Most of the deaths are explainable.

• Amy Catherine Eskridge died by suicide in 2022. The cause of death was a single gunshot to the head. Her activities leading up to her death are suggestive of mental health struggles, though they're used by some people as evidence of a conspiracy leading to her death.
• Michael David Hicks died in June 2023, age 59. He worked at JPL on comet and asteroid missions. No cause of death was released.
• Frank Maiwald died in July 2024, age 61. He worked at JPL on planetary missions. No cause of death was released.
• Anthony Chavez has been missing since May 2025. He was 78 when he disappeared. He left his wallet, keys, and cigarettes on a table at home, a common action right before a suicide.
• Melissa Casias has been missing since June 2025. She was an administrative worker at Los Alamos and held no security clearance. She was last seen walking down a street. She had left her keys, wallet, purse, and both work and personal phones at home after telling colleagues that she was going to work from home. Shoes similar to those she was wearing were recently found in a nearby forest. This also lines up with a possible suicide.
• Monica Reza has been missing since June 2025. She worked at JPL in California, and went missing during a hiking trip. Her hiking companion said she was there one minute and gone the next. A fall is a much more likely event than an abduction.
• Steven Garcia has been missing since August 2025. He worked at the Kansas City National Security Campus in Albuquerque. He was last seen walking away from his phone carrying a gun and had left behind his wallet, phone, and keys. As with others above, this is a common behavior of suicidal people.
• Nuno Lureiro was killed on his doorstep by the Brown University shooter in December 2025. Motive hasn't been established, but the shooter left a recording that he had planned both shootings for years.
• Jason Thomas went missing in December 2025 for three months before his body was found in March 2026. He was last seen walking along railroad tracks, another frequent precursor for suicides. A cause of death doesn't seem to have been released so far, but law enforcement said that they don't suspect foul play.
• Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Neil McCasland has been missing since February 2026. He was last seen on a neighborhood surveillance camera with hiking boots and a .38 revolver. He had left behind his wallet, phone, and wearable devices. Many suicides start the same way.
• Carl Johann Grillmair was killed at his home in February 2026. He was a prominent astronomer and astrophysicist. A suspect has been arrested and has been charged in his murder, which may have happened after an argument.

One suicide (Eskridge), one likely suicide (McCasland), four possible suicides (Chavez, Casias, Garcia, and Thomas), two murders (Lureiro and Grillmair), two other deaths (Hicks and Maiwald), and one missing (Reza). Neither of the murders are linked. Reza may have simply fallen while hiking and been severely injured or killed. The two other deaths were both in the age range where sudden deaths start to become unfortunately common.

Stage 3 smog alerts were year-round when I was a kid in the 1980s. They were more common in the summer, but they could happen any time the temperatures rose, and they were a fact of life at school in the spring and fall. I spent a lot of recess and PE time indoors for Stage 2 and 3 alerts. This page shows the number of days at different air qualities for Los Angeles going back to 1980. The highest number of good air quality days was 11 in 1983. For all but two of the remaining years, it was in single digits. The combined number of unhealthy, very unhealthy, and dangerous days usually covered a cumulative six months or so out of the year.

You can see the numbers shifting to the left starting in 1989. Both Republicans and Democrats in the state government (which was run by Republicans at the time) had authorized various government agencies to make changes that would affect smog levels. Since 2002, the number of moderate or good air days has covered at least half of the year, a huge reversal from the 1980s. The number of very unhealthy or dangerous air days has been in the single digits every year (bar one) since 2007, even reaching zero in 2010 and 2013 and only one in six of the other years.

Musk aside, the #1 change that absolutely destroyed X as a platform was by default sorting a users feed by likes rather than by post date.

The entire point of Twitter was to see what that account is doing right now and not what the most popular thing that account ever did was.

And no. I don't want to login to sort by date and then be tracked by some algorithm so it screws up my random feed like YouTube does when all I want to do is look at a tweet from a news article. Especially when I didn't have to do that before the X changeover. I also don't want it to be a walled garden like Facebook where I have to login to see anything.

The Second Amendment was intended to be a check on federal power. None of the amendments were incorporated into jurisprudence about what individual states could do until arguably 1890 and not certainly until the early 1920s. Many states had laws around firearm storage for decades. In the 1830s, Massachusetts was the first among several states to generally bar carriage of firearms in public. Texas would follow suit in 1871.

The Heller decision written by Scalia was a sea change in constitutional law, but it laid down important limits that were respected in the MacDonald decision that followed soon after and which incorporated the Second Amendment as applying to states as well as the federal government. Scalia wrote that firearm law limitations were presumptively lawful, and essentially laid down an opportunity for the federal government to prohibit future types of weapons sales by preventing them from becoming publicly available. Here's what he wrote (citations removed).

