They do. And they always have. I don't know how to describe this phenomena to you in a way that communicates what this is like. For disclosure, I have three kids. Two are of high-school age and are largely too old for this particular meme. The third is in elementary school and that's where this seems to hit the hardest.

Those two numbers together is enough to get better than 90% of a group of elementary school students to reflexively shout "SIIIIIIIIX-SEEEEEVEEEEEN." You can punish them. You can deny them recess. You can tell them they get extra homework. They don't care.

Part of the reason they don't care is that educational philosophy doesn't allow particularly hard-nosed punishments for little kids. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. When I was a kid the principal was allowed to literally beat kids with a wooden bat which seems like maybe not the best idea.

But the other reason they don't care is that the meme is almost universally reinforced by people they like and care about: influencers and video content creators. That group is fairly rarified and the meme is extremely wide-spread so, while they're all engaged with personalized content, nearly all of it carries the meme. The people pushing against it are teachers and parents but part of the appeal of the meme is that it is absurdest (kids don't know what that means but they appreciate it anyway) and irritates parents/teachers/etc.

It's like the "jingle bells batman smells" song when we were kids, but not seasonal, linked to two integers, and ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE in media pitched to elementary aged kids.

And so it's really, really easy for it to cause teachers to lose control of a classroom. It's not that the content of the stupid shit that kids say is unique or different here, but that the level of disruption and the ubiquity of the issue is notable.

SR-71. But yea. And huge exhibits on the rest of the space program, the Cold War arms race, etc. The Dulles annex is a national treasure.

The FDA lied about it, got sued, and had to retract their statement. I have that linked somewhere around here too. Ah, https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bloomberg.com%2Fnews...

Your summary completely -- and I would further suggest deliberately and maliciously -- mischaracterizes the case. The article you cite states that the Fifth Circuit found that the FDA overstepped its authority by providing medical advice. Nowhere did the court find the FDA's statements were materially false or misleading -- it is and remains a fact that ivermectin is ineffective and inappropriate for treating COVID. Therefore, claiming the FDA "lied" willfully misrepresents the case.

The article then goes on to support my point and the Democratic Administration's efforts -- that misinformation concerning COVID-19 was and remains rampant, and that it needs to be combatted for the sake of public health.

Speech is not violence. Speech is not a threat to public health. Speech is necessary to find truth in society.

Look up the term, "fighting words." Then go visit a venue with a principally African American clientele, and explain how you should be free to use the N-word without consequence, because it's merely "speech."

It sounds to me like your sanctimonious polemics would be better received on X. They have a prettier UI as well. Off you go, sonny...

...there was extensive documentation on how Biden pressured social media companies to silence everyday American citizens. [ ... ]

Couple 'o things:

1. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,
2. Assertions made without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.

Not even ordinary evidence was provided. So we can set that nonsensical statement aside.

The Truth: The Biden Administration was seeking to remove maliciously posted lies and falsehoods concerning COVID-19's risks and how to mitigate them, so that people without mad Google sk1llz searching for information on staying healthy would be less likely to encounter false, life-threatening information.

Example: Back in 2020, there was this slob who suggested on national television that the best way to avoid COVID was to inject disinfectant , and that the disease could by treated by ivermectin -- which is a horse de-wormer (i.e. an anti-parasitic, not an anti-viral). Both claims were absolute bullshit , but nevertheless got repeated millions of times on social media by "everyday Americans." It was this kind of LIFE-THREATENING GARBAGE that the Democratic Administration was seeking to mitigate. So that people wouldn't, y'know... die.

Well. It seems that Google has been cowed by -- or now is under the complete control of -- fascist filth.

Post links to viable substitutes for Google's various services here.

Well damn. Yes. Though, now that I stop to think about it, the Pacific is kind of crazy in that the Western Pacific is in the Eastern Hemisphere and the Eastern Pacific is in the Western Hemisphere.

And now I have a headache.

This ain't the early Cold War anymore. While there are certainly some super-secret weapons platforms out there, a lot of military capability is deliberately communicated and even put on display because it deters conflict.

When the Soviet Union fell the Pentagon's priorities shifted from "World War 3 against the USSR" to "wars against countries with marginally effective air forces." So when the B-2 came online, it served the Pentagon's mission better to show it off. "Look at our invisible bomber. You really think crossing us is a good idea? Be a shame of bombs just fell out of an empty sky on you without any warning whatsoever."

China wants the US to know that it can launch stealth aircraft off of its carriers because that allows it to use its carriers to assert control of the Eastern Pacific. China doesn't regard war with the United States as inevitable. Consequently, it's interested in convincing the United States that a war in the Pacific isn't worth fighting. That means eroding American confidence in American strategic and technological dominance so Americans know that a conflict with China will be costly.

This is targeted directly at American isolationists: "do you really want your kid to die for Taiwan?"

As a historian the only caveat I'd advise there is that we are unlikely to see a long, drawn-out slog like WW2 again. Production capacity is great but the next Great Power war isn't likely to take place over years or even months. So China's technological edge is likely to matter but it's tempered with a willingness to stockpile and maintain systems which may never see use.

