> Iran

To be fair, I think you would be hard pushed to find anyone outside Israel who seriously thought Iran would ever be on the cards.

Netanyahu dedicated 40 years of his life going to various US presidents trying to get their buy-in. The US presidents all clearly listened to what their advisors had to say regarding Hormuz etc. and said "Thanks, but no thanks" to Netanyahu. Then Trump came along who was ready to over-rule his advisors and surrounded himself with yes-men in his cabinet.

I'm not being political here. A lot of it is public, for example just go to YouTube and look up the decades of videos of Netanyahu visiting the UN or US repeating the same line about "Iran being weeks away from a bomb", almost word-for-word for the last 40 years.

> Presumably because the price is a volatile, and storage gives you more flexibility around when you buy.

I will give credit to the person who got there before me. :)

Smoothing out price volatility is a big one.

But also it gives you options:

You can buy it "today" when its cheap and store it for when you need it (e.g. winter months).

You can also trade on that basis too. For example you can make a future-dated commitment to buy gas (knowing you have the storage available to take delivery). But if the situation changes and you later find you don't need it, you can sell that contract to someone else (or you can still take delivery and re-sell it). But you can't do any of that without having the ability to take delivery, because the person who sold you that future-dated contract will want both your money and to get the gas they sold you off their hands.

> Or actually brcause gas is expensive.

Gas in the UK is expensive because the Tories spent decades selling off the storage so developers could turn them into real estate. This continued well into the 2000's when, for example the lettuce (Truss) closed the Rough storage facility in 2017.

Gas in the UK is expensive because of 1980's privitisation. Another one of the Tory's great ideas. The UK privitisation model is designed to generate profit. Norway made a different choice. Equinor is majority state-owned, and Norwegian extraction operates within a framework designed to capture resource rents for public benefit. Britain privatised its way out of that option decades ago in the Thatcher-era and has never seriously revisited it.

Analysis from the University of Oxford[1] found that maximising oil and gas extraction from the North Sea would only save households £16 to £82 per year – and this would rely on tax revenues collected being distributed to households to offset their energy bills.

Dr Anupam Sen, co-author of the analysis, said the idea that “draining” the North Sea would make the UK more energy secure and significantly cut household bills is “sheer fantasy”. “We show that regardless of the remaining lifetime of North Sea oil and gas, a ‘drill baby drill’ approach to extraction would actually cost households more money versus continuing on our path to clean energy.”

The authors stress that savings gained from the clean energy transition are recurring annual reductions in bills which would continue indefinitely, whereas North Sea oil and gas are finite resources that would run out around 2040.

[1] https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/drill-baby-drill-appro...

> Of all the issues with the US justice system, being compelled to disclose passwords isn't one of them

Under the present administration I wouldn't be surprised if for example ICE tried the $5 wrench method.