I 100% agree that the best solution would be for the law to catch up and actually treat privacy as a human right. Until that time there are things which, while challenging and a hassle, do help.

I would use the same sim-card in the burner phone. Any attack by the government that they can do with your real sim card can also be done through phone number spoofing.

For email, use unique emails (things like booking+youremail@...) for reservations/bookings/tickets and have those forwarded to a second email account that you want to use during the trip. It is already good privacy hygiene to use unique emails for all types of registrations, and you will have more control when services eventually have a leak.

They can bypass it, and as the user you can also use any other sign or character that you want. If you email is foo@ then you can use the letter x, as registrationxfoo@. A popular choice for a company email is first.lastname@, so you can use a . for it, or the - character. + is just what some program, like procmail and Sieve, will recognize without much trouble.

Using a a catch-all email with your own domain works also perfectly fine. Doesn't work as well if there is multiple email users of that domain.

The war in Ukraine demonstrated how cheap drones could overwhelm more expensive defense systems and make favorable trades. It has now also started to show that, as defense against cheap drones has gotten better, more expensive jet drones are being used that can bypass the now cheaper and slower defense systems that is designed to target cheap drones. As such we can expect to see more expensive and faster defense systems. If they then want to make even faster and bigger drones they might make it so big that put a person in it to fly it, thus making it easier to reuse and better to adapt to different defense systems.

And so the cycle is completed. The only real question seems to be if the pilot in the fighter jet will remain a benefit when the drone is increased to that scale.

> The only real question seems to be if the pilot in the fighter jet will remain a benefit when the drone is increased to that scale.

With the modern tech level, silicon-based systems can react faster, make fewer mistakes and feel less fatigue. So it all circles back to the relative wetware price.

It would be good if future elected politicians would choose to remove the president power to starting wars or killing people in special military operations. I am reminded of this 13 year old rap news video being very prophetic, including mentioning bombing Iran. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpMPu5p_QXU

It doesn't really matter what powers the president is "given". As seen with this current US president, there're always ways to grab more power, directly or indirectly, no matter what checks are in place. And there are certain things that a president has to be allowed in some way for them to be able to act as a president in the first place, which preempts making them fully off limits.

2030 could be the decade where nations all over the world realize that independent energy production that produce an overabundance of stable energy is critical to enable growth and prosperity, and thus will put a lot of money, people and political capital towards that goal. Fossil fuels was useful when it had a consistent cheap price and availability, but those properties has been quickly eroded.

Different countries must have different standards for that. Here, the result would be that the person owning the staircase would call a cleaning firm and then send the bill to the person, in combination with a warning that eviction may happen if further misuses of the property occur. If it happened every other week, the person would be evicted, and I suspect the bills from the cleaning company would be enough to make that happen regardless.

If they couldn't identity the person they would setup cameras or a passage system to identity who uses the staircase until the problem can be solved. The law here allows apartment owners to setup cameras in the case of resolving problems with property and shared spaces. For example, in my building there are cameras in the garage and the garbage room, and entry require tags that get recorded when opening the door. Those intrusive actions where done to address past theft and misbehavior which in turn cost money to the company who own the building.

The end result of this is that every place becomes locked down and covered in cameras, which is very expensive, and which also kills off the few remaining quasi-public (privately owned but freely accessible) spaces. All because we couldn’t figure out how to help or manage people with problems.

Not every society is like this.

If we want to get closer to the "real" number, we would also need to account for mechanic failures of the car, wildlife, and suicide. We don't usually attribute people jumping in front of trains as the fault of the person driving the train. Fatalities per mile driven may very well be biased in favor of waymo that has nothing to do with safety of drivers, which in turn create uncertainty when trying to estimate the statistical result of making all cars Autonomous. For example, car owners can have a higher variance in maintenance than waymo, they can use the car in areas with more wildlife than city traffic, and they can commit suicide through other means than personal being behind the wheel (suicide statistics is itself quite complicated).

The German government is responsible for making itself and its citizens wellbeing dependent on cheap natural gas/oil. It was German politicians that drove the classification of making natural gas "green" in EU, and it was their investments into fossil fuel infrastructure that enabled and encourage the industry to focus on products that utilized those cheap fossil fuels. They betted their economy on a world where cheap natural gas produced prosperity, and that bet fell apart when those wars started.

Germany is thus paying the price for those failed investments, as is any country which energy market is connected to the German market. It is natural for voters to look to the government for a solution for a problem that the government is responsible for.

If history had gone a different direction and kept natural gas prices low, the bet that the government did would had been successful and people would likely had a very different view of the government. People would had enjoyed one of the cheapest electricity prices of the world, burners would be cheaper than electric heaters, and the chemical industry would possible be the biggest in the world. Emissions would still be high but the bet was always to utilize natural gas until green hydrogen could replace it, even if that part of the bet had dubious scientific support).

I think the goal was at least in part explicitly to increase economic integration with newly democratic Russia in a(n apparently vain) attempt to prevent war.

The actions of Russia (and now the USA and Israel) really fucked a lot of countries all across the world; particular policies with regard to energy do have an effect, but are definitely not 100% the cause of the related issues.

I must underline, the winning wave of the rightwing peddle on increasing this dependency to cheap russian energy even more, while they're also criticizing Merkel and the others for building a dependency to cheap russian energy. Maybe I'm getting it wrong, but it's mind boggling.

That is part of the irony, but also the best explanation I got for why the election results are as they are. This is a political situation that the leading parties worked to create in the last few decades, and the dissatisfaction of the situation is one that feeds into populist movements.

CDU and the green could had done a 180 turn now when the bet on natural gas failed, and instead gone on a course for energy independence through a mix of nuclear, wind and solar, while investing heavily into making it as cheap as possible for the consumers. They would loose a lot of internal support, but it would demonstrate a clear alternative to the bet on natural gas.

People said/wrote in the past that what NSA and other intelligence agencies did was to gather data and store the meta data. The actually traffic got processed for the meta data, and small amount of the traffic got sorted out and also stored.

I would suspect that today they also process the traffic for llms and thus store a bit more of the traffic as weight and biases. All that can be done distributed and to different degrees based on how much access they got and under what operational conditions.

Will hobbyists and experimenters that has no interest in understanding licenses go out of their way to locate specific licensed code, or are they more likely to just ask the AI/agent to cobble together stuff without care of any licenses?

Solar and batteries are great for any region where solar production align with electricity consumption and where the battery solves the issue of night time.

Wind is great to reduce fossil consumption to around 50% in regions where the conditions of solar is not great. After 50% the cost increase significantly as overproduction competes with existing investments and prices drops below zero (see Denmark as an example). Batteries is also prohibitively expensive to cover months of poor production, which is why regions that heavily invest into wind also construct thermal power plants for equal capacity that burn carbon rich fuel for electricity and heat (see all of central/northern Europe). Regions with colder climates also has inverse consumption behavior than warmer climates, which mean that solar produce the least when consumption is highest. This is where nuclear can be economical viable, but only if we discontinue building more thermal power plants that burn cheap fuel. EU voting to have natural gas defined as "green" demonstrate this perfectly well, as well as the complete lack of any political party advocating to building battery as the solution for low wind production.