We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those "in common use at the time." We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of "dangerous and unusual weapons."

It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like—may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large. Indeed, it may be true that no amount of small arms could be useful against modern-day bombers and tanks. But the fact that modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right cannot change our interpretation of the right.

Scalia had no problem with regulating or even banning public availability of broad classes of weapons as long as those available to the public continued to be available to the public. In his view, existing weapons like missiles and new weapons like portable lasers could be banned because they were not "in common use." However, Scalia died in 2016, and the Court has moved to a substantially broader view than he had.

What are you going to do when Nazi Trump really ramps up the persecution? Oh right, sit back and protest and hope the government doesn't murder you all, ie just like Iran did to it's protesters two months ago.

The people who have clamored most over the last 40 years about government overreach are largely those most supportive of Trump's tyrannical behavior. However, the fastest growing segment of gun owners in the last couple of years are those on the left, with even more disproportionate growth among minorities. There are a lot of former military who are very unhappy with the direction that he's taken, too. There are a lot of guns on both sides and not nearly enough police or military to handle them all.

So far, the Trump administration's own overreach has been embarrassing enough to force them to back off. The videos of the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti were bad enough, but the responses by almost everyone up to and including Trump in labeling them terrorists and declaring that the ICE and CBP agents did no wrong before we even had multiple views of what happened caused them to backpedal (even the NRA chimed in against the administration). Bovino was removed from Minnesota and demoted, resulting in him either deciding or being forced to retire. They sent Tom Homan in, and the first thing he did was withdraw half of the agents assigned there, and most of the rest have returned to their assigned jurisdictions. Noem's constant bluster and media presence have sidelined her in the administration, destroyed almost any chance of a political future and cast a permanent pall over the brutal enforcement actions under her watch. Her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, isn't much better in terms of policy goals, but he has said that he doesn't like and doesn't want the constant press from extreme actions. The GOP, including Trump, is being forced to negotiate on things in the DHS budget bill that Trump declared just a couple of weeks ago were nonnegotiable. Trump's actions in Iran have backfired, and so far, the only negotiations happening seem to be in his own imagination, leaving him looking even worse, even among his own supporters.

They're weak and they know it, and their support isn't as solid as it was a year ago. Whether this means they continue to back down or they suddenly lash out, I don't know. But if they do move to mass violence, it isn't going to be against a group of unarmed pansies entirely incapable of shooting back. I hope it doesn't come to that, because it will become impossible to predict the outcome.

Trump has issued 101 pardons in his first 13 months of office, many of whom were very obviously guilty of serious crimes and for which Trump was expecting a quid pro quo. The Cuellars are a prime example. The evidence against them was overwhelming, yet Trump pardoned them and then got angry that he registered to run as a Democrat for office in his district. And there's Changpeng Zhao, whom Trump didn't know anything about but pardoned on the idea that his prosecution was a "Biden witch hunt." We're supposed to ignore that Peng's company made the Trump family $2 billion richer a few months before.

Mikrotik has manufacturing in Europe and China, as well as Vietnam and Malaysia. Their higher-end stuff seems to be made in Europe, but that doesn't necessarily mean that parts of those aren't made in China.

I'm not fond of Musk, but this part about SpaceX is just blatantly untrue. Falcon 9 has an enviable record, with only two full failures and one partial failure out of 619 launches. Of the 602 attempted recoveries, they've made 589 of them using 53 boosters for an average of 11 launches per booster, with at least one (B1067) completing 33 landings.

NASA has most certainly not given up on reusable rockets. They continue to plan for the Falcon line to be used, and New Glenn has some contracts with more likely coming as it demonstrates reliability. Vulcan is supposed to eventually get reuse capability (we'll see), and NASA uses that, too. Even most of the smaller rockets have or are developing reuse capability.

Tesla is a mess, Musk had to get SpaceX to buy Twitter and Grok, and Starship is clearly having more problems than expected, but SpaceX's core Falcon operations are working just fine.

For power, he will likely divert a bunch of solar panels and grid-scale batteries from Tesla.

The bigger issue is that he wants to put this close to sources of vibration, like the Tesla gigafactory that uses high impact tools to shape metal. Apparently reputable commenters elsewhere have said that these impacts, while invisible to human sensations, are likely enough to affect high-sensitivity chip manufacturing operations. Existing fabs all over the world have to take into account traffic from nearby highways, and the gigafactory will be even closer and involve sharper impacts.

He has also dismissed concerns about clean rooms in the past, saying that they're overblown, and that he'll be able to eat a cheeseburger and smoke a cigar in the same rooms that are running manufacturing operations.

He was good as an idea man for a while, but his ideas have lost contact with reality.

ASML uses the calendar year for its fiscal year, so it's the same thing.

To be fair this is the correct play.

