That is how I remember it too. Before, shredders turned out long strips. After Tehran the strips were cut into short bits.

>>off-disk

Yes.

I wiped the Chromebooks but could not bring myself to trust a process I didn't understand, unlike the sledgehammer method in an old desktop.

Remember there were disk wiper programs built to a department of defense standard that wrote and erased every sector at least seven times and that was thought to be so good it was like shredding all the incriminating documents at the US embassy in Tehran.

The moment you have been waiting for!

This is why I have two dead Chromebooks at the house. In the old days, I would pull out the HD and put it in the patio and tell the young boy up the street it was his day to crack open a hard dive.

I'm hoping this will be a temporary thing. Right now they are finding 20yo flaws, but as that backlog gets processed it should slow down.

Drupal requires unit testing to release a minor patch. That has reduced the number of times an update breaks things. I am assuming AI exploit testing will also become a required step for any update.

>> Wonder why?

Their commitment to security and quality user experiences. Please pay attention and read the official statements. This information is easily available.

I recently read Project Hail Mary and it got me wondering about a local knowledge box like they put on the ship.

How are your in-laws doing?

From Freedom House 2026 report, recently released

QuoteAmong countries rated Free, the United States, Bulgaria, and Italy have experienced the year's largest declines. In the United States, an escalation in both legislative dysfunction and executive dominance, growing pressure on people's ability to engage in free expression, and the new administration's moves to undermine anticorruption safeguards all contributed to the negative score change. The United States lost 3 points on the report's 100-point scale, bringing its net decline since 2005 to 12 points, more than any other country rated Free during the same period except for Nauru and Bulgaria.

IN other words, on the FH scale, we have gone from a bit better than the UK to the same as South Africa.

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2026/growing-shadow-autocracy

Contrary to Maxwell Hunter, I believe our main response will not be panic, but hashtags, bumper stickers and speeches.

#NOLAStrong

"Never count New Orleans out" (wild cheers from the crowd).

"Our people have always blah blah blah"

"We have faced adversity and blah blah"

It's not optimistic. I'm not making a prediction.

If you stop seeing something as a possibility, it is impossible to make it a reality.

That was my guess.

Philippines is on my mind because I just read Maria Ressa's memoir, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, about her life as a journalist in the Philippines. Things were very bad under Duterte and Freedom House continues to lower the Philippines rating even with Duterte gone.

Of course, the Philippines doesn't have the weight of the US to throw around on the world stage, which makes people more angry at the US. The Philippines has little ability to affect the life of someone in Britain, but I think the idea that China has never experienced an open society and the Philippines has only had a very brief democratic period between Marcos and Duterte makes their behavior forgivable.

By the way...

Freedom House gives Philippines a 58/100 score, which is pretty good ("partly free" in the FH system), as compared to 81 for the US and 92 for the UK and 9 for China and 100 for Finland.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/scores?sort=fiw&sort_order=asc

>> fake facades with no soul

That is no doubt true.

But I think more likely is there will be a long attrition. We will deny that it is actually happening. The next Katrina will hit and this time, lots of people won't come back, but many will. Then the next Katrina hits and the cycle repeats.

At a certain point the infrastructure and the culture collapse.

If we were China, we would build a modern city without soul, but functional and livable, like the cities created as part of the Three Gorges dam project. I don't see the US doing that. We will handle it ad hoc, one case at a time, probably with insufficient support and let them move to wherever they can.

One of my favorite passages in all of literature, from Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides:

QuoteWe, the people of Colleton, left like sheep, docile and banished to unspeakable newly created towns without the dark resonance of memory to sustain us. We walked the Carolina earth without the wisdom and accumulated suffering of our forebears to instruct us in times of danger or folly. Set adrift, we floated into the driftless suburbs at the edge of cities. We left not like a defeated tribe, but like one brushed with the black veils and garments of extinction. Singly and in pairs, we left that archipelago of green islands that had been spared the worst disfigurements and indemnities of our times. As a town, we had made the error of staying small—and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.

Well, when you cut off accounts of foreigners your government doesn't like, you have to expect foreign governments to start cutting ties.

I have wondered - if a glitch erases your account and the bank and its lawyers double down and say you never had any money there, will a paper statement carry any weight?  It's not like it's notarized. No harder to fake than a PDF. Only slightly harder to fake than a screenshot of account balances.

I rally don't think a paper statement buys you much and it wasn't a paper statement that helped here.

It seems that the root of the problem was that she didn't even have a record of her account number handy. Once she got that, the problem was resolved relatively quickly.