Random_dg

Beautiful UIs magically appear

You're counting not just on Scaleform here, but on your having a good UI artist. Sometime the problem is that part :-)

A great many Israelis do want Palestinians to be free, but you don't see much of them on TV. Please don't go the way of hasty generalizations. As was showcased in some news outlets during the last war, and as being written in lots of blogs and news sites, there are a great many of us that want Palestinians to be free and for all of us to live in peace.

One problem with that is that some of us turn gradually to the other side - one actually told me a few months ago that he no longer believes Palestinians want peace. Why is that so?

From here it sometimes looks like the Gazans voted Hamas into power, so that every few years Hamas lets the fighters let loose thousands of rockets our way (even if it's not by Hamas forces but by Popular Islamic Front forces). Clearly, our government which is also controlled by extremists isn't helping much either, but the Palestinian extremists are surely giving our extremists a lot of popular "ammunition". Where would Naftali Bennet be without those rockets? I don't think he would've been voted into the parliament without them.

I see those who fire the rockets as stupid extremists, but some Israelis ask themselves, why the Palestinian people don't stop the extremists? Why don't they throw Hamas out? So every time a Palestinian extremist does something stupid (like murder three Jewish kids), whether it's at the West Bank (which isn't devoid of violence from both sides) or at Gaza, several more Israelis join the cause, they start believing that there will never be peace and that Palestinians prefer the current situation and don't want to be free.

For every rocket fired in the last war, several more Israelis gave up on peace. Whether if it's ultimately Israel's or Palestine's fault, the real losers in the situation are the normal citizens who'd really like to live in peace and quiet, whether it'd be on the other side's expense or while the other side enjoys just as much peace and quiet. So maybe ten years ago X Israelis wanted Palestinians to have a state of their own, but now it's maybe only 0.8 * X or even less Israelis. The rocket fire has had a vital role in doing that.

Regarding the "negotiations for an actual state are promising" - I don't believe it's true, at least in the last few years. We have too many extremists here running the show, even when Netanyahu disagrees with them. Something similar happens at the other side, in the West Bank and in Gaza. Some representatives show up to negotiations, but there's a big difference between what they want to offer and put on the table and what they actually can. We saw what happened at one point near the end of the last war, when some terms were offered by Abu Mazen and Egypt (if I'm not mistaken) but Hamas themselves didn't really agree with them. This is just one example about Hamas, but there are other Palestinian groups who are very vocal about not agreeing and not giving up anything in the negotiations between Abu Mazen's government and Israel.

Extremists on our side do something similar: For example, they disagree and even propose legislation against giving up East Jerusalem and most of the West Bank, when that's the only right way to make peace happen. So we have several groups on opposing sides, both preventing peace from happening.

What's JIDF?

Why do you need to keep it set at a specific temperature? Why not just heat when you want to, cool when you want to? I've seen other redditors write something like this and still no explanation.

Keeping it at a constant temperature sure sounds to me expensive, but the first method of countering that, that I can think of, is to turn it off when I'm not at home or when it doesn't bother me.

It makes sense that keeping it at a constant temperature would save energy, but I think this needs to be qualified. I'm not an expert on matters of energy efficiency, but our power company suggests that in the summers (which in most of the country it gets to above 30 degrees for most hours of the day) you turn the air conditioning off when you leave the house, to conserve energy. In fact, they have a meter on their website that shows the current usage of the entire country. The maximum usages have actually decreased in the last few years due to their asking people to turn it off when they leave the house or the office. One more point, when it's 35+ degrees here, it's not on short blasts, it's always blasting pretty strong to keep an apartment cool.

I imagine that this works only with some types of heating/cooling, not like the air conditioners that we have here, and with different climates.

With the water heating we have a much better solution here. Over 90% of the country use solar panels for heating the water so in the summer you usually get 20+ hours of hot water without turning anything on (16+ hours of sun, and it saves it pretty hot for several hours after the sun is down). In the winter, you either turn it on for 30-45 minutes before you shower, or you put it on a timer.