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Military literally planting the American flag on Wilshire Blvd.

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Abrego* is in fact staying in pretrial detention with the US Marshal temporarily. The judge agreed to delay enforcing her order to release Abrego at his own request. The Marshal will at least ensure he shows up to court in TN--something I'm not willing to say about ICE.

*This judge also asked Mr. Abrego in a hearing what surname he prefers, and the answer was "Abrego."

American car insurance covers collision damage from other cars or external factors. It doesn't cover mechanical failures. You can get extended warranty coverage, both from your car dealer or from third parties, but this is usually not financially worthwhile.

I get that the name is alliterative, but this is more like Dachau in '33 than Auschwitz in '45.

Okay. Looking at this pic carefully, where the hell did Lake Okeechobee go? It seems like it should be there, looking at Tampa Bay.

This machine also played Earth Lander on the CM version.

A while back, people in Florida built an absolutely massive airport in the middle of the Everglades. They wanted to build the next big regional hub covering all of South Florida, but that never happened. So there's a massive gigantic 12,000 ft runway, huge amounts of concrete apron, and space for a big passenger terminal that was never built. The runway remains open as a general aviation airport, and was until now mostly visited by students to practice touch and go landings.

My points:

1. The article summary saying it's an airport used for training is true, but slightly misleading.
2. There's a lot of things about this place that make logistical sense for the type of operation they want to do: cheap rent or land, lots of available concrete, not actually new build (easier environmental impact statement), easy on site access to a massive airport that can support jets of any size, low amounts of air traffic, and secluded from public view.
3. It's not actually in Everglades National Park, and they aren't filling in wetlands, like I've seen some say.

Those are probably not Cavendish bananas.

Several years ago at this point, Congress passed a bill, and that bill was signed into law by the President. What that law says, is that TikTok cannot continue under Chinese ownership. Byte Dance either have to sell the American video app business so that it is controlled by Americans, or they have to shutdown Tiktok.

Byte Dance did not sell the business, so under the law TikTok has to shutdown. This law was lawyered all the way to the supreme court, and the court said it's a valid law, and must be followed.

Despite all of these facts, the law is not actually being followed. And Tiktok is still operating in the United States. There is no legally valid reason for it to do so. President Trump has issued extension after extension, even though he has no legal authority to do so.

The latest here is the top law enforcement officer in the US telling the app stores, "yes we know it's illegal to keep Tiktok in your app store, but I am pinky promising we won't go after you."

Sadly most of the great maritime powers have signed onto the 1856 Declaration of Paris where they agreed to give up privateering as a weapon of war. The United States has not signed on, but has also not issued a letter of marque since that period. During the civil war, the confederates experimented briefly with privateering, but the Union declared that it would not.

In 2025, The Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act of 2025 was introduced in Congress. This bill would authorize privateering against "cartels" (apparently any cartel, like OPEC or the American Medical Association).

I've done some work with near infrared spectroscopy on a similar problem to the tricorder "molecular scan.". There are two-three main problems as I see it.

1. A typical lab spectrometer might collect on 3,000 different frequencies to cover the spectrum. Meanwhile the sensor that is cheap enough to put in a tricorder has around 10 channels.
2. The lab instrument probably has expensive and fragile optics. You can't do the same thing on the tricorder because the optics will break when you drop it.
3. Lab procedures rely on carefully controlling the illumination so it's the same every time. Hard to do in the field, even in relatively benign field environments. This even comes down to using sample cuvettes that are precision machined to have two sides extremely parallel. You can't make a tricorder that dispenses precision cuvettes for sample collection. If you can't control the illumination, you have to measure it and calibrate.