, e.g. for batteries, legislate their use, done. As a side effect, products become cheaper because parts will then be available off-the-shelf at economy-of-scale prices, and supply problems also become less likely because there will be numerous vendors for each part.
However, there will be two problems: some things, like cases and special moldings are hard to standardize. So I would suggest legislating that 3D-printing instructions (STL, material, finishing steps) be made available as soon as the part itself is unavailable or too expensive. And very innovative parts should be exempt for the first few years, provided they are measurably and provably better than the standardized equivalents and that a new standard is being created from them.
> > The worst part is nobody in charge really cares.
> _Much_ of government spending I've seen in recent years has been towards climate.
Much of the spending of a few western governments.
The majority of the world's governments do nothing except maybe wait for their "climate justice" handouts. And of course, as soon as the first-world nations have ended their dependence on oil and gas, both will get cheaper. So the rest of the world will "pick up the slack" and consume all the rest of the available fossil fuels, because they are getting real cheap now. Far cheaper than any renewable energy sources can ever hope to be since oil/gas-producing nations have to keep the good times (and the buck) rolling, in their own interest (or at least the interest of their ruling class).
What we do need is rather a closure of the world's oil/gas fields and coal mines, in the rather short term, by agreement of the respective governments or by changing those governments until they agree. Yes, this will be ugly.
But anything else is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
There are flat-ish contact surfaces on the bottom of the module that are compressed by a bracket onto the corresponding contact surfaces of the motherboard.
Cork is oak, which is carcinogenic (in different amounts in different parts of the plant). Of course for some things one doesn't usually care about that because drinks such as wine are also stored in carcinogenic oak barrels and contain carcinogenic ethanol among other harmful things, so it doesn't really matter.
Also, corks promote microbiological contamination of various kinds, leading to e.g. the common failings in wine (there is actually a multitude of "cork" faults, not just one): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_fault
I'd prefer any metal or plastic to cork actually. Just because it is "natural" or "traditional" doesn't make it any good.
> At the very least, if a fixed ratio of coin:gold were actually maintained these failings wouldn't have happened
It could still have happened, the mechanism is basically the same as in a bank run. If there isn't enough gold and too much demand for gold payouts, the central bank will run out and the system will explode.
The "other" "abolishment of the gold standard" is actually something different: The transition from commodity money to fiat money. Commodity money is when your money is something of intrinsic value such as gold. Stamping coins in commodity money only serves to assure the holder of weight and purity, but the value of a coin is 1:1 the metal value. In commodity money, it is pointless to mint any coins out of metals other than the precious ones, so that transition is marked by the abolition of actual gold coins. There you transit from intrinsic value to putative ("fiat" means "believe" in latin) value, usually through instilling some kind of trust into that coin by payout guarantees (you may still get some gold if you really want), force of law and guarantees of purchase power (a loaf of bread will always cost some fixed amout, or else...) or just plain trust that it will continue to work as it always has (which is the current state of things). So the actual abolishment of the gold standard was quite some time after the commodity to fiat money transition and just exchanged the "fiat base" of a promised gold payout by plain trust.
However, that "plain trust" can only work if the amount of money in circulation doesn't increase too rapidly compared to the amount of goods and services available and provided. Which is why you really really need strict control of the amount of money in circulation, thus central bank interest rates, austerity and other limitations on "printing" of money.
The EU isn't democratic in that basically every official function is only through multiple indirections dependent on the voters. So the will of the people and the sovereignty of the voters is diluted through a multitude of political backroom deals that are anything but democratic. Just look at how von der Leyen came to her job.
Back in the day, when there was still a communist bloc, this kind of system, a "soviet republic" consisting of a hierarchy of workers councils was the usual example for how you can have elections but not have democracy. Because the hierarchy of councils will dilute any kind of will and sovereignty of the people into the will of the political upper class.
Glass is usually harmless, if you don't use lead or uranium glass. But breakage will lead to harmful shards, which is why many locations such as some schools or party places ban glass bottles.
For storage, use glass bottles. The material of the seal is usually not a problem if there is no contact to the liquid and the seal doesn't crumble. When reusing bottles, make sure to only use fresh or at least good-looking caps. And sterilize things properly (taking into account what the seal is suitable for), because mold and bacteria are far more harmful than common metal or plastic contamination.
"metal" is too unspecific. You usually want stainless steel, preferrably CrNiMo steel (V4A, 1.4401 or similar).
Aluminium bottles are always coated with plastic in the factory, which flakes off and usually isn't really better than plastic-bottle-plastic, sometimes even worse (containing PTFE, BPA, ...). As soon as the coating is gone, aluminium will dissolve in the water, and aluminium salts are known to be "not good", in addition to the influence on taste. Same for copper, in addition to the hassle to keep copper clean. Steel bottles are better because proper kitchen-quality stainless steel (the one with Molybdenum in it, in addition to Chromium and Nickel) doesn't leech out into common drinks (including salty hot broth, which would stain CrNi steel) and doesn't need inner coating.
Also, politicians can get more and more creative at excessive spending, at some point even outspending any kind of economic growth. And even if they don't outspend, at some point inflation comes along and kicks things over the edge.
The failing of the gold standard was that it never limited money in circulation. Gold standards in practically all economies allowed for unlimited amounts of money to be printed at the whim of the central banks. Just that the central banks had to guarantee to pay out the set value in gold (or sometimes silver). At some point ppl realized that there wasn't enough gold in the vaults, which is why trust in the value of money (which is the actual backing force) vanished and hyperinflation happened.
So the gold standard failed because it was bound to fail. It was bound on the false illusion that every penny in circulation was backed up by a gold brick, which it wasn't.
Provide drivers using the old model and a set of instructions to enable that.
Edit: I guess instructions won't even be necessary, as far as I've understood, there will just be a warning. And users are already trained to just ignore those.