Honestly if you have enough disposable income for an Alexa, may as well get the Alexa controlled lightbulbs, power switches, coffee machines, massage chairs, toasters, sprinklers, dildos, and cat feeder.
At least give the burglar a good time while they're there.
to whit - try googling for 'fuel efficient tools' - you'll get plenty of sites about fuel efficient [i]vehicles[/i] before you begin to even see anything about tools.
You clearly don't work in landscaping or yard maintenance then. You may not use any of your gas powered tools frequently - but even here in Arizona there's thousands and thousands of people with pickup trucks full of gas-powered leaf blowers, weed wackers, chainsaws and so on that go out - a veritable army - to keep all that nice landscaping looking nice.
Outside maybe mom and pop businesses, any corporate, retail or industrial location is going to be paying people to come out and mow their lawns, trim their trees, blow away debris and so on. You have a storm come through and an army of landscapers will follow to clear fallen debris and trees. In my state - the only 'clean air' enforcement I'm aware of is that state employed landscapers cannot kick up too much dust on severe pollution days.
I can't toss any hard numbers of how much gasoline they use - but I'll gladly bet even one pickup full of landscapers user far more in a few days than you spend on all your gas powered vehicles and tools do in a month easily.
There is nowhere near as much pressure on tool manufacturers to improve their fuel efficiency as their is on auto manufacturers. There definitely isn't any pressure on landscapers to buy fuel efficient tools, nor any incentives. Of course there are less landscaping outfits than drivers - but if there somehow was as many, the effects on pollution would be devastating.
The more 'practical' (as you can get) plan I'd heard was not to mine a planet - to far away and all - but to capture some chunk of rock and bring it close to Earth for us to exploit.
That was one of the big reasons why we were sending craft out to passing asteroids to see what they're made of. Presumably once we have said rock - we could ship the bare minimum into space and use whats on the rock as raw materials to build out the facilities needed.
I also wouldn't be surprised if Musk doesn't have 'mine space rocks' on his SpaceX bucket list somewhere.
The Prime Day thing is pretty skeezy - tons of no-name brand items who's prices were inflated for the sale day so they could "slash prices" and offer you the low low discounted price of what it normally sells at - but with the bigger price it never sold out crossed out. It was entirely an exercise in preying on peoples gullibility, who saw these huge "discounts" and made impulse buys thinking this super short special shopping day was saving them money.
And of course, you had to buy the prime membership in the first place. You're by no means saving money on prime - you're usually paying more for the same goods - all you're getting is the "free" two day shipping.
Sport and racing games in particularly are ridiculously popular. Normal people play plenty of games - it's just that the typical platform of choice is their smart phone.
Gaming isn't the only reason you'd want a 'beefier' laptop though. I ended up needing to buy a laptop to get some 3d work/editing done on the go - it came down to an expensive under-spec'd ultra thin, a chunkier gaming laptop with 'passable' specs, or an insanely expensive "workstation" with a mobile quadro in it.
I ended up getting a gaming laptop - I was surprised to find opening the thing was as simple as undoing a single scew and using a shim to pop some plastic latches and I was in. 32 GB of ram and a 500GB M2 SSD later I had a laptop that hit most of my needs - still need to tinker with bios settings to get it to recognize the original HDD.
The laptop out of the box ran like garbage - between the slow 2.5" HDD, the small memory (how is 4GB still typical today?) and the crapware every Laptop vendor shoves on their machines the thing was barely functional unless I let it sit for an hour or two after booting. The upgrades and a fresh install of windows fixed these things - but I can't imagine how I'd ever be able to do these fixes on a 'super thin' laptop, by design they're so densely packed and everything is so custom fit that more often than not there are NO sockets for you to upgrade things, everything is soldered or glued in place! You'd be lucky if you could even swap the hard drive out. Not that a bit of solder would deter anyone with the mind to do it - but your average Joe or Jane doesn't stand a chance.
