A little more than five years ago, a shiny white Falcon 9 rocket made its debut flight, boosting a Cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Over the next year, it would launch a pair of astronaut missions and a handful of commercial spacecraft.

But since then, this first stage booster, designated B 1067, has mostly flown Starlink missions. It has launched them one after another, always returning safely to a drone ship before undergoing refurbishment and flying again. Sometimes it has flown twice in a single month.

On Monday morning, B 1067 once again took to the skies, launching 29 Starlink Internet satellites into low-Earth orbit from Florida. Upon landing on the A Shortfall of Gravitas drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, the vehicle completed its 35th mission overall, retaining its title as fleet leader for SpaceX.

Is 40 the goal, or will it be extended again?

The successful launch brings SpaceX closer to its most recently stated goal of qualifying its Falcon 9 first stage vehicles to support 40 missions each. Since that goal was outlined more than two years ago and the company has continued flying its experienced boosters safely across dozens of missions, SpaceX may be intending to push past 40 missions.

We take the Falcon 9 rocket for granted. It now launches so often—a few times a week—that its flights are a complete non-event. Even a milestone like a 35th launch and landing, bringing it closer to space shuttle Discovery's record of 39 spaceflights across nearly four decades, seems hardly worth mentioning.

But in reality, the Falcon 9 rocket is the bedrock of SpaceX's success today. And whatever one might think of the company's impending IPO—whether it's a financial boondoggle or a long-awaited opportunity for investors to own a piece of SpaceX—its valuation is largely due to the Falcon 9 vehicle.

The success of Falcon 9 allowed SpaceX to launch cargo and then crew to the space station for NASA, giving it instant credibility as a global spaceflight leader. Experimentation with the Falcon 9 first stages led SpaceX to pioneer first-stage landings and reuse. The record-setting cadence of reused Falcon 9 boosters allowed SpaceX to dominate launch internationally and deploy its Starlink mega-constellation, finally pushing the company to reach profitability.

SpaceX is targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion in its IPO on Friday, which is predicated on Starship flying frequently and deploying massive networks of orbital data centers in space.

But it's only because of the success of the Falcon 9—with which SpaceX proved it could fly rapid, reusable rockets and use them to deploy thousands of satellites—that anyone gives credence to the company's future plans. Starship and orbital data centers are the Falcon 9 and Starlink constellations on steroids. Absent the Falcon 9, they seem like the hallucinations of a bad AI model. With the success of the Falcon 9 rocket, a line just might possibly exist from here to there.

More launches than ULA in half a decade

Finally, it's worth considering just how much work this single Falcon 9 rocket, once so clean and shiny and now so dark and grimy, has accomplished in its short lifetime.

For some context, consider the performance of SpaceX's top US-based competitor in medium- and heavy-lift launch, United Launch Alliance. Since Booster 1067 made its debut in June 2021, the company has flown its workhorse Atlas V rocket a total of 22 times and the Vulcan rocket four times, and the Delta IV Heavy vehicle made its final three flights.

So in the time that this single Falcon 9 first stage has flown and landed 35 times, its competitor company has made 29 total launches. Put another way, this rocket has put more mass into orbit than more than two dozen expendable rockets over half a decade of effort.

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As Apple announced last year, this year's macOS release will end support for Intel Macs. The macOS 27 Golden Gate release will require a Mac with an Apple Silicon chip inside, including the original M1 that launched in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini back in late 2020.

Intel Macs running macOS 26 Tahoe can expect security and Safari patches for about two more years after the release of macOS 27 Golden Gate. Macs running macOS 15 Sequoia will receive one more year of updates. Apple Silicon Macs will still be able to run Intel Mac apps via the Rosetta 2 compatibility layer in macOS 27, but future releases will begin to limit the technology (Apple has said it will mainly be used to support older games that still use Intel code).

This change has been a long time coming, and every new macOS release has left a longer and longer list of Intel Macs behind. But many Mac owners who purchased late-model Intel machines in 2019 and 2020 could still run the latest version of the operating system, and third-party utilities like the OpenCore Legacy Patcher helped more adventurous Mac owners use their unsupported hardware a bit longer.

