That’s an interesting thought.

thinks

Tax revenue would be less-frequent, and there might be potential to create a misincentive to encourage people to unsafely drive on threadbare tires longer than they otherwise would. But I could see that being done.

But is $130 actually fair?

Well, a flat fee doesn’t take into account vehicle weight or annual mileage, which the gas tax more-or-less does. And the road maintenance cost is a function of those two things. A flat fee would penalize drivers of infrequently-driven small vehicles.

But…I suppose that gathering that data would also add some privacy concerns and costs, like the government needing to record how many miles your vehicle has traveled in a year.

EDIT: The really obnoxious thing is that everyone else is grabbing movement data on vehicles to make money off. Automakers via integrated cell radios. ALPR network operators. I assume that charging station operators do too — fast DC connections like NACS transmit the vehicle’s VIN, and I’d be very surprised if charging companies aren’t monetizing that data.

I don’t think that they have much to do with the shortage one way or another. The companies described in the article aren’t AI companies or even memory chip manufacturers (I wouldn’t have called them “RAM makers”, personally). They’re companies that buy memory chips and assemble them into things like DIMMs.

It wasn’t called “the broccoli haircut” then, but it reminds me a lot of some haircuts from around 1990-ish, and WP says that that it’s just a revival of some 1980s/1990s styles (though none of the WP examples look that close to the broccoli haircut to me, or quite like what I’m thinking of). I don’t find it objectionable. It feels a little disconcerting to see so many people that look like they’re out of the 1980s running around all of a sudden, I suppose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broccoli_haircut

During the early and mid 2010s, the permed undercuts of the 1980s and 1990s underwent a revival.[10] The trend was inspired by hairstyles popular during the New Romantic movement of the 1980s, such as mullets and shags.[6] By 2018, possibly having been popularized by rapper Little T (Joshua Tate), the hairstyle had gained recognition in the UK as the “Meet me at McDonald’s haircut”.[2] The hairstyle achieved media exposure after a school in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk banned pupils from possessing the style.[11][12]

During the COVID-19 lockdowns of the early 2020s, many younger Gen Z boys in the UK and United States experimented with new hairstyles at home before the barbers reopened. In 2020, Dillon Latham, a then-15-year-old TikToker, posted a clip of himself getting a perm in the style of the broccoli haircut, which prompted its early spread among teenage and tween boys. It soon became more a trend in 2021 after being worn by TikTokers such as Noah Beck, Bryce Hall, Harry Jowsey, and Jack Doherty.[5][4] That same year, it became an Internet meme and a subject of scorn online, beginning with a 4chan thread that coined the phrase “Zoomer perm” to describe it.[13]

The broccoli haircut was especially popular by 2022 and gained further attention online in 2024 when a photo of American actor David Corenswet on the set of James Gunn’s 2025 film Superman showed him with what many online described as a broccoli haircut, which was mocked by social media users.[6] GQ’s Alex Nino Gheciu argued that the broccoli haircut had reached its peak by 2024.[5] Also in 2024, Marie Claire’s Samantha Holender called the haircut “the TikTok tween boy hallmark”.[4]

EDIT: What I’m thinking of looks more like this “taper fade French crop”:

To my eyes, at least, looks pretty similar.

Gotcha. Yeah, the stuff in fstab is just a convenience; it’s equivalent to running a bunch of mount commands at boot. You might be able to just run “mount” again without the '-o remount" option. I was just listing that in case you were seeing some kind of errors in trying to manually mount it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYt0SDnrBE

Bobby: A hundred and eleven degrees? Phoenix can’t really be that hot, can it?

The family exits the car

Bobby: Oh my God! It’s like standing on the sun!

Peggy: This city should not exist. It is a monument to man’s arrogance!

EDIT: (For non-Americans, 111°F is about 44°C.)

That’s a neat tidbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_cooling

The heat in the tunnels is largely generated by the trains, with a small amount coming from station equipment and passengers. Around 79% is absorbed by the tunnels’ walls, 10% is removed by ventilation, and the other 11% remains in the tunnels.[3]

Temperatures on the Underground have slowly increased as the clay around the tunnels has warmed up; in the early days of the Underground it was advertised as a place to keep cool on hot days. However, over time the temperature has slowly risen as the heat sink formed by the clay has reached its thermal capacity. When the tunnels were built the clay temperature was around 14 °C (57 °F); this has now risen to 19–26 °C (66–79 °F) and air temperatures in the tunnels now reach as high as 30 °C (86 °F).[3][4][5]

Nah, that’s good. What I mean is, if it’s in /etc/fstab, it should be possible to manually mount it without a reboot. Have you tried manually remounting it after power comes back?

I’m not saying that the move is a good one, but I would point out that the US is about one-quarter of the world economy and about a thirtieth of the population. If the rest of the world wants to combat the start of a pandemic, it does have the resources to do so. The US might — as a wealthier country — have a larger responsibility to humanity as regards global health efforts, but it is not the only country with a responsibility. There are about two hundred countries in the world. If they want to stop a pandemic that might be starting, they can probably do so.

