Yeah, at first it was the "glorified golf cart" angle, but when Tesla proved that wasn't true, it turned into "they're too expensive", "ackthually they pollute more", "rare earths", etc... There will always be something.
It's a 4.2 inch e-ink screen from waveshare driven by an ESP running ESPHome. Nothing fancy, really. I used to change it "manually", but the lightbulb moment happened when I realized I had the entities I needed in the HA desktop app.
I never said they got revenue from a link. They make their revenue by showing you ads, and they use various strategies to make you stay longer on their website so they can show you more ads. One of these strategies is to include news articles in your feed, either shared by your friends, shared by the news organizations themselves (in a desperate bid to get you to visit their website), or just as suggested stuff.
They captured a huge chunk of the advertising market, and it's happening at the expense of other businesses who provide a useful service to the people. I won't pretend that they aren't useful themselves, but I think they reached a point where they've stopped seeing that as a goal, and are instead focused on antisocial objectives (showing you more ads).
That's obviously something we need to decide as a society, I just took it as a given since that's what our government is trying to do.
As to why, well I think the issue is that the social media companies inserted themselves as middlemen through monopolistic behaviours and captured all the ad revenue the news organizations used to get. The fair market isn't always fair, and monopolies are one of its failure modes. Market failure is one good example of situations where government intervention is warranted.
I think it's a bit of both. The law has good objectives (making sure news organizations can have some revenue), but the way they implemented it is terrible (paying to post a link). Meta just complied in the most dick-move way they found.
EDIT: I think a better way they could've done this is to tax the hell out of ad revenue from Canadian users. Then just subsidize the news with this money.
Yeah, you pretty defined the one acronym which is already defined in the text... Meanwhile I'm sitting here wondering what the hell is UAP. United Arab Patrolmen? Uniform Afghan Police? Unassisted Analysis Paradigm? Ah, I got it: Unknown Acronym Poster.
I have a e-ink screen next to my office door that displays the date, or a warning icon when I'm in a meeting. It uses the "camera in use"/"microphone in use" entity from the desktop app for meeting detection.
My kids really like it.
I'll second the Zigbee valve, I got mine on AliExpress for about 50$ CAD. It's a big gray thing with a button on the side, it looks like it's all the same model. It exposes a switch in HA, on when the water can flow, off when it can't. Pretty easy to automate.
I guess it could be construed that way, but there's a fairness element to it, too. I have waited for my turn, I'd like my time to be respected, especially by people who will be less inconvenienced than me. They will most likely make it to their destination way before me, too... Which only makes their impatience more frustrating.
I'm sorry, but when I'm walking 2 miles to the nearest store, I'll adopt a steady pace. When it's my turn to go at the intersection, I'll take the time I need to go through.
All these impatient drivers are sitting in their air-conditioned car anyway, I'm not breaking a sweat just so they can save a few seconds.
Homeschool isn't only at home, though. My kids, and all of the other homeschooled kids I know are out at some activity, museum or educational "thing" at least twice a week. Depending on their age, they can also volunteer or work somewhere that interests them. For example, my oldest loves reading, so she volunteers at the library once a week, where she gets to meet people of all ages.
Also, it's much easier to travel when you're homeschooling. You can go pretty much anywhere anytime as you don't have to be back home before school starts. As an example, we recently came back from a year on our sailboat traveling up and down the US East coast and the Bahamas. My kids spoke a different language (we're not anglophone), tasted different foods, met people from all the places we saw, but also from all over the world (you tend to meet a lot of other travelers when you travel), saw incredibly diverse fauna and flora, made friends incredibly quickly, etc. How's that for a microcosm?
Homeschooling's biggest misconception is that it's at home, when in reality, it's wherever you are. It's like remote work for kids.