Well then this is definitely going to blow your mind... I'm not American and I don't live in the US.

If, like me, you didn't know who OnePlus was.

Back in the early 2000's (before smartphones and social media) I used to work at a company where we'd go out to lunch almost every day as a group. There were people of both political persuasions (this was in the US) and we'd have real thoughtful discussions about politics face-to-face. Feelings were on display. People were a little exasperated at times. But everyone went back to work and worked together and got shit done, and were respectful to each other.

A few years ago I was back in the US on a job, and a bunch of us were going out to lunch, and I said, "is so-and-so coming?" and they said, "no, he won't come with us. He's a democrat." I guess they didn't consider Canadians democrats because I was still invited. But that's how bad it's gotten, and let's not kid ourselves... it's entirely social media that's changed how people communicate.

I was at dinner with a group of people (in Canada) a year ago. My mother and an acquaintance started arguing over some kind of politics. In my mind it was pretty mild and they did listen to each other. She apologized to me later, and I said, "No, don't apologize! I want people to spend time talking face-to-face! It's way more civil than what gets said online, and you were both listening to each other." It's not like they stopped talking to each other... they still have pleasant conversations now when they see each other.

I suggest getting to know people who disagree with you, and just spend some time together. Ideas only change when people feel listened to.

The idea of catching the rocket means you don't have to include landing legs, which is a significant weight savings. You add the weight on the part that never goes "up". It's a good idea, and the same reason that SpaceX's next generation Starship system uses catch arms to catch the booster and second stage when they return. You do spend a bit more time hovering, which is consuming fuel. I assume the engineers did the math and the fuel you need to hover for a couple seconds is lighter than the weight (and increased drag & complexity) of the landing legs.

The only interesting story you can tell about Superman is bringing up the question... "If you're so powerful, why not just use it for your own purposes? Nobody can stop you. Why help people?" And the answer, which has always been part of the Superman mythos, was that he was raised by two salt-of-the-earth good people out in the middle of nowhere who taught him good old fashioned American values. He does it because it's the right thing to do. Does anyone remember "Truth, Justice (and the American Way)?" I think the recent Superman movie did a reasonable job of leaning into that, in an environment where the audience is jaded about American institutions. It's a tough sell, particularly trying to sell the movie to urban audiences to see everything rural as something to look down on, and rural audiences who see everything urban as selfish and corrupt.

"Screw SpaceX!"
We hate Elon because his politics don't align with ours, therefore we think it is great that NASA isn't giving his company money for this Mars mission, especially because Elon wants humans to colonize Mars so badly. Double whammy!
Slashdot has become so biased during the past decade.

You should not have, because the researcher who claimed you should retracted his own claim in 1989. This story is the latest release of a rough example working better than smooth.

I have to disagree. While I agree the understanding of roughness impact has evolved over time; The summary clearly indicates Ichiro Tani introduced this idea in 1940 and retracted it based on further analysis of data [from 10 years prior to his claim] in 1989. The rest is just examples of people hunting down the best inverse examples of what he'd previously claimed... with this being the latest 2026 release directly descended from his own work.

It's actually impressive flex to claim an idea you pushed that misled people for 40yrs before you retracted it [and arguably beyond that] is a fundamental principal of aerodynamic engineering which you then 'overturned' with your continued research into how wrong you were.

1940 - Ichiro Tani argues surface roughness prevents laminar flow.
1989 - Tani reviewed data from the 1930's and found "roughness may not necessarily only promote turbulent transistion.
1990s - Yasuaki Kohama of Tohoku University experimentally demonstrated fibrous rough surfaces, which have fine fibrous irregularities on their surface, have the effect of delaying transition under certain conditions.
2026 - Same team announces this.

From TFS "This technology is fundamentally different from the "rivulet (shark skin) process," which is known as a typical aerodynamic drag reduction technology. The rivulet process mimics the fine longitudinal grooves in shark skin, and by carving grooves approximately 0.1 mm wide along the direction of airflow, it aligns the vortices that occur near the wall surface of turbulent airflow areas. DMR, on the other hand, delays the switch from laminar to turbulent flow by means of random and minute irregularities. The flow zones it affects and the mechanisms it employs are based on completely different concepts."

You used the phrase 'junk emails' but it is clear from context and the rest of your remarks that you were not talking about SPAM but rather legitimate emails that you just considered useless junk.

Look at this statement, it would be nonsensical to claim this is referring to ACTUAL junk aka spam email: Pruning spam.

