> mandatory installation of powerful ventilation systems
In my country that's already been a thing for the last few years. The HRV system is around €1000, so it isn't a major cost for the benefits you get. From this year all newly installed units need to be 90% efficient.
Also "powerful" is probably not needed, the system I have at the lowest speed changes the air in my entire apartment every 3 hours, and is basically the same noise level as a barely audible computer fan.
> A fuse should be put on the hot leg as close to the power entry as possible. The reasoning being that if the fuse pops it removes the hot voltage from as much of the assembly as possible.
This only works if the power system has a defined neutral and live wire. European Schuko plugs do not - as the plugs are reversible - so you need to break both wires to safely cut power to the device.
In the Middle East the Land Cruiser V8 is king. It's not because of looks (although IMO they don't look bad), but what it can do.
Can you use this to overtake someone on the hard shoulder (half covered in sand) and go bumming around sand dunes? That's what Tesla have got to do to win there.
I live in Northern Europe and drive a Prius and have no issues in the winter. Last year we went to visit my wife's grandma, who lives in a 'village' (nearest neighbour 1km away) ~5km down a uneven dirt track which is bad enough in the summer. When we went, there was 30cm of snow on the road, but I had absolutely no issues. I was surprised by how well it handled it.
Sure if I had ended up in a ditch I would have had troubles, but you'd also have issues with a truck. (There aren't many big trees you can use to tow yourself out in this area)
I get that maybe you like trucks, but I don't think there is as much need as you make out (in the winter department - your other points are fair arguments). Modern cars (esp. 4x4) can handle pretty much any road surface, the only case you would need something bigger is for off-road where you need higher clearance.
I bought a used Dell workstation with a 8c16t Xeon E5-2670 and 32GB ECC DDR3 RAM a few years ago. It's a bit outdated now, but it's still faster than the most laptops (for multi core workloads). At the time I had a MacBook Air, so this completely blew it out the water. I remember one time while trying to debug an issue I had 10 docker instances of our CI running (Rails + Cucumber + Firefox) and there was absolutely no performance impact to the desktop experience.
Last year I bought a T470s with 20GB DDR4 and an i7 (U series) as I was mostly working away from home. It's good enough for most of the work I do, but it can be a bit slow at times. The processor just isn't as fast and the integrated graphics struggle with a 4K desktop (I think that's mainly Linux/GNOME being unoptimised though). I haven't noticed it throttling, but my workload usually isn't that CPU intensive.
If you mainly work from home I'd definately suggest building a desktop machine for your needs.
Props to the engineers at BT/OpenReach for making the most of a pair of copper wires. Even at my parents place, built in the 80s, and a mile and a half from the local exchange/cabinet they can get 50mbit down with VDSL2.
However I feel BT as a company needs big changes. They are a monopoly because most people (especially older people) don't realise how easy it is to change. Their prices are consistently higher than competitors, and they get a lot of government incentives.
I now live in Lithuania where most households within city limits can get 1000/1000 FTTH, and even in remote areas you can get decent 4G speeds (50mbit+), and it's costs less than half of what BT charge for the cheapest BT Infinity package. This has all been rolled out in the last few years, and I can't see BT doing anything like that anytime soon in the UK.
I did this when I was at high school with a friend. Basically the place had a shared Windows file system, and the only thing that prevented everyone from viewing it was that it was hidden in the UI. On the drive was lots of data, including some applications in PDF format - completely unprotected - full of personal information of minors.
At the time we had recently covered data protection in IT class, so we wrote up a document explaining what we did, and why it was bad, and gave copies to a few people in prominent positions (principle, head of IT, IT teacher) as well as posting it (with instructions redacted) on an internal message board.
Well of course they didn't take it very well. They threatened to expel us and call the cops, and suspended us for a week until they decided what to do. In the end a well written warning from my friend's parent made them drop the issue and let us back in. I doubt they did anything to change the "security".
I'm not sure if that's true anymore. Last year I switched to Android and paid for some high quality apps, spending more than I have probably ever on Apple. I've noticed that Android free apps are usually more restrictive and pester the user to upgrade more than they do on iOS - I assume Apple ban this, but these dark patterns must work otherwise why would a company tarnish their image with them?
If you look at Android users as a whole, percentage wise of course they will pay less because they are a lot more popular in less well off countries. On the other hand Google's carrier billing support is a lot more extensive than Apple's, so actually being able to pay is less friction.
In my country that's already been a thing for the last few years. The HRV system is around €1000, so it isn't a major cost for the benefits you get. From this year all newly installed units need to be 90% efficient.
Also "powerful" is probably not needed, the system I have at the lowest speed changes the air in my entire apartment every 3 hours, and is basically the same noise level as a barely audible computer fan.