The main draw I see to these thin laptops for manufacturers, is that being so hard if not impossible to upgrade you're forced to upgrade sooner rather than later.
Or perhaps you were referring to the part about 'not participating in anti-competitive behavior' making it to harder for the 'small guys' to compete? I imagine it would make it nearly impossible for a small ISP to operate if it couldn't be a monopoly. That makes perfect sense then, as being a monopoly means they wouldn't need to compete at all!/s
Funny, the most common thing I hear about problems competing when it comes to the 'small guys' is the 'big guys' pushing them out with every dirtytrickthey can think of.
Following some ground rules for being fair to your customers is probably far easier compared to competing with incumbent big name ISPs. Besides, I bet small ISPs don't do enough business to make screwing over customers a valid business strategy. I fail to see how it'd be overly demanding of a small company to expect them to provide their advertised speed and service quality, to not demand they pay extra to use certain websites, etc.
No, I think the companies that stand to lose the most are big ISPs. Perhaps they should have dealt more honestly with the American people and we wouldn't need to legislate them into behaving.
I've never 'ghosted' an employer, but I have 'ghosted' plenty of unsolicited recruiters and potential employers - often for sending obviously mass dispatched offers.
If someone is looking to hire me, they can contact me directly - properly addressing me by name, and offering employment actually relevant to my career.
The most recent recruiters I've ignored were trying to get me to move to China to teach English. Considering I'm a software engineer, there was no particular appeal to such a job beyond possibly being near enough to Shenzhen to indulge my interest in electronics.
I'm going to hope they aren't nearly as draconic as that sounds, and that it was more meant that if they catch people making use of disposable plastics and not re-using them. Maybe they're going to go digging through peoples trash?
I'm surprised to find I'm not the only one who will re-use the same 'disposable' water bottle for several years. The Aquafina bottle I have at my desk is from 2015 - I go to a local 'water and ice' (a chain here in Arizona) and buy RO water to fill it and several jugs at $0.25/gallon. Granted, while the tap water out here is perfectly safe to drink, it isn't very palatable straight from the tap. Filtering it takes the canal taste out of the water.
As I understand it - the soy insulation was primarily made from tasty soy, thus easily palatable.
From the article it sounds like they're taking the celullose alone and mixing it into things like paint or concrete. I think eating concrete is a bit beyond rodents capabilities at least.
While that's likely true for this movie, OTHER Star Wars movies made back their costs in theaters and THEN went on to make even more from merchandising.
I'd be satisfied with making my money back and some profit besides on one of my projects. But companies like Disney tend to be greedier - why make another 'flop' like Solo and only make bank on merchandising, when they could make another Force Awakens and make bank on both ticket sales AND merchandising?
Though I expect Star Wars Mania 3.0 has started to cooldown at this point, and that likely played a part in Solo's poor performance - unless they build up more hype for the next movie, I'd be curious to see how whatever is coming next does.
Granted, I see maybe one movie every 6 months or so. Stuff like Star Wars hasn't really grabbed me, and it being owned and run by Disney now isn't helping.
This is the danger behind Youtube and Googles decision to not interact with anyone using it's service at any level beyond automated messages - the toxicity and politics that drove this are entirely of their own manufacture. People were left to interpret their actions by these automated messages and vague press statements, their bots inscrutable actions which can have significant financial impact on it's users. These users are left to draw their own conclusions about Youtubes intent. Nasim seems to have drawn the conclusion that Youtube was out to get her (from her latest videos mentioning the demonetization of her exercise videos), and she went on the offensive.
I can't help but wonder that if Youtube offered any form of direct, non-automated user support - a hotline, a chat room, a ticket system - this person might have been able to work things out with them and taken a more peaceful route. But we'll never know.
All bets are certainly off when talking about desktops - but stores mainly push laptops these days. I think my local electronics stores combined stock maybe half a dozen different desktops on shelves. The offerings for laptops on the other hand for even one store is well over 3 dozen or so options - not counting Apple products.