"Don't use the legal excuse, that a lawyer might ask for an email some day, that's BS and you know it! Don't use the "I might have to reference email X later on", excuse, you'll know if it's important enough to keep."

"I will never keep an email where someone is alerting me they'll email me later, I'll just wait for that later email. I will never keep an email where someone is asking me to upload stuff to their site, once I upload whatever, they confirm, I delete the email. There's no the value to the email once the upload is done"

Right, emails you subjectively consider useless, but many people are required to keep ALL communications. They are not allowed to decide which are useful and useless. More importantly, you are describing a time consuming process where you spend significant time and worse, mental load, backtracking to determine old LEGITIMATE email is no longer useful. We just calculated a cost under 25 cents a year to simply archive all your email forever. That means if you make $15/hr flipping burgers and spend ONE MINUTE A YEAR managing email you've already exhausted the cost to simply keep all of it.

A lot of developers took a long time fighting your argument, only they were fighting for microoptimizations in code but the math kept crushing them. It's simply far more effective to save the time you'd spend choosing instructions that are slightly faster and instead use that time finding a high level design that is more efficient or timing execution to find the choke points. Email management is only useful to the extent it aids you in finding emails you need.

For YOU. https://slashdot.org/comments....

I answered the legal/compliance point seperately.

"I'll assume a 50 GB email load, if 10 million people have that much email that's 50 x 10 000 000 or 500 000 000 GB of email, which is also 500 PB, a 1/2 EB of email, that is most likely almost worthless. Where do you store 1/2 a EB? Why store 1/2 a EB of effective digital toilet paper? That's just email, now think about photos, videos, and cloud drive usage, if you start cleaning it up, and you're honest, most of that is junk."

Of course most of it is junk but you missed the point. Yes, I said 120 50GB email accounts and you sound like someone stuck dealing with people and their oversized outlook PSTs that crash and clobber their systems to me so I'm sure we can agree that in reality, you'll have some double that and most far smaller. So lets say that is 200 users covered by a $200 drive for 5 years. That is $0.20/user/year... hell lets pad it and call it a quarter a year for the benefit of never deleting an email you need later. At that price it's going to be the right call for 200 people or 10 million people. And that's talking about RAW storage... email is text, not only is text highly compressible but emails are highly redundant text... you only need to store unique blocks on disk if you do it right and the rest will just have references pointing to the same location. Just thinking about emails sent to 20 co-workers and their giant reply chains... how much less that becomes becomes because you only store the novel content once and store pointers for all the repetition across all those mailboxes.

"That's just email, now think about photos, videos"

Personal Photos and videos take up far more space than emails. Emails especially are redundant as well. 1/2 EB of email doesn't require anywhere remotely close to 1/2EB of disk to store.

"There is no legal requirement to keep old junk emails."

See the problem with talking out your ass is that you are often wrong. There may be no legal requirement for YOU to retain emails/communications. That doesn't make it some universal truth.

Sure — there are quite a few. Common examples:
Financial services

SEC Rule 17a-4 — broker-dealers must retain electronic communications (email, IM, chat) for 3 years, first 2 in easily accessible storage, in WORM (write-once-read-many) format
FINRA Rule 4511 — similar 3-6 year retention for member firms
Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) — public companies retain audit-related communications for 7 years
Dodd-Frank — swap dealers retain communications for 5 years
Investment Advisers Act — registered advisers retain records for 5 years

Healthcare

HIPAA — covered entities retain communications containing PHI for 6 years (longer in some states; CA requires 7, some require until patient age 21+)
CMS / Medicare — claims-related communications retained 7-10 years
FDA 21 CFR Part 11 — pharma/medical device communications related to clinical trials and manufacturing retained for the life of the product plus a period after

Legal / litigation

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — once litigation is "reasonably anticipated," all potentially relevant communications must be preserved indefinitely (litigation hold), overriding normal retention schedules
Attorney-client communications — typically retained 7-10 years post-matter under state bar rules

Tax

IRS — communications supporting tax positions retained 7 years (3-year audit window + extensions); employment tax records 4 years; some indefinitely if fraud alleged
State tax authorities — vary, often 4-7 years

Employment / HR

EEOC — personnel-related communications retained 1-3 years (longer if charge filed)
FLSA — payroll-related communications retained 3 years
ADEA — 3 years for hires, 1 year for other personnel actions
OSHA — workplace safety communications retained 5 years (30 years for certain medical/exposure records)
ERISA — benefits plan communications retained 6 years

