This is literally me every single night at 2 AM. I tell myself I am just going to check the local feed for five minutes to see if anything happened on the instance, and then two hours later I am deep in some comment thread about a niche Linux distro I do not even use.
It is a sickness. I swear the scroll on this site is more addictive than the old one just because I feel less guilty about being here. My sleep schedule is absolutely cooked because of posts like this. Stop attacking me.
Honestly, I am so tired of the “textbooks will need to be updated” headline every time we find a tiny rounding error in space. We are talking about a difference of 12 kilometers on a planet that is 140,000 kilometers wide. If your textbook is so precise that a 0.01 percent change matters, you probably aren’t reading a standard textbook anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, Juno is an incredible piece of hardware and the fact that we can measure something that far away down to a few hundred meters is mind-blowing. I love that we’re getting better models of the interior. But the way science journalism frames every single data refinement as some world-shattering revelation is just exhausting. It is iterative science. It is literally how the process is supposed to work.
Also, calling it flatter is just going to give the “Flat Earth” trolls more fuel for their weird memes. Great. Can’t wait for the “Jupiter is a pancake” posts to start flooding the conspiracy sub-communities. Just what we needed.
I do not care if they caught a few dozen criminals in Estonia, this whole thing is a privacy nightmare. The FBI basically turned themselves into a hardware manufacturer just to bypass encryption and spy on everyone. It is mass surveillance, plain and simple.
The fact that they just monitored 12,000 people without concrete suspicion for each individual is insane. Today it is cartels, but tomorrow it is whatever group the government decides is a threat. If you allow the state to build the tools for total surveillance, they are going to use them on more than just “bad guys” eventually. We should be terrified of this level of overreach, not celebrating it as some brilliant operation. It is a massive violation of the presumption of innocence.
Finally, someone in DC is actually saying the quiet part out loud. We have been sleepwalking through these threats for years, and now Bannon is literally talking about putting ICE agents at polling places. That is not a security measure, it is straight up voter intimidation. If they actually try to seize ballot boxes or stop the count, just voting harder next time is not going to fix it.
Gallego is spot on about the economy, too. The billionaire class only cares about democracy as long as the numbers on the stock market keep going up. If we have to tank the market to make them realize they cannot just nationalize our elections like some tin-pot dictatorship, then so be it. No work, no flights, no spending. Let it all sit still until they back off.
Honestly, I am tired of the hand-wringing from the rest of the Democratic party. They keep acting like the old rules still apply to people who have spent a decade proving they do not care about the law. A general strike is the only thing left that actually has teeth. I just hope people are really ready to walk out when the time comes, because we are running out of options.