You’re telling me that an implied threat of violence is the only reason why a married man chooses not to say something bad about his wife, to their kid, when she’s in the room?

Is the domestic violence in this comic?

You’re right, but I am curious whether they’ll be able to pursue this chemically through non-biological feedstocks. Most existing use of Fischer-Tropsch turns fossil fuels (coal, natural gas) into other types of hydrocarbons.

And they’re specifically targeting output of fatty acids, using fractional distillation to separate each fatty acid, and then forming triglycerides according to the characteristics they’re looking for.

It all sounds very energy intensive and inefficient, so I’m not sure how they expect to make money doing this, but if they can dial in which fatty acids to assemble into triglycerides I can see this being a good substitute for palm oil and coconut oil, and maybe other vegan substitutes for animal fats like tallow and lard.

Hydrogenated vegetable oils still start with vegetable oil, which have to be extracted from farmed crops (mostly soybeans).

This is a process that skips living feedstock from biological organisms and assembled the fatty acids directly from methane, water, and carbon dioxide. No photosynthesis, no cellular metabolism, nothing like that.

Bill Watterson has clearly expressed dislike for corporations and profit seeking, but there’s also no question that he’s in favor of very strong copyright protection. It’s how he enforced his vision of preventing unauthorized use of the Calvin and Hobbes characters.