We’ll wake up tomorrow with Clarence Thomas riding off into the sunset in a new RV, John Oliver poorer by one RV and $1mil/year, and a supreme court justice that doesn’t need to shave everyday.

P.S.: Someone get word to John Oliver that sooner rather than later might be a good time to rescind his offer!

Everything’s easy when you know the trick:

Guy who knows the trick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPsgEdmlUf0

So what do we do next? I mean, in terms of things that might actually help?

Become a society with strong critical thinking skills who values people based on reasoned takes based on experience and science over people who value rapid, loud appeals to emotion.

One piece of that is recognizing that doing things like putting flat earthers up in high altitude planes or near space is a waste of resources that could’ve been spent doing something better.

EDIT: that last paragraph was an incomplete thought. Individual flat earthers have done the whole scientific method thing, and proved themselves incorrect and stepped away from it. How do you handle the people that refuse to be convinced? If there’s no level evidence that a person will accept and they’re out in the forest commons chopping down trees to build a tower to whatever is on top of earth, how do you tolerate it at a societal level? It’s still an incomplete thought.

Good teachers: “It’s broken again. That’s on me. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong with the passes. To shreds you say?”

Personally, a single “bathroom pass” NFC card that a teacher hands out to any student in their class that needs a bathroom visit wouldn’t cause me much security consternation; that any student could be carrying the pass at any given time is enough anonymztion for my concerns. I’d be more concerned about germs; a group pass is going to get nasty.

Add in a requirement that the scanners have to be connected to an airgapped system, and the system software ONLY reports/stores if a trip took more than X minutes, where X is some agreed upon time by teachers/parents/etc how long a trip should take, and I think that’s a a decent basis for a product that most school districts will completely ignore while they get wined/dined by someone who completely intends to sell the system at a loss and profit off the data collected.

Everybody else here captured the uncertainty in the world, but even without specifics you can still do a tabletop exercise without jumping all the way into a rabbit hole and see what you’d need to have to spend three days without being able to buy supplies. Most of those kind of lists just end up being things you’d need anyway: water, food, any prescriptions, some local currency if credit card machines are down, etc. Decide how much you think some event is likely and how much budget you have and react accordingly, or don’t. Take it as an opportunity to change out the batteries in any smoke dectectors or battery powered radios, maybe top off any power bricks you have for charging phones.

If you decide to stock up on something there are a lot of resources out there already on what makes sense. If you decide not to stock up on anything then be aware that people might not be willing to share if something does happen; you had the same opportunity to prep and the same information that everyone else did.

Most of my knowledge of UK preparedness is either from WWII documentaries or dubious sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgwaOEg0Uqo

They don’t price their based on cost + profit. They price their product based on what analysts think the market will bear.

And for your original question: “How can they be losing money when prices are higher than ever”

They didn’t lose money. In Q3 of 2026 they beat earnings estimates by 27%, and missed revenue by 0.25%. The stonk dropped because its price was based on analysts’ guesses on what it would do in the future, and they’ve revised that estimate down based on Intel’s earnings report and what they think the AI market is going to look like. And so the stonk price collapsed all the way back to where it was in…April of this year.

There are recent parallels in both the firearms and 3D printing industries. California 3D printers now get to have restrictions on them because of recent legislation. When technology bridges the “moat” to some Unreachable Fortress it’s inevitable for lobbying to appear since you can’t move the Fortress. Chinese open source models and weights are that bridge, and here we are.

I’m sure there’s market research, focus groups, and unfilmed talks where people air the ideas out to gauge if they can get national traction, but it’s hard to tell with techbros if we’re seeing the vetted idea put to film or if he really thinks the idea that there’s just one computer on earth (that he owns) that everybody can buy time on. I trend towards the latter given the market for software you actually own instead of license, and unlocked hardware.

There are already rumblings about RISC-V.

No. They have already told off a 27 year old to ensure that the backdoor(s) they put there on purpose are still there when he gets done. It’s been worse than you thought for years.

• https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cisco-backdoor-hardcoded-accounts-software,37480.html

Someone with no understanding of what quality software looks like who also doesn’t have to deal with the consequences of every Cisco switch and router on the planet either being old and unsupported, or new and absolutely full of security holes.

They can buy it on the used market and destroy it.

<proper noun> absolutely hates the idea of [other] people <gerund> their own <noun> at home, argues they shouldn’t <verb> <noun>.

I happen to like verbing my own noun.

People like that rarely think deeper than that, in my experience.

That’s my experience as well. Usually followed by them getting very offended someone called out their gesture and explained all the side effects that they won’t have to deal with, especially in this day and age of people trying to minimize their online footprint.

After all the time and money that was spent guarding all of that data the US just gave it all away.

I never see anyone framing it for what it was: a cyber attack. After all the damned money spent on guarding all the stuff they got access to, all it took was them just coming and taking it. And I still only see unverified internet comments that they may have gotten into classified places. Was that what all the history of the Cold War and all the planning for large scale cyber events amounted to?

What was that about a KGB grandkid?

Someone who was 55 in 1996 lived through an era where you could start a new life by moving a part of the way across a state in the US and nobody would think to research, or it wasn’t uncommon for people to have two whole families that never knew about each other (bigamy). Who cares about security cameras because nobody has time to look through all the footage? Who cares what you got up to in your 20s¹ when you’ve got a family and a job in town?

Then storage got cheap enough to store it all, and computers got fast enough to look through it all (but there’s still no time to figure out who egged your car over a weekend). All those old people don’t have to live in the world they built, either, AND the world is built so it can’t be undone. All that data will always have value to someone, and storage is only ever going to get cheaper in the long term.

[1] Old busybodies need to get off their high horse judging people. Data miners are already working their way backwards looking for something of value, and if you spent a nine month summer in Europe sometime in the late 50s then it’ll eventually come it if someone bothers to look.

It’s the perfect place. Sometimes I even see comments I might’ve written myself before.

They’re not even putting the donuts and bacon down themselves. They pay some guide company for a hunt, and the company will place the bait and tell the hunter where/when to go. Then they fly back to wherever they come from and don’t have to deal with the consequences of getting bears used to human food.

It doesn’t work until reddit gets to that specific person’s make/break feature and breaks it.

Reddit? The Lemmy alternative?

I won’t go there, but someone go into that thread and try saying something good about Lemmy and see if it sticks.

WD40 evaporates?

A lot of compressed canned things are something suspended in a solvent, and when let out of the container the solvent evaporates leaving behind whatever stuff was dissolved in it. I can’t speak if it’s the solvent or something in the WD-40 that has the effect the previous poster is talking about.