Doing that at limited production scale is one thing. Doing it at massive, "we're going to fight a serious war with this stuff" scales is another. China, like many authoritarian regimes, has shown itself to be dazzled by the propaganda value of wonder weapons. The CJ-1000, most recently, seems like a very impressive missile system but if it doesn't exist is sufficient quantity to turn the tide against American assets in theater it's just a waste of money.

Of course, China is also famously closed lipped so it's hard to tell. It might turn out that they have tens of thousands of those things. Probably not, but maybe.

ve never seen a software distribution mechanism as careless and sloppy as NPM. Bazillions of dependencies and no signing of packages. [ ... ]

Rust's cargo packaging system is almost exactly the same way. And the last time I looked, Go's packaging was very similar. And package signing won't help if the maintainer's key/cert has been exfiltrated and cracked.

This is what you get when you embrace DLL Hell -- the idea that you should pin your program to a single specific revision of a library, rather than, y'know, doing the engineering work to ensure that, as an app author, you're relying only on documented behavior; and, as a library author, to be responsible for creating backward compatibility for old apps linking to old entry points. Sticking to that principle lets you update shared system libraries with the latest enhancements and bug fixes, while remaining relatively sure none of the old clients will break.

"Sometimes you have to break backward compatibility." Agreed, but the interval between those breaks should be measured in years, not days.

A fair chuck of the crypto space is "pie in the sky bullshit" with a few rare exceptions where the coin itself has been established as a critical consumable for some other service which delivers real value. But the rest? Memecoins are basically a casino with the added twist of being able to bluff other idiots into doubling down on your bet to your own benefit.

Trump Coin, on the other hand, is not a meme coin. It looks like a meme coin and you're supposed to think of it as a meme coin but it's the first kind: a coin which enables some other service that delivers real value. That value is bribing government officials.

Large purchases of Trump Coin necessarily drive the price of the coin up, allowing Trump or his chosen acolytes to sell their horded coins at a tidy profit. Everyone who holds the coins has a commonly held interest. Everyone who buys them to inflate the price and enrich the holders expects to get something for their trouble and then becomes part of the cabal of holders.

Trump Coin is basically an anti-dollar: it is backed, not by the full faith and credit of the United States but by the political corruption and dominance of the MAGA movement.

Previous comments have been drawing analogies to Black Mirror, but this "idea" goes back much further...

...This is an episode of Max Headroom (US version).

Specifically, S02E02: "Deities." A company claims to be able to bring past loved ones back to "life" as an AI, for a modest recurring fee. But Bryce (the creator of Max Headroom) opines they can't possibly have the compute power to do it, as it requires a large mainframe just to run Max's highly flawed, glitching bust.

Wouldn't surprise me if the "visionaries" behind this saw that episode, and saw an opportunity to fleece gullible rubes.

It's wild to imagine Echostar/Dish being worth anything close to that amount of money. From my own experience working inside the company everything always seemed like it was held together with bailing wire and bubble-gum.

I assume there was a highly competitive bidding process for this because there's no way Dish's board of directors would have had the stones to set the price at "three times the company's market cap" on their own.

I'm largely in agreement with you. I don't think its terribly effective to tell people what they can and can't do. If we don't want people to gamble, making gambling illegal isn't going to move the needle meaningfully and it's probably going to increase overall harm. See, for example, the war on drugs.

But we can move the needle by regulating the supply side of the equation and the more infrastructure intensive the supply side is the more effective regulation is. Banning the sale of leaded gas, for example, resulted in a pretty painless transition away from lead in gasoline. We didn't need to arrest people using leaded gas; the inconvenience of getting leaded gas was more than enough to get people to convert.

That's the approach that makes the most sense for online gambling too. We don't need to be kicking down doors to card games or frog-marching seniors out of bingo night, but we probably would be substantially better off if it weren't legal to develop platforms and services which are specifically engineered to engaged young people and nurture in them a crippling gambling addiction.

And we can say "oh, but why can't you just convince companies not to build those products without the threat of government force" but building those gambling products, or putting heroin in the Big Mac special sauce, or handing out cigarettes and alcohol at middle school football games is a fantastic way to make giant buckets of money at the expense of people's lives and nothing short of the threat of consequences exceeding those potential profits is going to convince a profit-seeking corporation to pass on all that money.

Banning tobacco didn't stop smoking, but banning cigarette vending machines meaningfully reduced it, especially in under-age smokers and lighter smokers.

Yes, banning gambling doesn't stop gaming addiction but taking the casino out of your pocket and taking away the casino's ability to run A/B tests on what it takes to get you, personally, to place your next bet will reduce the harm of gambling addiction across the population.

Anyone who did Not See this coming isn't paying attention. One of the hallmarks of a fascist ideology is the identification of any competing ideas as degenerate or ideologically poisonous. This is not a "both sides" issue; the insistence that we not teach political fantasy and conspiracy theory is qualitatively different than insisting that we teach what actually happened and we can tell the difference by imagining the opposite.

If tomorrow incontrovertible evidence that the 2020 election was stolen came out, you wouldn't see a bunch of Democrats insisting that we refuse to teach it. How do we know that? Simple: look at how the Lewinsky scandal is covered in Blue-state history curricula.