Unfortunately most commercial farms aren’t putting in what they’re taking out, even with the industrial fertilizers. Most of the industrial fertilizers are just nitrogen, potassium, and phosphates, often as a liquid. You are absolutely right that you can’t take and never return; that’s why in pre-industrial revolution times, people would rotate fields between crops, and lying fallow/being used for grazing (where sheep, cattle, etc. were leaving free fertilizer) You also ended up with fewer years where all your crops got wiped out by a single pest, because you weren’t farming just one thing. Efficiency in farming–esp. monoculture–is great for profits, not so great for the land itself.

Good news is that good water treatment plants will pull phosphate out of the waste water.

Eh. High levels of phosphates end up running off fields into waterways, and then you get things like algae blooms. Waste water treatment plants will clean up runoff that goes into the sewers and storm drains, but it’s not really cleaning up entire rivers. IIRC, that used to be a much more significant problem; I remember water in rivers near where I grew up–which was all surrounded by farms–often had white, sludgy scum anywhere that the current was forming eddies. If I remember correctly the high levels of that white shit was due to worse regulations governing agricultural run-off.

Under that criteria, there are a grand total of zero areas that can accommodate them. Same goes for dogs.

But that’s a stupid criteria, because cats are tamed, and thrive indoors.

Hope that helps.

Fuck.

Ouch, man. Why you gotta attack me like that?

If someone intentionally caused harm to any of my cats, I live near a large national forest, and once you get a few hundred yards off a trail, no one is going to find a body.

Who tf gets a pet cat and doesn’t let it outside?

People that love their cats and don’t want them to die young. Outdoor cats live an average of 2-5 years, indoor-only cats live an average of 10-15 years. By allowing cats outside, they’re exposed to pathogens, parasites, and dangers that they wouldn’t otherwise experience. In my area, there are coyotes, bobcats, rattlesnakes, hawks, and owls, all of which will quite happily make a meal of a cat. There are also cars; they don’t tend to be able to stop on a dime.

fertiliser is applied in tightly controlled doses based on aerial analysis

Gotta say, this should be a huge red flag for everyone. Soil quality is declining sharply, and fertilizers simply aren’t making up the difference. Switching to robots farming will almost certainly accelerate this.

Use some Rokset on all your fasteners; the only way to break the threadlocker is with heat, and heat would also destroy the bodywork. So you could still replace damaged panels, but you couldn’t steal them.

a) I’m not sure about trusting second hand parts

It’s pretty much plug n’ play for wiring harneses. If you are placing the replacement while removing the original one, it’s hard to go wrong. The wiring harness that I bought for my CBR was a little wonky; the service manual covers 2007-2012, but they made some very minor changes for '11-'12. One of those changes was moving a single pin where the harness connects to the ECU. The result was that I had an engine code–knock sensor malfunction–and I had to re-pin that single wire. It was a bit of a pain in the ass. It was annoying mostly because the person that sold it didn’t realize that there was a difference.

Lots of 2nd hand motorcycle parts are just fine. Things that are damaged in crashes are usually catastrophically damaged.

multi-part disassembly and - more critically - correct reassembly challenges me.

That’s fair. I’m in the process of trying to turn a naked sport bike into a cafe racer, and just to change the headlight assembly, I need to remove the wheel and then the fork. It should be a 10 minute job, but instead it’s several hours. When I was checking valve clearances on my CBR, I ended up having to nearly remove the engine to get to the cam shafts. I hadn’t thought I was particularly mechanically inclined, but I guess I kind of am?

I used to have a fairly large collection of skulls that I’d found while walking around in the woods.

Not sure what ever happened to them… Probably lost them in one of my many moves.

I dunno, bourbon is nice too. And it has the benefit of usually being a lot less expensive than a Caol Ila, Bunnahabhain, Ardbeg, or Lagavulin. Rye whiskey is another one.

But Jack Daniels can fuck right off.

Just ask him what he’s doing when she makes those noises, because you want to try it out on your girlfriend (or have your boyfriend do it to you, either/or, I ain’t gonna judge).

They’re usually not too bad, if you get a working one off eBay. Buying a new loom from the manufacturer? Yeah, that’s a few grand.

At a certain point, it ends up feeling easier to just replace the whole damn wiring harness.

I enjoy working on engines when it’s not urgent, and it’s fairly low stakes if things take 5x as long as I plan, or I need more parts than I thought. OTOH, it’s incredibly stressful when my motorcycle throws an engine code that tells me there’s an electrical fault, and I know that I’m going go end up needing to tear it down, go through the wiring loom, and not be able to ride for a few weeks when the weather is finally getting really nice.

I understand it as a hobby/passion, even though the old cars are far less efficient, die sooner, and are less safe than now. The only way they were better, IMO, was that they were less complicated, and thus easier to wrench on. It’s significantly harder to build hot rods or street racing cars now than the way you could in the 80s and earlier.

The lead was a lubricant, and old engines ran better, and longer, on leaded gas.

There were two issues. First, tetraethyl lead increased the effective octane level. That, in turn, reduced the probability of pre-ignition, e.g., the fuel-air mixture igniting before the compression cycle was completed. Higher octane allows for higher compression, which is more efficient. The other issue was the valves specifically; the lead provided a ‘cushion’ between the valves and the valve seats, which minimized valve wear.

The octane issue is easily solved by both better refining or by adding alcohol. It was known that you could add alcohol to gas to improve octane rating even when TEL was first added, but TEL could be patented, and alcohol couldn’t. The valve issue has largely been solved by better metallurgy and manufacturing.

The one are where it hasn’t been solved is small aircraft. Some small planes still use leaded gas, and it’s mostly for the octane boost. TEL can give them a better octane rating than alcohol or better refinement can, which allows them to operate at much high compression. Take that away, and the engines are too underpowered to keep the plane in the air. Over 150,000 small airplanes still use leaded AvGas; thankfully, newer turboprop planes and all jet planes mostly use Jet A or Jet B fuel, which is closer to kerosene.

In theory, I think that you could convert older cars to run on unleaded fuels, but you would need new parts rather than OEM.