Because the US moves civilians out of an active war zone?

If one is just download encodes off of usenet so doesn't have the originals, and one is content with the limitations of encodes, great. But here we are talking about tools for people who are encoding their own media (and sadly, from personal experience, I consider backed up ISOs to have a longer shelf life than many of optical discs, I have media I backed up 20 years ago now that still works, while the optical discs have degraded. Hard Disks die as well, but there are effective means of mitigating that).

2. "easy enough" (this is a bit hyperbole, but i've done it) to take an iso and expose the playlists one wants as individual .m2ts files, and then everything recognizes it the same as mkv

did this using a fuse fs. drop all isos in a dir with a metadata file to list the playlists one wants exposed with how one wants them named, and the fuse fs turns each iso into a virtual directory populated by files named .m2ts that corresponds to the playlist you wanted for it (work for seamless branching as well).

3. if saving space is so important to you, yes, none of this will apply, I still think the energy costs need to be factored in, to understand how much money one is saving / spending to accomplish that space savings. If one is going to be storing a digital iso backup of the discs they purchase (or borrow), what I listed in #2 is the best overall.

Is the $100-$200 savings worth the extra time spent (also computing/gpu electrical costs.

There's a reasonable argument that the cost in electricity would be measurable, perhaps small, but still measurable, if it's 1c per movie, not such a big deal, if its 50c a movie, one didn't actually save any money in practice. if one wants to software encode to get the best results, cost is going to be more than if one is ok with gpu encoding and just ok results from fixed encoders. (I would hazzard software encode at reasonable quality is going to be in the 25-50c cost if paying 25c a kwh)

If one lives in an area where electricity is cheap but storage is more expensive, the calculation is different.

Now, I'd note that there is one thing that storage being cheap can't directly solve. The ability to keep them online at a time (i.e. many computers are limited to the number of connected devices). In that world, one can argue that reducing that complexity also has value.

2) its very easy/straightforward to take a honeybee larve and raise it to be a queen (i.e. let it feed on royal jelly).

If you find animal research to be problematic, none of this changes anything. However, this did nothing to hurt honeybee colonies in north america.

This seems much more doable today than in the past as machines boot in moments. Switching from secure "xbox mode" to free form PC mode, would be barely a bump.

Now, I see one major difference, heterogenous vs homogenous hardware (and the associated drivers that come with that). In the xbox world, one is dealing with a very specific hardware platform and a single set of drivers. In the PC world (even in a trusted secure boot path), one is dealing with lots of different hardware and drivers that can all have their exploits. If users are more easily able to modify their PCs and set of drivers one, I'd imagine serious cheaters would gravitate to combinations they know they can exploit to break the secure/trusted boot boundary.

I wonder if there are other problems.

It shouldn't matter if a country's territory is occupied or not if nuclear weapons are the ultimate deterrent.

Ukraine has invaded Russia here and there during the war even though Russia has nuclear weapons.

The argument is weak, because in general the countries that have nuclear weapons wouldn't be invaded even if nuclear weapons did not exist.

"The courts just take issue with him naming his AI system as the sole author and himself as the copyright owner."

you can't claim a non human as the "author" and claim the material is copyrightable.

the "author" (not the AI) was trying to make a legal point/hack and the courts shot him down.

I'm not saying AI art should or shouldn't be copyrightable. One can argue the inputs into the AI generator are copyrightable, but if the output isn't deterministic translation of the input, its a different argument.