When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare for your family are dependent on your income, you may find yourself facing very difficult decisions. Most parents will risk whatever legal ramifications to care for their kids and that's inherent moral and ethical, even if the downstream outcome is not. That is because it is the socioeconomic system rather than the individual who is acting immorally.

> The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it.

This is an infantile view. The law is a framework and there are lots of circumstances where breaking it is not only excusable, it's the only moral action.

The verb to tinker doesn’t appear until the mid-17th century, first meaning to work as a tinker and only later coming to mean what you're familiar with.

So while the root word’s sound-shape is debated, the order of senses is clear: the Traveller sense comes first, the modern “casual repair” sense comes later and was derived from it. This is the etymological order given in all sources, eg https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tinker

> they're probably due for some self-reflection on what offends their sensibilities.

Or maybe what they're willing to accept?

Eh, this is a very particular and long-standing racist term, and the meaning used by the authors is derived from the slur, so it's not incidental.

It is actually the only thing that keeps me up at night. I am crew on a lifeboat and need to live within a certain distance from the boathouse, otherwise I would move tomorrow. The RNLI is too important a part of my life to leave behind otherwise. I may be able to afford some land higher up (60m+ in the future).

> I always wanted to do the same (be self-sufficient in such ways).

I am definitely not self-sufficient (especially not socially)! I could maybe take care of my family for one calendar year (one growing season and one winter), but it's a maybe. If we're talking about a situation where people are physically (violently) competing for resources, then I'd be in the same boat as everyone else (by design, I'd add - I have no desire to be the lone survivor behind a fence or whatever while other families starve).

> I probably will never be living like that (unless homelessness count, bleh), but good for you, I envy you. :)

Thanks! It actually happened because I gave up on living in a city. Certainly, there's a lot of people I knew in SF/Bay Area, London, and Dublin who could do what I did overnight (probably even as a side project), but don't, so I don't think funding is the limiting factor for most.

I hope things work out for you. I know it's trite to say online, but if you decide to do it, it's certainly a path you can take. It will involve sacrificing other paths not taken, though - the bill for opportunity cost escapes no-one.

I don't believe that world civilisation will collapse (at least not in any way that can be prepared for), but I have moved out of the city, begun to farm organically, and have a plan to cook and live without mains power or fuel for months on end. I know people think I'm a nutjob, but I've also seen first-hand whole cities who thought that progress was a one-way street end up in terrible circumstances.

That said, I'm not an alarmist. I am a founder, put a sizeable amount of my wealth into the global stock market, drive cars, fly (outside of COVID-19) to various places, and - most riskily of all, IMO - live only 1.6m above the high water mark/strand line of the sea.

That is a very normal setup.

> Worse, they'll start to become unreliable due to the number of operations being performed. So you'll end up with a test suite that takes potentially multiple hours to run, and may periodically fail just because.

This is called flakiness and is generally a symptom not to be ignored, as it is almost always indicative of bigger issues. It's rare that flakiness is limited to test environments. Instead it's much more likely that whatever your smoke tests are experiencing is a something end-users are also intermittently hitting.

> The feedback loop becomes so slow that it's not helpful during actual coding.

Devs can write their own unit tests when working on their assigned tasks. Smoke tests are designed to run when you're trying to integrate those changes into the existing codebase. At that point, you have the calculus all wrong. Smoke tests slow down devs enough that they don't merge broken code into production. That is a useful release gate unto itself.

If unit tests pass but smoke tests fail, then often (the vast majority of the time in my experience) the issue is that either the dev didn't understand the task or, more often, didn't understand the system they were integrating into.

It has been for over 20 years now, since October 2000.

They are also regulations. You can't opt-out of the patent system.

> You can weigh the benefits or lack thereof and chooses to opt-in or opt-out.

What is your proposed mechanism to opt-out? Do you mean that an inventor can choose not to apply for a patent? If so, that's not an opt-out of the patent system. You are still subject to all other valid patents.

> Regulations are a government-created burden.

Including patent regulations. It seems you support the regulations that you consider "good" and call them incentives.

Environmental and consumer rights regulations are both regulations and incentives in exactly the way patents are. They are enforced by the state and incentivise certain behaviours.

> You can't opt out of a regulation.

True. As stated, you can't opt-out of patent regulations either.

In the UK, cookies used for only that purpose don't require consent. In their cookie policy, you can see they don't ask for permission to set such cookies - they rely on a different legal basis: https://www.blog.gov.uk/cookies/

I do have a new fear of drowning in an elevator, though: https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/01/05/young-couple-drowns-i...

Simply Britain and Ireland (or Ireland and Britain) is far more commonly used if referring to the archipelago.