Most of those communities are used to the noise from a steel mill and would welcome any tax revenue even if it's low. Electric grid is either already in place or worse case needs to be refurbished rather than completely built and rezoned for large line runs, Truck and Rail lines are usually available for large scale shipping if necessary and most brownfields are close to a water source such as a river or municipal plant which can be further filtered if necessary.

The Youngstown/Warren and Akron/Canton areas alone could provide miles of usable brownfield for data center space.

There was a little of that, but I think they really wanted to be part of the industry and figured that their effectively unlimited bank account would make that relatively easy. Almost out of the gate, GFiber was complaining about the amounts of red tape that incumbents were imposing, ranging from high fees to use existing poles to to arguments over easements to lawsuits over trivial and even frivolous claims. They lobbied city, county, state, and federal governments to do everything they could to block Google, threatening to withdraw from markets even before Google started building out, potentially leaving people without any high-speed internet for years as a way to threaten government officials who wanted to keep their jobs with losing them due to angry constituents.

My college professor in a user interface design class back in the 90's said it best after telling us a story about the NASA space program and it's UI design for Apollo:
If you can't train a monkey to use it, you can't train a human to use it.

I'm sick of apps that look good. I want Apps that WORK GOOD!

I'm sick and tired of having to relearn an app or report endless bugs because some just out of college app designer wants to vibe code some fancy app remake so he can say "I DID THIS MOMMY!!" to his parents like he's a fucking kindergartner holding up a finger painting.

Worse, I'm sick and tired of having to retrain other users and clean up bug mess because of said app designer.

I want a program that works. That is all.
I don't care that a program that works looks like something out of Windows XP. I don't care about bullshit features and UI elements that never work. I especially don't need a fucking box popping up every fucking five minutes to tutorial me about your bullshit feature or design that no one wants or cares about with a "GOT IT" button like a stripped down text based new age Clippy.

Firefox has (or at least used to have) skinning. How about working on that so that the kindergartners can play with their crayons and the adults can get work done instead of babysitting your slopcode for the umpteenth time. It's bad enough I had to create a theme so I can easily see what tab was active without having to waste time thinking about it because some idiot in your UI Dept thought white on white for the tab UI was a good Idea because some idiot at Google though it was a good idea instead of white on black or at least offsetting colors so you can easily differentiate like a good functional UI should be. I don't have time to retrain employees or submit endless bug reports and feedback loops because your "My First Sony" obsessed VTech Leapfrog Toddler app team is trying to justify it's existence again by reinventing the wheel for the 15th fucking time.

This is way I miss cutthroat managers like Steve Jobs. I hate Apple products but I have to admit that Jobs kept this bullshit in check at Apple when he was alive. If it didn't make sense, broke things, confused people or wasted time he would shoot it down and if the designer kept insisting, he was fired which kept the other app designers in line. The split second his body was cold you started seeing Apple UI's redesign themselves to the point you have a UI that's more art than function and then you wonder why your customers are bitching because they can't understand or even see your glass looking UI.

And if you happen to work as a manager in a App development studio. Print this post on wallpaper and hang it on the wall in your break room instead of some bullshit motivational speech or word cloud to coddle the kindergartner's safe space feelings. You'll probably be facing a harassment charge from your HR dept afterwards but It will be more valuable to your team and your customer's overall heath than any motivational new age crap you were going to put there anyway.

I've seen cameras installed in gyms to monitor the exercise floor. There's no reason they wouldn't be, and multiple reasons to have them, including showing customers misusing equipment, harassing other customers, or starting fights. They're not installed in the locker rooms, but the main floor is perfectly fine.

They're also perfectly within their rights to ban customer recording devices, including smart glasses.

Grumman and McDonnell Douglas were saved from bankruptcy by mergers. It is very likely that other companies like Martin Marietta would have gone bankrupt post-Cold War save for mergers. Five major defense contractors were left out of around 50 previous major contractors. OpenAI may not go bankrupt, but that doesn't mean its independent future is secure.

OpenAI is already facing serious headwinds. Its 2025 revenue was only $13 billion, but it expects 2030 revenue to be around $280 billion. Two years ago, it expected to invest $1.3 trillion in data centers, hardware, and model training, but a few weeks ago, that was cut to $600 million. It's losing money on most of its subscriptions, even the $200 Pro level. Its early technology edge is fading, with Anthropic and Google competing for the top spot. It had to push out ChatGPT 5.2 earlier than planned, and that wasn't much of an upgrade over 5.1. They're still by far the most popular AI brand, but that doesn't mean permanent success.

Permanent recordings raise questions about two-party consent. If a microphone can pick up the worker's voice, there's a good chance it can pick up the customer's voice, too. There are around a dozen states that do not allow recording without the consent of all those who might say something.