Apple's compatibility list for macOS 27 includes no Intel Macs. Credit: Apple

Those workarounds will presumably no longer work for macOS 27 Golden Gate. Apple is jettisoning most of the remaining Intel code in macOS, as it did when ending support for PowerPC machines in the Mac OS X Snow Leopard release; without that code, continuing to force new macOS versions to run on old Intel machines will become functionally impossible.

Even some Apple Silicon Macs will miss out on some of the new Apple Intelligence features Apple demonstrated during its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote today. The basic version of Apple Intelligence will continue to work on all Apple Silicon Macs, including M1 devices and models like the MacBook Neo with just 8GB of RAM. But Apple's more capable on-device models will require an M3 Mac or newer with at least 12GB of RAM.

The first macOS 27 and developer beta is available now, and a version aimed at public beta testers will follow in July. The final release will land in the fall.

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People are disabling the "recording light" on Meta's Ray-Ban smartglasses — "by my count, thousands of people," says tech journalist Joanna Stern in a new video report: STERN: "They're hiring people on Facebook Marketplace to drill out the light for as much as $100. According to our reporting, folks are offering this service in at least 30 states — despite Meta's attempts to stop it... In most states, we found multiple listings. In the New York and New Jersey area alone there were 23 listings." Stern watched a man in New Jersey disable and then conceal the light with a drill and dental probe in a New Jersey garage (a skill he learned watching YouTube and TikTok videos). He said the same day he'd already been contacted by eight more interested customers, and Stern also found at least 10 other people willing to do the same thing, just in New Jersey. "But what we found is they're all over the country." Meta sold 7 million smartglasses in 2025, but a Meta spokesperson insisted to the videomaker that a "majority" of their smartglasses owners aren't blocking the recording light. And furthermore, they added "We aggressively target anyone advertising tampering tools, have removed thousands of violating ads and Marketplace listings for these services, and pursue legal action when appropriate." (The reporter acknowledges "many" of the Marketplace ads disappeared after they brought them to Meta's attention — and Meta also said they were working with other retailers and sellers to take down listings for smartglasses-tampering parts.) The reporter also heard from one journalist who said they'd used it so they could record the activities of federal immigration agents without being targeted. "Others told me they just don't want people asking questions when they're recording." (There's video of one young man saying "It's already difficult enough to film in public. I don't want to have a blinking light on my face.") Tampering with smartglasses isn't illegal — though it is against Meta's Terms of Service, and could void your warranty. But a lawyer in the report says recording others without consent may be illegal, depending on a wide range of "jurisdictional nuances" like whether you live in an all-party consent state or a one-party consent state. "This seems to be our new reality," the report concludes: "more cameras, more microphones everywhere, and less certainty about who and what is recording." (Tech blogger John Gruber offered this assessment. "Using a Meta platform to find people to hack a Meta device so you can surreptitiously record strangers. So perfectly Meta.") Stern's report points out that "People are trying to fight back. Apps have popped up that use Bluetooth to scan for nearby camera glasses." (In the video one app-maker wonders why Meta isn't offering the same service themselves. "There are technical solutions to these problems.") Ironically, when I watched the report on YouTube, it was preceded by... an ad for Meta's Ray-Ban AI smartglasses.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

starbitten13:

wordfather:

phillyphillyphilly:

wordfather:

wordfather:

wordfather:

idk if this is an usamerican thing or not but it always blows my mind as a small european country resident that yall have many names and types of apples???? what do you mean its not just red yellow or green??? why is it so complicated??? who is granny smith????

‘whats your favorite apple’ 'red’ 'no i mean like what type’ ’??????’ actual conversatiom i’ve had with a mutual from usa

THIRTY TWO??????

Listen that doesn’t even account for all the weird shit local farmers are getting up to.

May I present the best apple:

the world is so big and beautiful

There are 7500 cultivars of culinary or “eating” apples.

Source

Another hearty round of congratulations to the Burger Too Exponsive voters who put Trump over the top:

A devastating parasite is threatening to upend President Donald Trump’s efforts to lower beef prices ahead of November’s midterms.

The New World screwworm, which often kills untreated livestock, has been discovered in two calves near the Mexican border in south Texas in the past week. The pest’s reemergence in the U.S. is alarming agriculture officials, ranchers and beef industry leaders who have spent months attempting to prepare for its anticipated arrival as ground beef and steaks fetch record-high sums.

