I was looking for a nice coffee table recently. I decided to try the unfinished wood furniture store, most of it made by the Amish or Menonites. I'm handy enough to stain but not equiped to build a table myself so I figured I'd save a few bucks doing the finish. Most the tables weren't our style but finally found one that looked great and was some real quality oak. Asked for the price and just about crapped my pants. We stopped by Ikea on the way home and bought probably the nicest table they had for a quarter of the price. The nicer Ikea table will be able to make it through any moving we do in the future but it most certainly won't be an heirloom like my parent's old oak stuff.
I want try my hand at some furniture building in the future but just don't have the space or some of the standard tools for it now.
You could do something very basic with discrete components for controlling wireless lighting systems but system starts to get out of hand when you need to have a bunch of lights nearby. It's much cheaper, simpler, and smaller to reduce it down to a chip and move to a digital RF system. I've got a bunch of RF controlled outlets in my house but it's just about the dumbest system you can buy. It's on par with the typical remote garage door opener. You can program the on/off buttons on the remote for each outlet but that's as far as it goes. I'd like to be able to remotely control them away from home or be able to give each light or outlet its own schedule and that requires either a central controller or each device having network access for network time and remote control.
Interestingly, a friend rented a house in college once that had a system of low voltage light switches that ran back to a cabinet filled with relays that controlled light switches and outlets. No major benefit to the user other than a control panel in the master bedroom that lets you control the exterior and some interior lights. It was a neat system but definitely outdated. I'd imagine a retrofit would be to drop all of the relays for solid state and provide a networked controller to monitor status and provide remote control.
Raising the age for tobacco is a good first step. Next is to raise prices on traditional tobacco products and incentivize smoking cessation products like gum and patches. Vapes can help with getting rid of the smoking part but it can be even easier to keep using them as compared to cigarettes. The health effects are so much less that, I'm guessing, many people stop smoking by switching to vapes and then never stop vaping. If you remove a lot of the obvious downsides to smoking (tar, smell, price, etc) and add in tasty flavors, why would anyone want to quit?
Contribute the fine towards smoking cessation programs. A teenager doesn't need their money returned to them if they get caught buying tobacco products.
I feel like destroyers are large enough that taking your eyes off the "road" for a moment to adjust controls is perfectly fine. Ships like that have radar systems to detect other boats. These things could probably pilot themselves with enough sensors. They move slow enough in crowded waterways and have actual radar (versus lidar or cameras) so seeing the speed and direction of other things around them is already built-in. Relying on a bunch of tired people to work together to steer a ship seems like a worse idea than having just one well-rested captain that can sit back and observe an auto-pilot.
Having a thoughtful default UI along with the ability to display any control or status on the screen would seem like a better idea for central control station. A captain could pull up their own configuration for the control panel. During an emergency, they could fallback to a default view that could be referenced by operating procedure documents. Give the ability to delegate controls to other stations but do not allow multiple stations to control the same input, that seems like an idiotic idea.
You could use a Zynq FPGA that has a built-in dual core ARM processor. It has 512K of L2 cache and 256K of memory, more than enough to basically copy the same architecture into that design. It also has ADCs built in so you can implement analog joysticks too. It's also probably fast enough to build a graphics processor in logic. Only thing you may want to keep is the sound processor because there is no built-in DAC so you would need to implement that anyway.
I never said a nation state couldn't attempt this but just that if you try really hard to lock down your hardware, it becomes very expensive and risky. You may be better off attacking the system in another way other than cracking it open and soldering your payload in there.
I want try my hand at some furniture building in the future but just don't have the space or some of the standard tools for it now.