The biggest features pushed at the Best Buy near me was touch screens, a wacom pen you can use with certain laptop/tablet hybrids (sold separately of course), and MS Office bundles.
For specs you got tghe CPU model/name with MAYBE it's speed, an Intel graphics model number (with zero context on differences between one to another) the amount of ram in the system and if it had a small SSD or a 1tb HDD (some had both). There were two "gaming" latpops - in that they had an actual discrete graphics card rather than onboard Intel gpu.
Some common ground numbers could be posted with PC specs though - boot times, average FPS in a current popular game, load time of MS Word, time to copy a large file... that probably covers most of the needs of a typical user.
It's likely impossible to walk into a Best Buy or Fry's Electronics and purchase any off the shelf computer that is incapable of meeting the needs of 'joe or jane average'. They can all run a browser (meeting social media needs), they can all run the MS Office Suite (meeting productivity needs) and they are more than capable of running casual entertainment - movies, music, streaming media, and casual games. Even a chromebook can meet a users needs - Microsoft has had cloud versions of their productivity software available for several years now. Most other 'business' productivity tools are cloud apps as well, such as Slack, Basecamp, Trello etc
People who have specific performance needs aren't a 'Joe or Jane average'. Gaming, Media production, engineering/scientific R&D, and so on are all niche requirements compared to the rest of the 'average' population. Other than those who need performance for their hobbies, most niche computer needs will be fulfilled by an IT employee or department (or a consultant) that is paid to find and purchase sufficient hardware to meet employee performance needs - and this is handled as a cost of doing business.
I'm mostly pulling from the novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, as he wrote it to convey what it was like to be an immigrant at that time (early 1900's) - atleast while I was in school it was part of required reading in US History.
As different waves of immigrants came to America - the Germans, Irish, Slavs - those who came before discriminated against them based on the culture, language, and existing stereotypes they brought with them. They were the "other" to those previous immigrants who, granted, went through the same thing; now it was their chance to be the one holding the big stick.
Issues mostly boiled down to being different from those who came before, and the fact that they were willing to work for incredibly cheap wages threatened the job security of those who had come to grips on the value of their work, had joined unions and so on.
Without the news coverage, I'd have to question the effectiveness of this kind of protest. If you're cutting the lanes down to just one, the guy immediately behind your bike is going to get the full impact of your protest too.
Every other car behind the first is just going to think the car in front is being an ass and won't see anything in regards to your protest.
I am a software engineer rather than an audio hardware engineer, but working alongside such engineers and developing software for tuning audio equipment I know a little bit about what they're doing. As I understand it, our products handle frequencies a little bit under 20Hz and a little bit past 20kHz - essentially a band pass is in place on the input to prevent anything higher infrequency which can damage the set (there may be additional filters, we have a digital signal processor for example that lets you apply and tweak filters on your audio). For things like Subwoofers it may have a low pass filter instead of a band pass)
In the case of an advertisement trying to dog whistle commands to an Alexa device - it shouldn't work with our stuff. 20Hz to 20kHz is within the (typical) audible range of human hearing.
I'd also go googling for homemade napalm, but I'm probably already on a list for searching for homemade flamethrowers as is. I can at least justify it as being interested in Musk's toys when the FBI party van shows up at my door.
If this were the case the cheapo version of Musks toy would have been legislated out of existence. Musk has packaged a cheap off the shelf weed burner in what looks like an airsoft rifle, and called it a 'Flamethrower' to up the price by like 25x as much.
For $500 and a bit of googling, you can put together something closer to an actual, deadly style flamethrower.
I'll even save you the bandwidth of using google: For the price of this book and the materials needed (quoted as costing around $450) you could have a better flamethrower than what musk has. Shoots flames over 40ft... that's extremely close to the effective range of an American M1A1 Flamethrower, the kind used in WW2. I found it when searching for 'Home made flamethrower' on the first page of results.