Last I looked — not recently — Facebook was one of the more-competitive Bay Area tech companies in terms of base salary (though there are places where people can do better in terms of equity compensation), so they probably have some leeway to ask their employees to do stuff.

searches

https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-salaries-revealed-how-much-engineers-researchers-made-in-2025-2026-4?op=1

This is only part of a larger list linked to above, but for 2025 engineering salaries only, base salary only, stock options and other forms of compensation excluded:

ASIC & FPGA Engineer: $299,880

ASIC Manager, Design Verification: $258,940.00 to $299,880

Director, Production Engineering: $354,123

Embedded Software Engineer: $169,313 to $269,081

Front End Engineer: $178,000 to $282,461

Production Engineer: $108,098 to $317,242

Production Engineering Manager: $258,524 to $309,797

Senior Staff Software Engineer: $311,029

Software Engineer: $124,000 to $450,000

Software Engineer (Leadership) - Infrastructure: $317,797

Software Engineering Manager: $200,907 to $328,000

Software Engineer Manager: $277,837 to $318,000

Sr Staff Hardware Engineer: $294,520

Staff Software Engineer: $258,524 to $263,803

Does anyone know how I can resolve this issue?

I don’t know why you’d need a reboot to remount the thing. Are you just not familiar with how to add something to /etc/fstab and mount it manually and are relying on some kind of auto-mounting system that only happens to run at boot, or is it giving some kind of error?

If an error, what happens when you do:

$ sudo mount -o remount /mnt/the-mount-point

?

I was going to mention that, but also that while I’m sure that it’d handle power loss while it’s unmounted the filesystem I don’t know what happens if the backing storage goes away while it’s in use.

social media creates a highly-competitive media environment

we learn that what comes out on top in a competitive environment is ragebait, and social media sees increasing amounts of it

It’d be nice if humanity were less attracted to outrage-inducing content and more to, say, catgirls or something.

I’m reminded of that recent incident where it was discovered that the South African regulatory agency responsible for writing rules for the safe and appropriate use of AI had used an LLM to generate the text they submitted and apparently not validated it prior to the submission.

https://www.cnbcafrica.com/2026/south-africa-pulls-ai-policy-after-hallucinated-citations-expose-drafting-scandal

Lego itself is also a Europe-originating product. I don’t know where their manufacturing facilities are, though.

checks Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego

Moulding is done in Denmark, Hungary, Mexico, China, Vietnam and the United States. Brick decorations and packaging are done at plants in the former three countries and in Czechia.

So “all over”, I guess.

EDIT: You don’t seem very enthusiastic about Lego. I’ll say that I have fond memories of Lego, though over the decades they’ve kind of shifted towards licensed stuff that is less-appealing to me. I understand that some of their spin-off licensed products, like some of the Star Wars Lego video games, are considered to be pretty decent, but personally I liked their generic “Space”, “City”, “Medieval”, “Technics” building blocks stuff. Kind of the Erector set of a later generation.

why they’re letting so much heat energy out into the atmosphere

Surely at least some of that heat could be tuned back into electricity.

To harness useful energy from heat, you have to let heat flow from hotter areas to colder areas, to permit entropy to increase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

Entropy is central to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time. As a result, isolated systems evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, where the entropy is highest. “High” entropy means that energy is more disordered or dispersed, while “low” entropy means that energy is more ordered or concentrated.

They might be able to harness energy from the flow from warmer to cooler areas, but whether or not they do that, at the end of the day, they have to let the heat go, just like a power plant that uses water-evaporation-assisted cooling. If they’re near the ocean, they can maybe stick it into the water instead of the air, and maybe to some degree, you can stick heat into groundwater. But they can’t just take a unit of heat and convert it into a unit of useful work and not have that unit of waste heat.

You can, in areas that have a use for heat, make use of that waste heat. For example, district heating can make use of the waste heat from a power plant — you pipe steam or something from the power plant that you want to be cooler to homes that you want to be warmer.

District heating (also known as heat networks) is a system for distributing heat generated in a centralized location through a system of insulated pipes for residential and commercial heating requirements such as space heating and water heating. The heat is often obtained from a cogeneration plant burning fossil fuels or biomass, but heat-only boiler stations, geothermal heating, heat pumps and central solar heating are also used, as well as heat waste from factories and nuclear power electricity generation. District heating plants can provide higher efficiencies and better pollution control than localized boilers. According to some research, district heating with combined heat and power (CHPDH) is the cheapest method of cutting carbon emissions, and has one of the lowest carbon footprints of all fossil generation plants.

