Maybe it's proof of the existence of Afluenza and it's debilitating side effects. Doctor Payola recommends seeing two of daddy's contacts.

Aside from that, kids find way to game system. Not really anything new, I've seen this in the workplace for a few years. Some people use a marginal disability to openly skyve off work or shut down any criticism against them, it's a new move in a very old game though... People game systems, even when it harms a system that is meant to help people who genuinely need it. If you know a way to fix it without harming people who genuinely need help, I'm all ears.

It could be worse, a lot worse.

Imagine if those useless middle managers were tasked with doing something important rather than merely wasting the time of people capable of doing something important.

Probably stolen from the UK or Western Europe. Maybe even as far away as the US.

A lot of the UK's stolen cars end up in Eastern Europe, some even keep the UK number plates for that authentic feel.

LAG restrictions have been lessened or even gotten rid of in Australia and the UK. Air travel is not as bad outside the US.

Batteries are becoming a problem for airlines because people are entitled fuckwits and won't follow basic instructions (I MUST charge my phone no matter what people tell me) as they keep bringing damaged batteries on board which conflagrate. So they're getting banned at the insistence of airlines rather than governments.

I suppose my question is if you are going to go on at some length at how Home Assistant is some techbro nonsense, what do you see as the alternative that hits the same use cases:
- Centralized 'smart home' device management
- Does not lock you into a cloud connected dependency
- Does not lock you into a particular device or phone vendor
- Can implement various local automations without the device itself having to support things like schedules and so forth. E.g. turn off all lights still on at midnight, or reduce heating/air conditioning when everyone's phones leave a geofenced area, or start increasing it when I leave work so it's more comfortable by the time I get home.

Plastics.

They should actually have AI prompt design as part of core curriculum nowadays. I see many people who are clueless of how to actually write prompts for AI and are using it inefficiently. I think a semester or quarter wherein students learn to do nothing but prompting for various things would be of immense value.

Catch up to the Chinese on battery tech? They don't have any special battery tech. There's nothing special about Chinese EVs components, they're basically the same stuff everyone else is making their EVs out of.

Biofuels aren't worse than fossil fuels but they surprisingly aren't much better. You can make renewable e-fuels with just renewable power and recaptured CO2, but they take an obscene amount of energy and then the ICE turns most of what all that energy produced into waste heat.

Hydrogen is a fossil fuel industry distraction, it offers the best selection of the worst downsides: An expensive and currently mostly fossil-sourced fuel you need to get at a station like gas/diesel, relatively long refuel times and short range in a vehicle with a higher up-front cost and weight like an EV, and a fuel that is only available at a small handful of stations, needs to be stored at immense pressures, escapes through solids and embrittles steel on the way out, and burns with an invisible flame like only hydrogen can offer.

We won't be able to get rid of liquid hydrocarbon fuels completely any time soon but we can make their uses a small enough fraction of what they are today that they're no longer a major source of fossil CO2 emissions and these oddball "fucking around in the margins" solutions can fulfill a decent fraction of the demand.

Alexa and Google are always hooked into Google's stuff, whether there's some at least partial local control still available in an outage or not.

I'd say local-first is *fairly* unique. Yes Homekit/Matter devices *can* be controlled locally in a peer-to-peer manner right from handsets, but Thread radios are fairly rare and I don't know if any non-apple handsets support directly talking to those devices without an intermediary.

If you don't have Apple devices, then HomeKit is a mixed bag, as sometimes the onboarding is only possible with an iPhone.

Now when you want to take it to be internet accessible, Home Assistant is a pretty rare software for easily supporting that *without* going through any cloud provider (get a dynamic dns and let's encrypt going, and Home Assistant plugins exist to automate that including renewal for those that don't want to understand how to do that themselves.

Now who is doing something "tech bro" that "isn't suitable for regular users"?

If the vendor's device doesn't support standards based management then I will just ignore them if at all possible. HomeAssistant can update firmware in any of my devices in my house.

The devices don't have a gateway set so they can't 'phone home' anywhere and if that's a deal breaker for them then it's a deal breaker for me.

I do know that there are devices consistent with 'off-cloud' usage, whether Home Assistant is at all responsible I don't know and don't really care.

To address the 'not for regular folks', they made a 'home assistant green' which is fairly decent at being an accessible, self-maintaining package. One of my relatives had a Nest thermostat that Google made stop working, and so I gave them an alternative together with Home Assistant green and they've been pretty happy.

"Only for tech bros" would be nothing but APIs and you have to assemble something yourself. Home Assistant has some tech-bro friendly deployment options, but does offer something akin to the typical cloud connected consumer electronic fare.

The devices generally do not connect to Home Assistant as a server, the Home Assistant connects to them as a client. The devices are generally oblivious about Home Assistant and it's nature.

I have z-wave thermostats. They have no idea what internet even is. They presumed they would be sold into some partner's hub ecosystem, but as a consequence Home Assistant can talk to it direct.

I attached an open firmware based controller to my garage door opener. The garage door opener doesn't know what networking is, and even the open source controller is oblivious to home assistant, just providing a general, locally accessible HTTP api. Home assistant connects to it.

If you are careful, you can generally find networkable components that do not expect to connect to any server, but can be connected to. Matter over Thread is *generally* a safe bet the device in question is friendly to local usage.

However, a lot of devices have firmware hard coded to connect only to their suppliers internet presence. Without an account you can't control them. Sometimes they start charging a subscription. Sometimes they discontinue allowing a device to connect and operate, suggesting you buy the new model after a couple of years. Meanwhile their 'cloud' doesn't add anything that you couldn't have added yourself. Get a free domain and a let's encrypt certificate and you can connect to your house from anywhere, if you want. Or keep it closed off to anything outside your house. Or 'shadow' select stuff into remote access while keeping some things local.

You have no statistics, I came at you with a link to statistics -- 50% of lung cancer (by far the biggest cancer killer) is diagnosed late .. I provided you a link for that, plus actual evidence I've seen says cancer is frequently diagnosed too late. You keep saying there's tons of evidence that diagnostic testing early is useless, but you haven't shown me a single link.
How many links do you need?
JAMA ..your favorite! https://jamanetwork.com/journa...
https://jamanetwork.com/journa...
https://jamanetwork.com/journa...
https://www.theguardian.com/so...
https://news.cancerresearchuk....
https://www.cancercenter.com/c...
https://news.cancerresearchuk....
https://servier.com/en/newsroo...
https://www.who.int/news/item/...