I must take exception to that. I am not a crook.

I asked Amazon what I need to start composting at home, and it referred me to a suicide hotline.

IIRC, plastic recycling did "work" for quite a while. I'm putting work in quotes because the way it "worked" was to bundle that stuff up and send it to China, where something could in theory be done with it--but as labor costs rose and the quality of the feedstock failed to improve it became impractical once again. Even if China was always land-filling the stuff, our "recycling" program "worked". Now it doesn't.

The Boeing hit doesn't qualify as a conspiracy theory--yet.

I define a conspiracy theory as: A belief that a conviction should occur, in the absence of a credible indictment.

Since the coroner hasn't even issued a report yet AFAIK, this can't be a conspiracy yet. Note also that in order to be a conspiracy theory by my definition, mere suspicion is not sufficient. You must *believe* whole heartedly that the crime occurred. Thus, you can be suspicious of Epstein's death and not be a conspiracy theorist. It's only when you assert with authority that you *know* he was assassinated that you become a conspiracy theorist because to reiterate, you can't prove that assertion. You have no credible indictment. The professionals who do that for a living couldn't come up with one, and neither can you.

That brings us to Covid. There are a lot of ideas floating around about it, and not all of them are equal. BiLL gATEs pUt 5G iN yOUR aRm. Is not the same as "They released this on purpose to sell vaccines". The former flies in the face of all reason, whereas the latter lays out a reasonable motive and opportunity; but it still asserts without an indictment and is thus still a conspiracy theory--it's just that it's not as crazy as the first one.

So. Apples and oranges. At this point, a suspicion that the whistleblower was assassinated doesn't make you a conspiracy theorist. Real investigators who don't live in their Mom's basement are looking in to it, and they're not crazy. They're not conspiracy theorists. If their reports don't satisfy us, that widens the net of potential participants in a conspiracy, and as real conspiracies get large they tend to unravel. It takes time, but it does happen; so I'm not in denial over the fact that some "conspiracy theories" do in fact become "conspiracy fact"; but in the meantime you're better off (and less likely to be regarded as a nut) if you express suspicion rather than certitude that something evil has occurred.

7, but I can't tell you how I know. Feel free to verify.

After a certain point, they could fill drives with the output of a real random number generator? Who's gonna check?

Ha-hah, only serious; but there's actually a really good answer for this. There is an algorithm for finding the Nth digit of Pi, and it's *fast*, not requiring you to compute previous digits. Thus, spot-checking the data for accuracy is very doable.

This reminds me of the good ol' days when Rob Cockerham sent in spray-painted trinkets to Cash 4 Gold. (warning expired cert).

He also gave out his Safeway card number to see what would happen if you spent $100s of thousands on one card. Not sure how that played out.

I miss the old Internet that didn't even care about SSL, and where pranks involved making companies looked silly instead of sucker-punching people.

Anyway, I hope they keep sending weird shit to companies. We need this.

You didn't actually comprehend what I wrote. The "next door" rule extends to "next office", and "adjacent activities". You should have inferred that from my proposal that they be BARRED FROM THE FINANCE BUSINESS FOR LIFE AND NOT ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE COUNTRY.

The next door rule is a colloquial way of expressing the idea that incarceration should be based on their odds of causing harm if living outside of bars, not a literal idea that release is only contingent on harm to immediate neighbors.

I don't care about punishment. I think it's petty. I go by the "would I want them next door?" or "what's the harm of letting them out?" rule. Also, I believe in humane economic confinement and listening to science on recidivism and such.

Anyway, it will cost a lot of money to incarcerate somebody that long. If he's next door to me, he's not a problem because he wasn't convicted of playing his music too loud. If he's able to participate in finance, that's the real demonstrated potential for harm so I say release him NOW, but don't give him a passport or let him participate in any kind of financial operation where he handles money, not even running the cash register... OK, maybe that; but you get the idea. No employment at any financial institution of any kind, not even as a temp or consultant. He's going to have to find another line of work, but I don't feel like feeding and housing him for the next 50 years.

Because New Jersey is approx. 5.8 times the size or Rhode Island. Kids these days. Probably doesn't even know how much a boatload is.

This has come up before and the idea is to put a magnet in space so that Mars rides the wake. Not sure exactly how this plays out, because they're talking about 1 or 2 Teslas, and then when I google that it's the strength of an MRI, but presumably needs to be that strong over a much greater distance.

The link mentions an "inflatable" structure, so I guess that's how they'd get the strong field out over a large enough distance.

Just skimmed it, not seeing anything about likely power source or requirements--obviously not a fully baked scheme; but sounds plausible. Next 100 years?

So then they'll be allowing people in to that SCIF they were talking about and/or prosecuting a bunch of people for giving false testimony before Congress and wasting our time? No? Why not?

They have no "street smarts" and it's kind of hilarious. There's a thread on X now where they allegedly yanked the "system prompt" out of Grok (Musk's AI on X) by asking it a simple question. I know next to nothing about AI; but apparently the SP is a simple set of prompt guidelines that are used to shape the output of a chat bot, and allegedly the Grok SP says not to be "woke". Of course this could all be made up too, either by bots, real people, or Grok itself. So just remember, everything I'm telling you is a lie.

But they are going to complain about corn, of all things?

I might think that too if I hadn't seen a documentary a few years back that talked about the importance of corn in the culture. It goes back to ancient times before the Conquistadors, and various regions all have local varieties. I'm given to understand that the introduction of US corn, GMO'd or not, caused a lot of cross pollination that made it difficult for them to maintain local strains. It's been a long time, but they seemed to indicate that it might have even been a significant factor in disrupting local economies and increasing migration across the border--though I doubt it's a huge factor now.

You can't delete something that's already been freed. They're going to have all kinds of problems.