So rather than them hating each other, they'll be united in their hatred for the UN.

Nobody wants anyone coming into their home and telling them what to do. The issue between Israel and Palestine is that both of them consider the land theirs, and and foreign interference that sides with one side will be hated by the other, and any that supports neither side or both sides equally will be hated by both sides.

The reality is that the elites of both sides want to fight . . . but realistically Israel is the side that will come out on top militarily, so the Palestinian leaders have to be willing to come to the table and negotiate. They're not getting one state, and they're not getting any historic territory back - not without land swaps anyways.

Come to the table. Draw up official borders and have nothing to do with each other. Israel doesn't control what goes on in Gaza's borders and they become an independent state (maybe united with the West Bank, maybe West Bank becomes its own separate country - who knows). After that though, any attack from EITHER side against the other is an act of war. There is no more fighting, no more trying to reclaim ancestral lands - you have your territory and you stay there in peace.

Fiction:

12 books from the Deverry series
The Three Body Problem trilogy
Monkey
Treacle Walker
Various books on Powershell

Non-Fiction:
Linux Administrator's Guide
Linux Network Administrator's Guide
Both OpenZFS books
Ansible
Terraform
Various books on Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL optimisation
C++ manuals
Various Cisco manuals
OpenPF manual

I suspect hydrogen will never get there. If someone comes up with an efficient process to synthesize propane from a renewable source, we'll have something. Unlike hydrogen, there's a fair bit of distribution infrastructure and off the shelf hardware for it.

The thing is, plug-in hybrids are still viable now as a bridge to ubiquitous fast charging. What would be best is a plug-in with and extended battery. For many people there exists a reasonable battery capacity that would allow them to operate as an electric car for 90% of their travel. For some, that is within the typical battery capacity of a hybrid. For others, adding just a bit more would cover it.

They would do well making that plan-A.

Quite.

I started tinkering with it as nothing more than a hobby, and I have some countless dozens of sensors on it now. And most of those are actually just operated in-house and don't require cloud integration at all.

I put three different SDRs on it and it captures multiple weather stations, fridge and freezer sensors, and even passing aircraft (using FlightAware). As well as the other useful integrations like what bin-day is today and what I need to put out.

I obtained for Matter smart plugs for free the other day and just out of interest I joined them - turns out HomeAssistant is a Matter server and requires no further integration or third-party to work. All kinds of switching and energy-monitoring now, and I have door sensors that I've put on my letterbox and parcel box, so I even know when I have a delivery and it triggers the cameras if I want it to.

I even added an ancient projector using "pjlink" into it, so when it's movie-time, I can dim my lights and turn on the projector and switch it to the right input just from my PC/phone.

It's a great little project - but it needs to shake the reputation of all that YAML nonsense being the only way to configure it. They really need to pull that out into the GUI entirely, because even as a programmer I was always put off by the concept of these large code-dumps on discussion forums to "fix" one particular sensor or similar. Turns out, 99% of that isn't needed and the other 1% could easily be folded into the GUI and probably will over time.

I don't even bother with voice, though, because it's just a home-sensor platform to me, I don't want it controlling anything itself and I don't want it listening. I just want alerts and a page of switches/graphs, and it's great for that.

Home Assistant runs my house and there isn't a single Zigbee device on it.

That's just "another module" in their huge libraries of integration modules.

It's "bespoke" because their own hardware that they choose to sell is not just an off-the-shelf device. However it's also just an open-source OS and software that you can put on a commodity Pi or other machine and don't need to buy their hardware or use any given protocol at all if you don't want to.

"Free rides can't last forever".

When the market is saturated, your return on each product diminishes.

But you're still getting free electricity!

Subsidies for solar were always going to be short-lived and rather pointless for the grid beyond a point - you want them to pay you for electricity they literally cannot use?

