I thought most of it was stock options?

It's because they don't put work on them.

Fair enough, I do love being contrarian

Asphalt is definitely a carbon sink though since it's a petroleum product!

Even in C this is possible. Just wrap the float or whatever in a struct and all implicit conversions will be gone.

Atomic instructions are quite slow and if they run a lot... Rust has two types of reference counted pointer for that reason. One that has atomic reference counting for multithreaded code and one non-atomic for single threaded. Reference counting is usually overkill in the first place and can be a sign that your code doesn't have proper ownership.