Government contracting

FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation) — contractor communications retained 3-4 years post-contract
DFARS / DoD contracts — often longer, 6+ years
Davis-Bacon Act — prevailing wage communications 3 years

Energy / utilities

FERC — communications related to wholesale energy transactions retained 5 years
NERC — grid reliability communications retained 3-6 years

Telecommunications

FCC — carrier communications retained 2-5 years depending on category
CALEA — certain surveillance-related records 6+ months minimum

International / cross-border

GDPR (EU) — retention varies by purpose, but documented retention schedules required for all personal data communications
MiFID II (EU financial) — communications retained 5-7 years
UK FCA — similar 5-year retention for regulated firms

Industry-specific

Insurance — state insurance commissioners typically require 5-10 years
Education (FERPA) — student-related communications retained per institutional policy, often 5+ years
Nuclear (NRC) — communications retained for facility lifetime in some cases

Public sector

Federal Records Act — government agency emails are federal records, retention per NARA schedules (varies from a few years to permanent for historical records)
State sunshine/open records laws — public employee communications often retained 3-7 years and subject to disclosure

The retention periods aren't arbitrary — they're tied to statutes of limitations, audit windows, and the practical needs of regulators to investigate after the fact. Most large companies actually retain longer than required as a hedge against litigation discovery, and many implement formal retention/destruction policies specifically so they have a defensible reason for deleting older material when it's no longer required.

"Businesses, it is worse. One lost email can mean a lost sale, or a customer unable to contact you and then resorting to legal means [1]."

This is very real and it almost seemed to happen overnight. Once upon a time as a freelance service tech I had dozens of small business clients who hosted their own email and it just doesn't make sense for a say a cabinet maker with 20 ppl on staff to pay for a T1 when they could have some multiple of the bandwidth and the same uptime from the same provider for a tenth of the price... but every so often they'd get a blacklisted IP or they might even really get some kind of bug and get blacklisted and the time it took to get off those lists grew and grew until eventually you basically couldn't get off the lists.

Luckily those large providers and spam battling champions saved the internet from the evils of people self-hosting email and spam exists no more....

1) The elite want you to be dependent on them in as many ways as possible. They want to be the sole providers of the energy used to heat your home and cook your food. In fact, they really want to just own your home so that they can rent it out to you. 2) Their greatest fear is the armed rugged individual who is smarter and more competent than them. They want to sew division and discord in homogeneous communities that have high numbers of these individuals. That is why they keep pushing that diversity-is-our-greatest-strength lie; to bring individuals into your communities that have suckier cultural elements, lower levels of conscientiousness, lower levels of empathy, lower IQ, and that have a lower net resource output or even one that is negative (i.e. net consumer rather than net producer). They are terrified of these prosperous communities that don't their currency and are minimally dependent on the companies and governments that they own and control. Examples: The Amish, certain Mormon communities in the West. 3) FACT: Wood is renewable, and when properly seasoned and burned in a clean burning stove, produces no visible smoke. It is an excellent heat source and can be harvested by anyone with a chainsaw, trees, some wedges and a splitting maul. Some seasoned woods when burned smell amazing, like fruit tree woods and certain coniferous woods high in sap. 4) FACT: Burning wood releases CO2 into the atmosphere, which plants love. The higher the atmospheric concentration of CO2, the faster plants grow, resulting in shorter growing seasons and higher crop yields. This is why they sometimes pump greenhouses full of it. CO2 makes the planet green. Without CO2 it would be a barren wasteland. So if you really want a green planet, then you should support measures that increase atmospheric CO2 levels up to about 1000 parts per million. This article is just further evidence of the mask slipping on the elites who seek to deceive people into becoming less self sufficient and more dependent on them. Remember the scene from V for Vendetta, "I want everyone to remember why they need us (government programs, the elite)!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?... You would do well to become as self sufficient as possible. Burn wood for heat, get solar with LiPO4 battery bank for electricity, get your water from a well/spring, have your own septic system, grow your own food, hunt game and raise livestock, run Graphene on a de-Googled phone and GNU/Linux on your computers. Transact as much as possible via barter or alternative currencies. Pack heat. Burn WOOD. Then you won't care about what your government does because you won't be dependent on them and won't even need their fiat currency much. All governments are temporary and will eventually fail. Stay out of their way when they go down and don't believe their propaganda.