From the other side Israeli Jews have been constantly taking Palestinian land for over a century, and the backdrop of those "serious offers" was the consistent expansion of Settlements on Palestinian land. If you were the Palestinians, would you have trusted the Israeli's saying they were going to give back your land even as they built new houses on it?

I fully understand the historical aspirations (and need) for a Jewish homeland, even after the holocaust Jews spent years in refugee camps since they literally had nowhere to go.

But from the Palestinian side, invaders/colonizers came and took their land, when they predictably fought back the invaders took more, and now the invaders have established a long term pattern whereby the invader is regularly kicking Palestinians off of their land to build new Settlements.

Recall, the reason that Israeli security was so light around Gaza during the attack was the soldiers were relocated to the West Bank to contain unrest over expanded Settlement construction.

That pattern is going to create a lot of animosity.

I can only see three resolutions to the conflict.

First, is the two state solution. But that requires not only halting the construction of new Settlements and restrict or even freeze the expansion of existing ones for good. And you're probably not seeing the Palestinians trust it until you've maintained this for at least 10 years. That sounds extreme, but in reality it's just "stop taking other people's stuff".

Second, is what seems to be the current plan, keep expanding Settlements and pushing the Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas until you're literally left with just a couple Gaza like enclaves with all the Palestinians and then you want a few generations for emotions to die down (if you don't think of a way to literally push them into another country).

Third, Israel miscalculates in some serious way. For instance, they turn the Arab Israeli minority hostile and alienate too many Western allies, and suddenly moderate Jewish Israelis start leaving. If that keeps up people start getting scared and more folks start leaving, and at some point enough leave to top the balance and Hamas gets its wish and Israel ceases to exist.

Personally, my money is on Scenario #2 and that certainly seems to be the Israeli government's plan, unfortunately the path to that contains a potential detour to #3. This is why Hamas and Netanyahu so often find themselves objective allies. It's in both of their interests to keep the rockets flying in order to prevent any peace.

The moment renewables were able to do >100% someone was going to put out a story about it. Make sure people understand the context sure, but it's hardly a gotcha.

The chart only went to ~14:15 but renewables were 60% at 8am and peaked at 13:00 so I'd say they were above 60% for about 10 hours of the day.

But that's a fairly naive way to look at. The bulk of that is from solar, and clouds don't actually affect solar that much, making it super dependable. Double the solar installation and you've got a reliable 100% for those 10 hours.

Wind can maybe have some big deltas, but I'm guessing they're predictable. But the bulk is solar which is arguably more reliable than traditional sources (it's not like someone will have to take the sun offline for unplanned maintenance).

So you don't need much staffing during the day when it's not running, and zero fuel costs. And gas plants don't cost much to build either. Not to say it doesn't hurt their economics, but not to the extent that you suggest.

The big question is storage. Can you build enough storage to handle those 14 hours (depending on time of year) when solar output is way down? If so, you can go down to zero.

Agreed on Afghanistan and especially Iraq, though once the US destabilized the countries I think they both would have been better off re-stabilized before they left (arguably Iraq is fairly stable now).

Either way, the US incurred quite a cost in human life policing those countries, so I'm not certain robots would have made a big difference in the decision.

In any case it doesn't really matter. No one was too interested in militarizing small drones because they realized they would be more advantageous for terrorists than militaries. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and the respective militaries quickly developed military drones out of necessity.

Robot soldiers are coming, whether the US builds them or not, all it takes is a capable nation perceiving the need..

I tried to propose a different approach but the working group for Nested Attribution Zone Investigation went in a really weird direction...

a) Not a fan of superpower imperialism, but rogue states are rogue for a reason, they're not rebellious bastions of freedom, they're places where you get tortured to death for saying something bad about the leader.

b) All you need to protect your robot from an EMP is some good shielding, some thick metal would do the trick.

c) The actual nasty thing I'd worry about is those rogue states using robots to suppress their own population. Typically dear leader just need to ensure the loyalty of the army and the army can put down rebellions. With robosoldier the loyal group can be that much smaller.

You mean drone strikes? Because the US can already kill people in foreign countries without a single American ever crossing their border.

The thing this actually changes is pacification actions like Iraq or Afghanistan where US soldiers are trying to prop up an unstable government. Arguably that is a form of imperialism, but in both cases they were trying to prop up nascent Democracies so it's hard to say that failure would have been a good thing.