It's why when I started my little amateur installation at home, I didn't ever care about "feeding back" to the grid. I'd really rather not be tied to the grid at all, even for feeding back. It requires a larger investment - not least the cost of the connection - and it's reliant on subsidies staying around forever and never changing (which just isn't realistic). I'm sure if you got in on day one when panels were ridiculously expensive, and you had the capital to put into it, that the cost of doing so was profitable over many years. But once those subsidies started to dry up and the hardware became commodity, there was never any question of getting that free ride.

Instead I buy panels at my own pace, and increasingly move circuits off onto them, reducing my bill, and one day being "self-sufficient". The excess electricity generated from there? I'll use it for something else (hell, why not just a little Bitcoin farm or similar to acts as a very-easily-controllable on-demand power absorber? Or a heating water tank that you can just dump excess electricity into?), or let it go to waste. Only when I've not switched back to grid power for a few years would I consider severing the connection, but I would never bother to apply for the grants / subsidies / connection as the return is too uncertain because of things like this.

If you are considering it an income of your own, you have to consider it the same as a business, which means you have to take into account that the market changes and may not be profitable in the future.

But you're still going to pay off those assets and get free electricity, no matter what.

What key? Sibling languages, alternative alphabets, and unconventional word choices don't have a key. If they want to learn shorthand, they can take a course at the community college like everybody else.

I never said anything about hiding my phone. I DO routinely encrypt data going in and out of my phone and some of the data is encrypted at rest. Nothing nefarious there, it just means that I use WhatsApp, Signal, and a web browser. Also SSH.

I guess if they want to go on a fishing expedition, they're SOL. If they have an actual good reason to suspect me personally of a crime, I guess they'll have a look at the phone. It would be nice if we could rely on law enforcement to not go on fishing expeditions and on judges to not approve of them (given that they are against the law), but here we are.

Like I said, they have a right to search. They do not have a right to find or to be able to make anything of what they might find.

If you ban E2EE, you render many law abiding citizens vulnerable to all manner of fraud and other financial crimes.

Amusingly, there was a period of time when the Italian Mafia had access to law enforcement communications in Sicily using a back door designed for "lawful intercept". That is, the police and prosecutors hoist by their own petard.

Personally, I don't do much processed food or fast food. But I also don't have kids and I work from home, so it's no bug deal to cook proper food.

I do find it odd how many adults out there never even learned basic cooking from their parents, or food network. I won't say the whole society is going down but there are subcultures that seem destined to die off.

But there is a reason I included time budget. While cooking proper food need not take a very long time, it generally takes more than nuking something.

If they can access it. I am permitted to write my diary in code. I can send a letter the same way. Why should email be made less convenient?

Siblings are allowed to continue using their invented words into adulthood if they like. We are allowed to have private conversations in an un-bugged room. Phone call: "Meet me at the other place. Bring that thing we talked about.".

Police have never had the RIGHT to access all of our communication. They may be granted permission to TRY if a judge signs off on that but that's all they have ever had.

On a side note, one reason so many people are interested in E2EE is because there have been WAY too many incidents where police skipped the warrant or found a judge with an itchy rubber stamp who just took their word for things and then went on a fishing expedition. They only have themselves to blame for entire populations distrusting them. Meanwhile, tech companies grew tired of the constant stream of "requests" for private information that amounted to a fishing expedition that they decided their best bet is to make sure they cannot provide anything.

OTOH, some cancer drugs give the choice of 9 shitty months with or 6 decent months then one bad month without.

If the only food like substance within your budget (including time budget) is pulped meat nuggets sprinkled with sugar, guess what's for dinner?

You say that as if American auto makers haven't gotten multiple bailouts and other special gifts over the years. You say that as if the U.S. isn't full of malls inhabited by tumble weeds and rats (literally) and doesn't have enough chronically empty residential property to house every homeless person here.

The U.S. is being strangled by the financial and real estate sectors.

The American companies manufacture in China for cheap but sell expensive in the U.S. The huge margin goes to executive management and Wall Street. They COULD profitably manufacture in the U.S. without raising prices, but Wall Street wants it's windfall and CEO needs a new yacht, so that's out.