Last I looked baseball bats can be used as a toy. So can flammable substances, in things like chemistry kits, toy rockets, fireworks, pop caps for toy guns... I could go on.
This thing is advertised as a toy, but it can still be used as an extremely expensive propane torch for the things one would typically use a 500,000 BTU torch for. You've already been informed of several such uses for it. I'm willing to suspect these things are exactly that, a weed burner dressed up and sold for roughly 25x as much as they normally cost.
Some danger exists yes, but the potential danger of "things you can buy for $500 or less" is ten times the size of an olympic swimming pool. Elon is just pouring a shot glass of water in it.
If one wanted to commit serious arson felonies, a trip to home depot or harbor freight would be a far easier, faster, and cheaper option to get similar results. Or just drop by the gas station on your way home and buy a canister of gas and a book of matches.
Being more worried about an over priced weed burner in comparison, is just Musk's advertising campaign succeeding. Boy look at all that free press he's gotten already.
I'd like to question the safety issues of storing flamethrower fuel in a gun safe. They do a very poor job of preventing fire related damage from the outside to it's contents - placing volumes of flammable chemicals in an enclosed space with no thermal protection qualities seems like you're asking for a bomb with guns and ammunition for shrapnel.
I'd say just keep the fuel where you'd keep your spare propane tanks for your grill. Kids using it to start fires is about as likely as them using a propane tank for it - it's not like it's ACTUAL flamethrower fuel (napalm infused gasoline).
And lets be honest - not referring to you specifically Antique Geekmeister, but to others trying to act like this is the next 'Streetsweeper' firearm - these aren't flamethrowers like you see in action flicks or WW2 documentaries. The ACTUAL weapons have effective ranges of around 20m and can launch ignited fuel (again, napalm infused gasoline) up to 43m away.
These toys Musk is peddling shoot out an (impressive looking) propane flame up to maybe a meter, meaning it's little more than a dressed up weed burner you could buy at Harbor Freight for $20. Yeeehaw.
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Honestly if you have enough disposable income for an Alexa, may as well get the Alexa controlled lightbulbs, power switches, coffee machines, massage chairs, toasters, sprinklers, dildos, and cat feeder. At least give the burglar a good time while they're there.
to whit - try googling for 'fuel efficient tools' - you'll get plenty of sites about fuel efficient [i]vehicles[/i] before you begin to even see anything about tools.
You clearly don't work in landscaping or yard maintenance then. You may not use any of your gas powered tools frequently - but even here in Arizona there's thousands and thousands of people with pickup trucks full of gas-powered leaf blowers, weed wackers, chainsaws and so on that go out - a veritable army - to keep all that nice landscaping looking nice.
Outside maybe mom and pop businesses, any corporate, retail or industrial location is going to be paying people to come out and mow their lawns, trim their trees, blow away debris and so on. You have a storm come through and an army of landscapers will follow to clear fallen debris and trees. In my state - the only 'clean air' enforcement I'm aware of is that state employed landscapers cannot kick up too much dust on severe pollution days.
I can't toss any hard numbers of how much gasoline they use - but I'll gladly bet even one pickup full of landscapers user far more in a few days than you spend on all your gas powered vehicles and tools do in a month easily.
There is nowhere near as much pressure on tool manufacturers to improve their fuel efficiency as their is on auto manufacturers. There definitely isn't any pressure on landscapers to buy fuel efficient tools, nor any incentives. Of course there are less landscaping outfits than drivers - but if there somehow was as many, the effects on pollution would be devastating.
The more 'practical' (as you can get) plan I'd heard was not to mine a planet - to far away and all - but to capture some chunk of rock and bring it close to Earth for us to exploit.
That was one of the big reasons why we were sending craft out to passing asteroids to see what they're made of. Presumably once we have said rock - we could ship the bare minimum into space and use whats on the rock as raw materials to build out the facilities needed.
I also wouldn't be surprised if Musk doesn't have 'mine space rocks' on his SpaceX bucket list somewhere.