Hey! It's only paedophilia if a Democrat does it!

If a Republican man has sex with a vulnerable underage female it just means he's a player!

You think people interested in Civil Liberties are voting for Trump?

The only times Trump wants to restrict the power of law enforcement agencies is when they investigate him!

The problem isn't countless candidates, the problem is countless platforms.

As an English Canadian I get 4 thought out consistent platforms I need to sort through, Liberal, Conservative, NDP, and Green. I don't really care about my individual MP so much because they generally just vote with the party.

In the US, among the Democrats you have progressives and moderates, pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, isolationists and interventionists, etc, etc.

Same with the GOP, you've got moderates, Libertarians, and MAGA, you have pro-Russian and anti-Russia, you have hard-core hawks and isolationists, etc, etc.

You need to sort through all those positions, then you need to figure out which camp your particular representatives throw in with. And the chances are the candidates you have to choose from are closer to the fringe because it's the dedicated partisans who select the candidates, and the candidates don't need to vote with the party.

So that's why the US is a mess.

Take away the parties and the average voter has even more trouble guessing how their candidate is going to vote.

The other big thing the labels do is gives the parties power to police their members. Your "no parties" system doesn't lead to responsible legislators, it leads to an explosion of weak legislators dominated by lobbyists and blowhards causing pointless crises to raise their profile.

1993 was an extreme example, but Canadian elections do see a fair amount of movement in terms of numbers of seats.

In the US, first past the post + a separately elected executive tends to produce a two party system, but it's not a given.

The advantage of the Canadian (British) system is it's all in the legislature so a regional party can get established without worrying about some single national winner-take-all vote.

Wrong country. Wrong system. Wrong conclusion.

There are safe ridings in Canadian politics, but especially due to having several significant parties there can be pretty big turnover. Case in point, the 1993 federal election where the PCs went from 154 seats to 2.

And while the PM is uncomfortably powerful, the centralization does mean that voters get to choose from among a handful of properly thought out visions, and then the winning party (if they have a majority) can follow through on that vision. This is a nice contrast from the US where a handful of Putin-loving congress folk have thrown away the US's mantle as the leaders of the free world.

The difference just emphasizes how bad your "no parties" idea would actually be in practise. The outcome wouldn't be noble philosophers debating the issues of the day. It would be a bunch of loudmouths with close to zero accountability since there's no practical way for voters to vet that many different candidates.

Now the Conservatives are pulling of this ridiculous time-wasting stunt, and due to the structure of the Canadian system we can hold the walking Internet meme known as Pierre Poilievre accountable for the actions of his party.

I think this is the disconnect.

People think the patent system should be After many great labours I've made a fantastic new discovery and deserve some reward for my efforts!

Too often, in software, it ends up being I was here first! Someone throw up a few fences behind me!!

I don't think that's right, being first is it's own reward, if you want fences behind you then you better have cut through some serious barriers to get there.

Huh? I never claimed that large yards weren't a result of the popularization of personal vehicles.

What I contest is this idea that people don't want big yards, or that yards are shrinking for any reason other than urban density increasing land prices.

You really think there's a significant trend of suburbanites abandon their vehicles? I don't see it.

It's not a passing fad, it's just economics.

In larger urban centers land prices are going up, so density is increasing, and lawns are the first thing to shrink.

In smaller cities or even towns land prices are much lower so they typically still have big yards.

It's fair to criticize Quebec's language laws, I do it all the time.

But comparing them to Chechen oppression is like those idiots who were comparing pandemic restrictions to Nazi Germany.

A policy can be bad without it being a crime against humanity.

The capital seems to have formed because it was the central city for surrounding farms (so not dessert).

Other Saudi cities seem to follow the predictable pattern, interior cities surrounded by decent farmland or coastal cities with fishing and trade.

Who do you think is going to live in the line city? If you're drilling oil you live near the oil fields, if you're a farmer you live near farmlands, if you're a fisher or sailor you live on the coast, and if you're in the service industry you live near those other folks.

The only people who can move into the middle of the nowhere are remote workers, but if you're a remote worker you might as well move somewhere nice.

Yards are shrinking already. If you're a property developer you could try a bunch of decent sized homes with garages but no yards, but stick a big park in the middle instead. Similar concepts work in Europe so its worth a try.

The big problem is thinking you're going to try some bold urban planning idea on the scale of a new city.