Short of simply outlawing the collection of this kind of data (which is problematic in the US), that genie is out of the bottle and is never going back in. You don't even need license plates, just access to enough cameras. It isn't exactly hard these days to track e.g. a blue 2008 Honda Civic through a well-covered area, and coverage is filling in by the day. Things like supermarket loyalty cards, credit card transactions, property tax records, etc, can answer the "who's doing the driving" part.

Ever growing automation is going to make for nice searchable databases. Which surely will never, ever, ever, be used inappropriately by those with access to them.

The violence in the Middle East dates back to the early Bronze Age. The Shah was violent and assassinated political rivals. In the 1940s, half of the Middle East sided with the Nazis.

The violence did not start in the 1970s, it didn't even start with Islam. It predates all of that.

Blaming individual X or modern event Y is to ignore the violence and open warfare leading up to those.

Only an idiot fixates purely on Iran. One genocidal Syrian despot has been replaced with another genocidal Syrian despot. IS is back on the rise. Egypt is a military dictatorship. Libya went from military dictatorship to perpetual civil war. The Arab Spring was ultimately crushed not because of a hatred of freedom but because the entire region is riddled with corruption.

Iran is a minor side show.

In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

I partially agree with you, but would like to bring something to your attention. I would say about five countries in the Middle East have been formenting a great deal of trouble for the others, along with a number of terrorist organisations. There is no particular reason to assume that the Middle East will deal with one problem and not the others. Yes, Iran has infuriated a great many countries, none of which (individually) can do much but could collectively act.

We could well see a genuine Middle East Union of nations that simple says enough is enough and clears the deck of all warring parties in the region -- and may well tell the US government that it needs to calm the F down or face a few reprisals of its own. Of course, if it does, then the subcontinent will likely join in - India and Pakistan are closely tied to Iran, and I shouldn't need to tell you both are armed with nuclear weapons. This is something the US also needs to consider, if it tries to invade Iran - you don't need missiles to attack a nation that's on the same landmass you're in, you just need trucks and an unsecured route.

Equally, this is a war that has been going on for the past 4,000-5,000 years now without showing much sign of anyone coming to their senses. This might not be enough to push everyone else over the edge. Precisely because several nations with a vested interest are indeed nuclear armed, there may well be a realpolitik view that kicking the collective arses of all of the power abusers in the region carries unacceptable escallation risks.

My hope is that the current wars being fought, all of which are mindboggingly expensive and stupid beyond all possible definitions of sanity, have a similar result as WW1 and WW2 - to push the world governments into saying that they will not tolerate this continued juvenile delinquency, but this time decide to do something effective about it.

The world has become vastly more destabilised with the wars since the 1990s, and I think there's just a glimmer of realisation amongst some of the politicians that they might well have pushed their luck too far.

Exams are a waste.

Rather, you want continuous practice that is also continuous assessment.

But US methods of teaching are also pretty 18th and 19th century. They are not sensible methods and result in students who are more advanced than the material being penalised. The US obsession with standardising is a recipe for subnormalising.

Seems to me if someone uses that symbol on something that isn't actually recyclable should be charged with fraud.

My vote is for Logan Lerman, fwiw...

Almost anything that has a big battery would actually power your house for several days if it can handle V2L. My Ioniq 6 has a 77kWh battery. If you're just running some essentials like your fridge and the lights, I think you might be able to last a week?

Even being relatively more rare isn't an issue right now, or it might be, but only in a very few places. Most of the time, the chargers are empty. One presumes as EVs become more popular, there will be even more charging stations. One of the major gas stations in Canada (Petro Canada) even has its own chargers at some stations.

Also, I think PHEVs may be a good alternative right now, since something like 90% of people's driving is 50km per day, and most PHEVs can handle that on a charge. Then you plug in at night and you're gtg. They would represent a major reduction in fuel consumption if we just got that far.

Nobody wants expensive cars, and EVs are undoubtedly more expensive. But otherwise, that claim is horse hockey.

Since I charge overnight (from an outdoor outlet, not even an L2 charger), I never have less than a 60% charge on my car at home. I spend less time overall at stops if you consider the totality of my life than when I had a petrol or diesel car. I recently drove 400km each way to another city, and I spent about 20 minutes at one L3 charger on the way there, and maybe 30 minutes total charging on the way back, and I needed to walk around and go to the washroom anyway. There's basically no difference in my road trip times from before. I used to be able to get about 1100km on a single tank of diesel with my VW wagon (my Ioniq 6 gets "only" 520km on a 90% charge), but I still had to stop every few hours to pee and stretch my legs and take on food. The human body is not meant to drive 6 hour stints. (I raced bikes and had a girlfriend in the USA in my 30s so I would drive 600km each way on a weekend on a fairly regular basis. No regrets, but I don't recommend that as a way to spend your time.)

I just drove 400km each way to visit family in another city. I'm Canadian, and the distances between cities here are considerably longer on average than in the USA. I had no problem charging in the middle of large mountain parks where there was otherwise no mobile phone reception. This is such a stunningly brain-dead take, I can only assume you've never actually driven anywhere with your eyes open. There are L2 and L3 charging stations everywhere even here. I live in a town of 30k people and I could go charge at some Mercedes 800v superchargers if I wanted to. I have a very hard time believing that Canada is ahead of the USA in infrastructure in this regard.

Also, while my townhouse has a driveway, I'm only using my outdoor outlet to charge right now. It's fine.

I love that I can self-host Bitwarden, and I do it with Vaultwarden, which is open source, so I have no fear of it going away. But if the company got really obnoxious and blocked self-hosted servers from the browser plugins, then I would be in big trouble. I don't think the changes listed suggest that they're going to do that anytime soon, but it's something I want to keep an eye out for.