That’s part of the reason a moon base could be viable. The sun outputs a reasonable amount of helium 3, which is great for fusion reactions. Unfortunately it tends to sit at the top of our atmosphere and get blown away again. On the moon, it gets captured by the dust in collectable quantities.

I never said it wasn’t useful, just a very low efficiency reactor. Then again, if it was better, it would burn out faster, which would be bad for life on earth.

Even the core only has an output of 200-300W/m^3.

The amusing thing is that the sun is actually quite a shit fusion reactor. It’s power per unit volume is tiny. It just makes it up in sheer volume. A solar level fusion reactor would be almost completely useless to us. Instead we need to go far beyond the sun’s output to just be viable.

It’s like describing one of the mega mining dumper trucks as an “artificial mule”.

IoT can be great. The key is, as you pointed out, to actually have personal control over it.

It also has to account for WAF (wife acceptance factor). If it doesn’t fail gracefully to a dumb version of itself, it’s not to be trusted

A van can’t deal with even remotely muddy grass. I lost count of how many vans I rescued, back when I had my pickup. They are also a lot less effective at dragging a horse trailer etc. Vans also (generally) don’t have back seats. If you’re also having to trek up and down the motorways, then the comfort of the ranger makes a big difference.

They have there place, but they are in the same boat as vans etc. They are commercial vehicles, to do a job, not city runabouts to stroke egos.