The Prime Day thing is pretty skeezy - tons of no-name brand items who's prices were inflated for the sale day so they could "slash prices" and offer you the low low discounted price of what it normally sells at - but with the bigger price it never sold out crossed out. It was entirely an exercise in preying on peoples gullibility, who saw these huge "discounts" and made impulse buys thinking this super short special shopping day was saving them money. And of course, you had to buy the prime membership in the first place. You're by no means saving money on prime - you're usually paying more for the same goods - all you're getting is the "free" two day shipping.
Sport and racing games in particularly are ridiculously popular. Normal people play plenty of games - it's just that the typical platform of choice is their smart phone.
Gaming isn't the only reason you'd want a 'beefier' laptop though. I ended up needing to buy a laptop to get some 3d work/editing done on the go - it came down to an expensive under-spec'd ultra thin, a chunkier gaming laptop with 'passable' specs, or an insanely expensive "workstation" with a mobile quadro in it.
I ended up getting a gaming laptop - I was surprised to find opening the thing was as simple as undoing a single scew and using a shim to pop some plastic latches and I was in. 32 GB of ram and a 500GB M2 SSD later I had a laptop that hit most of my needs - still need to tinker with bios settings to get it to recognize the original HDD.
The laptop out of the box ran like garbage - between the slow 2.5" HDD, the small memory (how is 4GB still typical today?) and the crapware every Laptop vendor shoves on their machines the thing was barely functional unless I let it sit for an hour or two after booting. The upgrades and a fresh install of windows fixed these things - but I can't imagine how I'd ever be able to do these fixes on a 'super thin' laptop, by design they're so densely packed and everything is so custom fit that more often than not there are NO sockets for you to upgrade things, everything is soldered or glued in place! You'd be lucky if you could even swap the hard drive out. Not that a bit of solder would deter anyone with the mind to do it - but your average Joe or Jane doesn't stand a chance.
The main draw I see to these thin laptops for manufacturers, is that being so hard if not impossible to upgrade you're forced to upgrade sooner rather than later.
Or perhaps you were referring to the part about 'not participating in anti-competitive behavior' making it to harder for the 'small guys' to compete? I imagine it would make it nearly impossible for a small ISP to operate if it couldn't be a monopoly. That makes perfect sense then, as being a monopoly means they wouldn't need to compete at all! /s
Funny, the most common thing I hear about problems competing when it comes to the 'small guys' is the 'big guys' pushing them out with every dirty trick they can think of.
Following some ground rules for being fair to your customers is probably far easier compared to competing with incumbent big name ISPs. Besides, I bet small ISPs don't do enough business to make screwing over customers a valid business strategy. I fail to see how it'd be overly demanding of a small company to expect them to provide their advertised speed and service quality, to not demand they pay extra to use certain websites, etc.
No, I think the companies that stand to lose the most are big ISPs. Perhaps they should have dealt more honestly with the American people and we wouldn't need to legislate them into behaving.
I've never 'ghosted' an employer, but I have 'ghosted' plenty of unsolicited recruiters and potential employers - often for sending obviously mass dispatched offers.
If someone is looking to hire me, they can contact me directly - properly addressing me by name, and offering employment actually relevant to my career.
The most recent recruiters I've ignored were trying to get me to move to China to teach English. Considering I'm a software engineer, there was no particular appeal to such a job beyond possibly being near enough to Shenzhen to indulge my interest in electronics.
I'm going to hope they aren't nearly as draconic as that sounds, and that it was more meant that if they catch people making use of disposable plastics and not re-using them. Maybe they're going to go digging through peoples trash?
I'm surprised to find I'm not the only one who will re-use the same 'disposable' water bottle for several years. The Aquafina bottle I have at my desk is from 2015 - I go to a local 'water and ice' (a chain here in Arizona) and buy RO water to fill it and several jugs at $0.25/gallon. Granted, while the tap water out here is perfectly safe to drink, it isn't very palatable straight from the tap. Filtering it takes the canal taste out of the water.
