Which nation? Israel decided to pre-emptively attack Iran and the Lebanon, Trump and friends decided "that sounds cool, let's join in". How is "the nation" being defended there?

You can prove anything with the right statistics.

I'm wondering what effect this is going to have on people trying to enter the U.S.
We've already seen social media posts being a ground to deny admittance, how is it doing to look with installed AI clients? Anthropic - BAD, ChatGPT or Grok - GOOD. As for me, I don't think my phone supports any of them and have no interest finding out anyway.

The EU is spread over three timezones, plus a few more for the distant French (and Dutch) territories.
- the Baltic states and Greece, probably Cyprus, maybe Finland
- pretty much all of the rest
- Portugal, Ireland
That's from memory and I may have got some of those wrong.
The reason Spain is in the "all of the rest" block rather than Portugal, Ireland (and the UK) is that General Franco owed and admired Hitler and he decided to have his country on the same time zone as the German Reich. The Spanish adapted (they get up an hour later) so the country stayed there once Franco was safely dead.

Since the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. hasn't collected comprehensive statistics on the number of citizens leaving.

It is difficult to come up with exact figures under those circumstances.

How much of this is down to "snowbirds"?
I've seen reports that Canadians are turning their backs on Florida - and selling their properties there - and heading elsewhere, and that Lisbon (along with the rest of that country) was actively trying to attract them, but their primary reasons (ICE, and a state legislature going out of their way to drive them elsewhere) don't really apply to US snowbirds. Bali, Colombia and Thailand would also fit. If this effect is down to that then 2025 is probably a one-off - they will have spent winter 2024/25 in Florida, Arizona or whatever, winter 2025/26 outside the US but only their departures will have been registered because they have not returned yet.
Of course Ireland is less of a destination for that kind of tourism.

They are going down that road (the second part at least, the "starting from scratch" part) with their "New Outlook".
News Flash: It is worse, much worse.

disclaimer, it's possible that they have mothballed that product, I don't use Microsoft's products nowadays.

a sneak peak into thousands of people's homes

"peak" is not the correct spelling in that context, it is of course "pique".
ok, "peek".

You can't be serious, it is

What about the Russians doing that although they used a missile rather than a laser? It was 13-14 months ago.

A couple of other examples:
- Iran shot an Air Ukraine flight down (this was before the Russians invaded Ukraine) because they thought it was Israeli, and they had reason to expect an air strike from that direction.
- Russia shot an Azerbajani passenger flight down because they were expecting Ukrainian drones (I can't remember whether they were already under attack from that direction).

Every judge in the UK is an active pedophile.

Is that you, Elon?

That post belongs in a Bitcoin debate, not here.

Look at his (?) other posts, he/she/it is serious.

How will people be able to tell that it's AI generated? In particular, before they buy it.
I suppose readers can blacklist authors' names once they notice, although whitelisting will probably work better in the long run.

I use DuckDuckGo and DDG is underpinned by Bing.
Most of the time the results are adequate although more obscure links are often broken - the sites have lapsed weeks earlier. This is not always a bad thing, the broken links serve as input to the Wayback Machine.