Uhm, the thing about science is that the only way to improve on the science is more science.

An opinion or pointing out a possible flaw doesn't advance science, but may be a part of future science that advances things further.

But if you don't have a solid grasp on the science done so far, then you're just having opinions that are unlikely to make much of an impact or be considered unless you have substantial credentials in the field.

Absolutely. It's a definite problem for people.

Well done on doing that. The forces can be a great route for the right people.

It's worth hanging around the personal finance groups for your country. I know the UK one has really solid advice, but the UK is quite tightly regulated on these things.

Oh, and thanks for asking. How are you getting on?

You sound to me like someone who is, however, facing and acknowledging their fears.

Try not to live like a monk, but now work to increase your income at each opportunity. Work like an immigrant. Make yourself a financial safety net. Once you know you can survive a year, or even a few months, without work you're starting to be able to relax.

Take every training program or government scheme or tax break/benefit you can get. Don't be too humble.

I went from poor terror to comfortable, and possibly am a paper millionaire now. I spent years working out how I'd reach the end of the month.

And I'm sorry to hear about your Dad. I know people in this sort of situation and it's been so tough for them. But it really does get better if you just grasp your opportunities, take am active interest in your work, and crack on.

Check out personal finance subs about the path to financial independence. Once you achieve that the risks become easier to take. I spent twenty years working towards it.

Yeah, I was a victim of bad circumstances and needed to make sure they didn't get worse.

Winner mentality, risk it all on red style, can bring massive success but you just don't hear from the failures.

I'm old enough to know people who claimed to be making a fortune on crypto or forex or back in the late nineties with tech shares. Yet so often their lifestyle doesn't change and they one day go quiet. If pressed, some tell you they lost a pile. Then, as a result of the burn, they don't try again. That's loser mentality.

Pretty good! I worked on basic stability for the first ten years of my career, preferring a stable job in a corporate. That gave me, eventually, a skillset that was hot in the late nineties job market.

I also by then had a girlfriend and we had a house that was pleasant but not a big stretch. I then worked ten years contracting but although I enjoyed some pf the extra money I banked plenty and resisted big liabilities I saw some colleagues take on. I banked plenty.

Which meant I could take the next risk. Starting a business. Bootstrapped as other people's capital (like VCs) wouldn't have been available to me at that stage. The business made an effective loss for me for years but nowadays, another decade and a half, it's running well.

I'm by no means rich. Setting up a business, unless you snaffle an amazing sector, rarely makes you a millionaire. You can't spend loads either. You just have to work it hard and nurture something bigger. Eventually though it starts to mature.

So you can see how I've grabbed opportunities and climbed gently, avoiding the steep and risky route until I was ready to step it up a little.

Aaah, the pleasure of failing when it isn't a big risk to you.

When you're poor, failure can mean living on the streets. You simply can't take that many risks. I had friends who would try and get me to take risks, but if it all went wrong they had their parents to stay with. I had nobody.

So I didn't fear people laughing at me for failing. I feared being destitute.

We could stop using huge amounts of oil to create the huge amounts of food required to feed cattle that become our beef meat. And pets. Dear God, why are we buying carnivores as pets? We can do so much that would help and all we'll miss out on are cheap beef burgers. I can handle that.

We cut the forests down in Britain a looong time ago and have been growing more in recent years. Urbanisation in the UK has barely changed in the last fifty years, so the correlation is poor.

Of course, if you can suggest that we're taking more measurents in cities than in rural spaces than we did them you might have a point. Are we?

I guess because some people really need to live the idea that everything corporate is evil by default?

They seem like a pretty big company. If they're winging it on music rights the bills are usually pretty impressive. I do work with image licensing and have seen bills for $5000 per image from Getty. They're vicious. I doubt music firms are any less generous.

So you're saying O'Reilly, a major publisher, decides to just wing it? On what basis?

Nah...music licensing is pretty straightforward. And expensive if you don't do it properly.

I sometimes wonder which other scientific projects have been named after biscuits...