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.

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.

Nowadays, that cool kitchen cabinet is made in a factory, ordered from a catalog and installed by your carpenter.

Does anyone whose net worth is less than a cool billion hire someone to make a custom cabinet onsite?

I call it a collision.

I don't call it an accident because it is a likely, forseeable consequence.

Goofing off at work posting to Slashdot.

Publicist faces stunned fans and tells them, "Calm down everybody. That was the "evil Captain Kirk" from Episode 5."

(Fans restart their chatter and demand for autographs as if nothing has happened.

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.

The "word on the street" is that statins, medicines that lower bad cholesterol although I think it is hope over experience that they raise "good" (HDL) cholesterol, don't do much of anything for people who haven't had a heart attack. Once you have had a heart attack, their benefit to living longer is unmistakable.

Someone point me to a source saying this is wrong.

cardiac patients are being treated differently than when the original trials were done.

The time a ball takes to drop off the Leaning Tower in Pisa, not as much.

I am prescribed metoprolol even though my ejection volume was measured at 60% during the hospital stay, at 55% two years later when I reported an episode of chest pain.

I was once taking an ACE inhibitor for blood pressure control 30 years prior and went to the ER when my upper lip puffed out making me look like a duck. They told me this was angioedema, but at the time, no one thought the ACE inhibitor was the cause. Since then, ACE inhibitors are said to be the leading cause of patients going to the ER with angioedema.

I rather like my metoprolol. Combined with following the cardiac rehab instructions for 30 minutes vigorous walking each day, I am getting both reduced resting heart rate and lower blood pressure. I fall asleep at night much easier. On the other hand, I get sleepy mid afternoon and would take a nap if I didn't have to work. I also feel like the moving truck I once rented that had a governor on the motor in that I max out in my exertion for heavier activities than the fast walking.

Back on the day, someone commenting on Slashdot would make the pendantic reminder that it is properly called "GNU/Linux."

Oops, I guess I just did. And you kids, get off my lawn!

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.