deadly-penguin

A government, or government funded, research lab. Mostly they want research scientists, but engineers also work in those places.

The UK government, as well as others, is currently funding research into the ecology of the target areas and the impacts of mining (https://blogs.noc.ac.uk/blogs/SMARTEX)

I'm not sure it will be 'hidden' (the research projects are not going away) so much as yet another case of competing interests within governments, where the environment gets sidelined for the sake of an hypothetical future magic money tree.

Those sorts of things are currently available and aren't much like a mining rig.

Deep sea mining rigs don't really manipulate the nodules so much as hoover them up - there wouldn't be as much backlash if it was just picking nodules up.

There's a picture of an early rig here: https://blogs.noc.ac.uk/jc241-smartex/prologue-smartex

Hasn't it always been the Game Advertisements? Perhaps it's gotten more egregious, but the nature of the thing hasn't really changed.

A jailbroken kindle is okay - they make an adequate PDF reader and they can be found easily for less than the alternatives, at least in Britain. I do agree they're somewhat poor when used as intended.

They're also quite a nice embedded ARM Linux machine for a lot less than I could make one or buy one from elsewhere, but I suspect that isn't the core market for a kindle...