here it comes in two varieties, one is about 10cm across, one about 5 and comes as a ring. don't know how the big ones are made but i assume they are boiled. good sandwich spread.
nope, big things are built with "industrial replicators". the only thing they can't make is a material called latinum, which is sought after by the ferengi precisely because it's the only scarce thing left.
also, there's a distinction to be made between "private" and "personal" property. people still own things, but it's for sentimental reasons. like, you wouldn't have a toolbox or a statue or a mansion unless it was your "lucky" toolbox or "antique" statue or a "family" mansion. things only have sentimental value, not monetary value.
but you're right in that an economy exists, because the federation still needs to do outside trade and freight. it's just more of a bartering system.
also, people on DS9 tend to carry latinum around due to the ferengi presence. the bar in ds9 just has the same replicators that all the rooms do, but it's like a custom to buy a drink at the bar and gamble.
i may just have had bad teachers but i to this day have no idea what chemistry at pre-university level were supposed to teach. the labs were all about watching things change, with no explanation as to why. and the theory parts were all about balancing reactions. none of it connected.
i'm still not entirely sold on them but since i'm currently using one that the company subscribes to i can give a quick opinion:
i had an idea for a code snippet that could save be some headache (a mock for primitives in lua, to be specific) but i foresaw some issues with commutativity (aka how to make sure that a + b == b + a). so i asked about this, and the llm created some boilerplate to test this code. i've been chatting with it for about half an hour and testing the code it produces, and had it expand the idea to all possible metamethods available on primitive types, together with about 50 test cases with descriptive assertions. i've now run into an issue where the __eq metamethod isn't firing correctly when one of the operands is a primitive rather than a mock, and after having the llm link me to the relevant part of the docs, that seems to be a feature of the language rather than a bug.
so in 30 minutes i've gone from a loose idea to a well-documented proof-of-concept to a roadblock that can't really be overcome. complete exploration and feasibility study, fully tested, in less than an hour.
as far as i understand it they can technically just show up, without you having to eat anything. it's one of those "could kill you from nowhere" things, like false vacuum decay.
but eating human meat, especially brain, will significantly increase the risk, yes
More seriously, most parts of the car already need to be changed for the RHD market. punching a hole in the front left fender instead of the front right is not a big problem, and the cable is easy enough to reroute.
damn it, you're right. should probably have checked that...