shatnersbassoon

what do you recommend instead?

IANAL (L=lumberjack) but it's clearly going to be cheaper if you can just chop it down, right? Quicker and less equipment required, less danger to life from having to climb and wield a chainsaw in an elevated position. Also, if you are interested in getting long planks out of the trunk, you would not want to cut it down progressively.

I think one of the blockers to this is a very high risk of bird strikes.

It's enough explosive to cause a 2m high tsunami in the estuary, iirc. Not an option.

2 related expressions: 1. Creeping Determinism - the idea that even magical leaps forward were somehow inevitable and were anticipated. 2. Nihil Admirari - the idea that wisdom is anticipating every possible thing that could happen, therefore a wise person would never be surprised.

But I lump both these together as the *"Wiseass Movable Feast"*

If you go to the Bolivian part of Lake Titicaca (home of the Bolivian navy), there is a statue with a sword pointing West saying something along the lines of "We are going to take back what is ours".

`TELETUBBIES = TeletubbiesCheat` Intriguing... what does this do?

It's the Scunthorpe problem all over again

It's presented in Gigawatts here, but I expect the actual metric is probably something like "Gigawatts available for 99th centile of duration of demand peaks", as this would allow you to talk about capacity in the same units as grid supply and demand. The whole point of grid batteries is for near-instant availability, so total energy available is moot if you can't access it right away - therefore a metric of energy would be less useful. Anyway, that's my speculation.

There's quite a big difference between the DNA you leave in a forensic sense all around you (which would take a lot of effort and expense for someone to gather against your will) versus serving it up on a plate in a format that is trivially searchable for close matches against any relatives. The value is in the fact that millions of people's DNA is gathered in the same place in the same format, not the individual value of your DNA. It's a classic network effect.

Given the nature of the service, you should probably treat it as inherently pseudonymous. You're handing over irrevocable genetic data which will link you to relatives. Whatever their data protection assurances are, you have to imagine the worst case scenario - massive data leakage. And if this happens then you will in all likelihood be identifiable.

"When a failsafe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe."

J. Gall