As I understand it - the soy insulation was primarily made from tasty soy, thus easily palatable. From the article it sounds like they're taking the celullose alone and mixing it into things like paint or concrete. I think eating concrete is a bit beyond rodents capabilities at least.
I heard something about this before - he probably shot himself with smaller bullets to build up a resistance to larger ones.
While that's likely true for this movie, OTHER Star Wars movies made back their costs in theaters and THEN went on to make even more from merchandising.
I'd be satisfied with making my money back and some profit besides on one of my projects. But companies like Disney tend to be greedier - why make another 'flop' like Solo and only make bank on merchandising, when they could make another Force Awakens and make bank on both ticket sales AND merchandising?
Though I expect Star Wars Mania 3.0 has started to cooldown at this point, and that likely played a part in Solo's poor performance - unless they build up more hype for the next movie, I'd be curious to see how whatever is coming next does.
Granted, I see maybe one movie every 6 months or so. Stuff like Star Wars hasn't really grabbed me, and it being owned and run by Disney now isn't helping.
This is the danger behind Youtube and Googles decision to not interact with anyone using it's service at any level beyond automated messages - the toxicity and politics that drove this are entirely of their own manufacture. People were left to interpret their actions by these automated messages and vague press statements, their bots inscrutable actions which can have significant financial impact on it's users. These users are left to draw their own conclusions about Youtubes intent. Nasim seems to have drawn the conclusion that Youtube was out to get her (from her latest videos mentioning the demonetization of her exercise videos), and she went on the offensive.
I can't help but wonder that if Youtube offered any form of direct, non-automated user support - a hotline, a chat room, a ticket system - this person might have been able to work things out with them and taken a more peaceful route. But we'll never know.
All bets are certainly off when talking about desktops - but stores mainly push laptops these days. I think my local electronics stores combined stock maybe half a dozen different desktops on shelves. The offerings for laptops on the other hand for even one store is well over 3 dozen or so options - not counting Apple products.
The biggest features pushed at the Best Buy near me was touch screens, a wacom pen you can use with certain laptop/tablet hybrids (sold separately of course), and MS Office bundles.
For specs you got tghe CPU model/name with MAYBE it's speed, an Intel graphics model number (with zero context on differences between one to another) the amount of ram in the system and if it had a small SSD or a 1tb HDD (some had both). There were two "gaming" latpops - in that they had an actual discrete graphics card rather than onboard Intel gpu.
Some common ground numbers could be posted with PC specs though - boot times, average FPS in a current popular game, load time of MS Word, time to copy a large file... that probably covers most of the needs of a typical user.
It's likely impossible to walk into a Best Buy or Fry's Electronics and purchase any off the shelf computer that is incapable of meeting the needs of 'joe or jane average'. They can all run a browser (meeting social media needs), they can all run the MS Office Suite (meeting productivity needs) and they are more than capable of running casual entertainment - movies, music, streaming media, and casual games. Even a chromebook can meet a users needs - Microsoft has had cloud versions of their productivity software available for several years now. Most other 'business' productivity tools are cloud apps as well, such as Slack, Basecamp, Trello etc People who have specific performance needs aren't a 'Joe or Jane average'. Gaming, Media production, engineering/scientific R&D, and so on are all niche requirements compared to the rest of the 'average' population. Other than those who need performance for their hobbies, most niche computer needs will be fulfilled by an IT employee or department (or a consultant) that is paid to find and purchase sufficient hardware to meet employee performance needs - and this is handled as a cost of doing business.
I'm mostly pulling from the novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, as he wrote it to convey what it was like to be an immigrant at that time (early 1900's) - atleast while I was in school it was part of required reading in US History.
As different waves of immigrants came to America - the Germans, Irish, Slavs - those who came before discriminated against them based on the culture, language, and existing stereotypes they brought with them. They were the "other" to those previous immigrants who, granted, went through the same thing; now it was their chance to be the one holding the big stick.
