So they want to place boxes full of ddr5 ram in people's back yards thinking they'll still be there tomorrow morning.

The instances like this that I was aware of had in common that a person in the hiring process was from the same community as the chosen applicants.
It's a safe bet that a department head from China did not preselect a group of men from India for these jobs. It could happen that way, but I'd bet it didn't.

All that is irrelevant. This is driven by Project 2025's general antipathy to science.
This specifc action wasn't called for, but it was a necessary step to eliminate "wokeness" in research such as climate change.
A lot of the administration's weird dismantling of agencies can be found in here. Everyone should have read it because it drives a lot of what has happened.
https://static.heritage.org/pr...

A few miles away "Nearly 20 people in their 30s stared at their cellphones for a few minutes. Then they set them down and looked at their bared palms for a while. Then those of their neighbors."

That almost made me nostalgic for the days of my youth and lsd.

The DOJ says it only patched affected devices within the USA. Once modified, the device has become a part of a criminal enterprise, so there's probably a law somewhere in the US allowing the court's authorization.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr...

The zone where integer math crosses with the tyranny of small numbers.

I, too loved that book. I had been already been working for 6 years for Burroughs on mainframes and peripherals as a so-called Field Engineer and had been thoroughly de-romanticized. I think that book re-energized me.

I wondered why anyone would make a computer that would easily fit through a door. Wouldn't someone just steal it?

Persistent malware by definition leaves code on the target so it can reload after a reboot.
What they call memory resident doesn't leave code on the device and therefore doesn't persist across reboots.

There is a meme for this American tendency:
https://imgflip.com/i/8g6qg7

True that about casting bullets - lead vapor wouldn't be the problem. My friends and I were black power enthusiasts in a rural area in the 1970's and cast many thousands. Some of the most fun I ever had.

Anyway, the problematic battery recycling Is like this:
https://dialogue.earth/en/poll...

The problem is the same whether the batteries are used for cars, storage for solar, or storage for unreliable electric grid. But "solar" in the article title gets more clicks.

According to the linked report, the problem is that a great deal of the battery recycling is done by back-yard/garage operations that lose up to half of the lead into the environment. So the government needs to get involved somehow, stop the unregulated small operator recycling, and also do something about the other sources such as lead paint. Tragedy of the commons and that sort of thing. This is very much like the USA before the EPA was created in the 1970's, thank you President Nixon.

I also wondered if Eadon-com was mocking the standard ant-whatever diatribe people.
Then I looked at his posting history which includes his calling us "brain-washed wankers". That's not true. I know why I'm a wanker.

And it seems we have these to avoid.
https://www.dailykos.com/stori...

If we didn't make stuff up, we would never have gotten laid, much less married.
This also depends upon the women willingly hallucinating about you.

Making stuff up is the only feature of AI that suggests intelligence.

My observation is that the population groups are different between young and old workers.

It's not that individual older workers are more productive in any way, but rather that the young cohort contains all the people who will become drunks, drug users, who bring their sex problems to works, who steal and so on.
The young people who are not fucked up are often amazing, but the worthless ones cause more problems and bring others down, so on the average productivity is damaged.
The worthless old ones who have jobs have mastered the art of invisibility, so less often screw things up because they don't do anything. Nor do they spend time inflicting their personal problems/neuroses on others, or perhaps they are easier to rebuff.
FWIW, I'm past the 3/4 century mark. That's my credential.