If you live somewhere where that works, it’s basically “free” heating from an energy standpoint, which is cool. Much of the US isn’t well-suited to residential district heating, because we tend to have residences in low-density suburban areas that are pretty spread out and where it’s a pain to transport heat around, but we do have some district heating in city cores. Manhattan, which is one area where we do have high density, famously uses steam heating.

Today, Con Edison operates the largest commercial steam system in the world (larger than the next nine combined).[4] The organization within Con Edison responsible for the system’s operation, known as Steam Operations, provides steam service to over 1,700 commercial and residential customers in Manhattan from Battery Park to 96th Street uptown on the west side, and 89th Street on the east side of Manhattan. Roughly 27 billion pounds (12,000,000 t) of steam flow through the system every year.

For that to work, you have to actually have some use for that heating (and you probably only want heating some of the year, unless you’re up in the polar regions or on a mountain or something).

You can also use waste heat to drive industrial processes that require heat, but waste heat from a datacenter isn’t super-hot compared to, say, that from a power plant, so I don’t know how interesting that necessarily is. Lots of chemical processes that might require elevating something to a much higher temperature, but a datacenter — at least using current computing hardware — normally tries to keep temperatures from getting to something like the boiling point of water.

Some greenhouses will also use waste heat (in the case of power plants doing cogeneration, some of the waste carbon dioxide as well) to help boost plant growth.

As for tooling to take one down, I do discourage the laser route because it’s a risk to the eyesight of those in the surrounding area.

Oh, I’m not talking about something powerful enough to destroy a camera, just to make it so that it can’t read anything while the laser is aimed at it. Laser dazzlers are a thing when it comes to countering satellite reconaissance, and if someone could work out the software side enough to rapidly identify cameras on earth, I’d think that it’d be a legal way to keep them from doing omnipresent monitoring.

I’d think that a lower class lasers, of the sort used in a low-power laser pointer or similar, should be fine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_safety

A Class 1 laser is safe under all conditions of normal use. This means the maximum permissible exposure (MPE) cannot be exceeded when viewing a laser with the naked eye or with the aid of typical magnifying optics (e.g. telescope or microscope).

A Class 2 laser is considered to be safe because the blink reflex (glare aversion response to bright lights) will limit the exposure to no more than 0.25 seconds.

I don’t know if it’s possible to do that, though, with current software; identifying camera lenses might be a hard problem. And if someone made a successful implementation, I could imagine laws against it being passed (“criminals will use it to evade surveillance!”)

Hmm. Well, a few Europe-originating companies whose products I see used or recommended here in the US, though I don’t know for sure where all of their manufacturing facilities are located.

• Bic is a pen manufacturer that makes inexpensive ballpoint pens. French.

• Eaton makes a lot of computer power-control and management hardware, stuff like uninterruptable power supplies, power distribution units, stuff like that. Irish.

• I haven’t used Victron solar/battery/inverter products, but they seem to be regarded as pricey but well-made on Reddit, and I’ve seen people consistently recommend them. They’re Dutch.

• My favorite cheese is probably Red Windsor, a sweet dessert cheese that has white Cheddar with marbled port wine. For whatever reason, no creameries in the US seem to make something comparable. It’s the product of a creamery in the UK, Long Clawson Dairy.

EDIT: Hmm. Reading their Wikipedia article, apparently Eaton is actually mostly American, but it sounds like they moved their headquarters to Ireland for tax reasons, so I don’t know if they’d legitimately qualify.

EDIT2:

• Beyerdynamic is a German headphones manufacturer that makes my favorite non-active-noise-cancellation headphones that I’ve used over the years, the DT 770 Pro; they’re pretty sturdy headphones that have good passive isolation. That being said, Wikipedia says that they were just acquired by a Chinese company last year, so…shrugs. It does say that they intend to keep making most of their products in Germany, though. And that reminds me of another:

• Cherry makes well-known computer keyboard keyswitches with swappable keycaps, but they’re apparently closing their German production facilities down and shifting production to China:

  https://blackout-news.de/en/news/end-of-cherry-production-in-germany/

  Cherry, the internationally renowned peripherals manufacturer from Auerbach in the Upper Palatinate region of Germany, is ceasing its German production after 60 years. Cherry became particularly famous for its iconic keyboards, which are expected to continue being manufactured in the Far East. Production in Germany, however, is no longer profitable, according to management.

  All of my mechanical keyboards other than my buckling-spring keyboards use Cherry keyswitches.

I mean, I think that the metaphor of a single individual doesn’t work all that well. The UK is a group, not a single person, just a group that can only make one collective decision. There are a bunch of Brits who wanted to Remain, and by-and-large, those people still want to be in. There are a bunch of other Brits who wanted to Leave, and by-and-large, those people still want out. The margin that’s changed their mind is relatively-small. It’s just that the vote was a pretty close one. The UK in 2026 doesn’t look all that different from the UK a decade back.

Some kind of gay fox.

Like V for Vendetta?

looks extremely confused

Oh. “Gay fox”/“Guy Fawkes”.