Issues mostly boiled down to being different from those who came before, and the fact that they were willing to work for incredibly cheap wages threatened the job security of those who had come to grips on the value of their work, had joined unions and so on.
Without the news coverage, I'd have to question the effectiveness of this kind of protest. If you're cutting the lanes down to just one, the guy immediately behind your bike is going to get the full impact of your protest too.
Every other car behind the first is just going to think the car in front is being an ass and won't see anything in regards to your protest.
I am a software engineer rather than an audio hardware engineer, but working alongside such engineers and developing software for tuning audio equipment I know a little bit about what they're doing. As I understand it, our products handle frequencies a little bit under 20Hz and a little bit past 20kHz - essentially a band pass is in place on the input to prevent anything higher infrequency which can damage the set (there may be additional filters, we have a digital signal processor for example that lets you apply and tweak filters on your audio). For things like Subwoofers it may have a low pass filter instead of a band pass)
In the case of an advertisement trying to dog whistle commands to an Alexa device - it shouldn't work with our stuff. 20Hz to 20kHz is within the (typical) audible range of human hearing.
I'd also go googling for homemade napalm, but I'm probably already on a list for searching for homemade flamethrowers as is. I can at least justify it as being interested in Musk's toys when the FBI party van shows up at my door.
If this were the case the cheapo version of Musks toy would have been legislated out of existence. Musk has packaged a cheap off the shelf weed burner in what looks like an airsoft rifle, and called it a 'Flamethrower' to up the price by like 25x as much.
For $500 and a bit of googling, you can put together something closer to an actual, deadly style flamethrower. I'll even save you the bandwidth of using google: For the price of this book and the materials needed (quoted as costing around $450) you could have a better flamethrower than what musk has. Shoots flames over 40ft... that's extremely close to the effective range of an American M1A1 Flamethrower, the kind used in WW2. I found it when searching for 'Home made flamethrower' on the first page of results.
Last I looked baseball bats can be used as a toy. So can flammable substances, in things like chemistry kits, toy rockets, fireworks, pop caps for toy guns... I could go on.
This thing is advertised as a toy, but it can still be used as an extremely expensive propane torch for the things one would typically use a 500,000 BTU torch for. You've already been informed of several such uses for it. I'm willing to suspect these things are exactly that, a weed burner dressed up and sold for roughly 25x as much as they normally cost.
Some danger exists yes, but the potential danger of "things you can buy for $500 or less" is ten times the size of an olympic swimming pool. Elon is just pouring a shot glass of water in it.
If one wanted to commit serious arson felonies, a trip to home depot or harbor freight would be a far easier, faster, and cheaper option to get similar results. Or just drop by the gas station on your way home and buy a canister of gas and a book of matches.
Being more worried about an over priced weed burner in comparison, is just Musk's advertising campaign succeeding. Boy look at all that free press he's gotten already.
I'd like to question the safety issues of storing flamethrower fuel in a gun safe. They do a very poor job of preventing fire related damage from the outside to it's contents - placing volumes of flammable chemicals in an enclosed space with no thermal protection qualities seems like you're asking for a bomb with guns and ammunition for shrapnel.
I'd say just keep the fuel where you'd keep your spare propane tanks for your grill. Kids using it to start fires is about as likely as them using a propane tank for it - it's not like it's ACTUAL flamethrower fuel (napalm infused gasoline).
And lets be honest - not referring to you specifically Antique Geekmeister, but to others trying to act like this is the next 'Streetsweeper' firearm - these aren't flamethrowers like you see in action flicks or WW2 documentaries. The ACTUAL weapons have effective ranges of around 20m and can launch ignited fuel (again, napalm infused gasoline) up to 43m away.
These toys Musk is peddling shoot out an (impressive looking) propane flame up to maybe a meter, meaning it's little more than a dressed up weed burner you could buy at Harbor Freight for $20. Yeeehaw.