I would immediately vote for this if they managed to get it on as a ballot initiative. Voting in a democracy is a right, not a privilege.
I have a few of these as well. Electric resistive heating like this is pretty safe. There's no control logic or anything, just a passive, high resistance wire. If a wire breaks it's going to just stop working. Unless you plug it in in the wrong country there's really no way for it to overheat.
Not to mention cats are pretty smart and will just leave when they're uncomfortable.
Food is full of water and takes a lot of energy to heat up. The plate is thin and made of easily heated material like ceramic or glass.
People say this and then you look at voting records in congress and you see them fall in line when the chips are down. Party affiliation and loyalty is what gets you reelection funds and spots on committees, there's a lot of tangible and intangible pressure applied from the color of the tie.
Punch Nazis is a good start.
And by that I mean be socially intolerant of intolerance. Personal morals and actions don't need to and shouldn't be held to the same standard as the US Federal government.
Hot water radiators are designed to work with temperature deltas in the 110 degree F range (target 70 room temp, 180 water temp). In the summer your temperature deltas are much tighter, you can only get to at best 32 F before the water freezes and with a target of 70 that's only 38 degrees of temperature delta trying to cool the room. They simply won't work efficiently enough for it to be worth it, not to mention being on the floor is very poor positioning for summer.
I love how well received pipewire was/is compared to the drama systemd and Wayland got.
Federation is on by default on all instances. As soon as you search and subscribe to remote communities they'll start federating. So far so good on my little one user instance.
At the moment Lemmy and Kbin federate exactly, Lemmy communities and Kbin magazines federate 1:1 with upvotes, downvotes, comments, all working as expected.
Mastodon users can follow communities and magazines as though they were users, post to them, and see replies. Although they see everything linearly. If you ever see a community post that starts by tagging the community that likely came from mastodon.
Lemmy does not currently, and may never, allow you to follow mastodon users or tags. Kbin offers a microblog view that does display mastodon content in its intended form.
"Your instance"
I have done some basic research into this before and it seems to be a bit of a trade secret among release groups. They don't heavily advertise how they're doing it to limit what the streaming services can do about it.
I actually think your hypothetical smoker is a great example of the opposite. Someone who lived it, understands the struggle, and ultimately regrets their choices is exactly who you want to hear from. It's why the really cheesy don't smoke PSAs don't ring a chord with most people, they don't feel genuine.
I don't think Thoreau is some enormous hypocrite, but I do absolutely understand why some people might feel bitter about it when they learn the greater context.