[…]

A potential infestation is the latest obstacle clouding Republican goals to rein in consumers’ grocery bills and calm anxiety in farm country. The average price of a pound of ground beef was approaching $7 in April, according to federal data, while a pound of uncooked steak averaged roughly $13.

An outbreak of the New World screwworm, a fly that lays eggs in open wounds that hatch into flesh-eating larvae, threatens to cause $1.8 billion in losses to the Texas economy and cost the state’s farmers $732 million per year if it spreads similarly to a 1976 infestation, according to a USDA estimate.

This isn’t just some unlucky break, either, but a product of letting a nutty billionaire and a bunch of incel know-nothings nullify congressional appropriations:

Roughly two months before the suspension, the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency gutted the United States Agency for International Development, which included a program dedicated to preventing the spread of the parasite across the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a report from Agri-Pulse published in March 2025, which cited a list of cut programs sent to Congress.

The screwworm prevention program was part of roughly 5,300 grants and programs cut from USAID. The program also monitored outbreaks of avian flu in Asia, according to the report.

The illegal shuttering of USAID would, in and of itself, make the second Trump administration one of the worst in American history.

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On, June 7, 1912, Boston Elevated Railway workers called a strike. But the company had a secret force–Harvard students. Harvard men were more than happy to be hired thugs to break this strike in an act of class solidarity we rarely see from the working classes. This is a good chance to talk about the strikebreaking college student of the early 20th century.

College students in the early 20th century nearly all came from the middle classes and above. And while some upper class kids might express some level of solidarity with strikers–see upper class women coming out to support the Uprising of the 20,000 in New York in 1909, including J.P. Morgan’s daughter of all people–the vast majority were ready to take over daddy’s company and daddy’s ideas and that very much included busting labor.

Now, most college students were men and elite ideas of masculinity could very much play into class-based violence against striking workers. Upper class men were obsessed with proving themselves as men in the late 19th and early 20th century. This created all sorts of new things in America (and also western European) society. The Marquis of Queensbury Rules in boxing (the Marquis is also who had Oscar Wilde imprisoned for having sex with his son). Hunting laws to protect game for the rich. The Boy Scouts. The rise of college football and the NCAA to regulate it so that upper class men could prepare themselves for the ultimate combat–war. The Spanish-American War had given this class just a taste of the fun war could be. But could our upper class men really be the leaders America needed to lock in its dominance as an Anglo-Saxon power? Lots of people questioned this.

Meanwhile, who were striking workers? Catholics. Italians. Jews. Eastern Europeans. The unwashed proles. College students expressed an amazing sense of class solidarity, the kind that labor activists only wish the working class had–they hated the poor. They had leadership from the top there. Harvard president Charles Eliot was called “the greatest labor union hater in the country” by labor publications. Eliot called the strikebreaker “a kind of hero.” It wasn’t just radical labor who hated Eliot either. American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers routinely denounced Eliot, saying, for example, that Harvard’s president had the “inordinate desire to make the institution over which he presides the mentor and apologist for predatory wealth.” My friends, that has not changed one bit in university administration. But it was hardly just Eliot. After he retired, A. Lawrence Lowell did the same thing in recruiting students to bust the Boston police strike of 1919. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia, called the strike “an act of war.” And really, what is more class warfare than the rich seeing strikes in this way.

So of course college students were going to bust strikes. They came from wealthy backgrounds or they wanted to be accepted by the wealthy. They were going to take over Daddy’s companies. Their professors and university administrators were telling them to go beat up Italians and Jews. When William Jennings Bryan spoke at Harvard in 1896, the students shouted him down.

So in 1912, Harvard students were already motivated to bust strikes. That year, textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts had gone on strike. This is the famous “Bread and Roses” strike that the IWW helped lead. Town elites set up Wobbly leaders for murder, imprisoned organizers, and then when workers tried to get their kids out of town to sympathetic socialists elsewhere, the cops beat the shit out of the mothers and children. Well, Harvard students thought this was all great and participated in strikebreaking and beating up immigrant workers north of their bastion of elite privilege.

Boston’s rail workers had tried to organize since at least 1897, when an initial strike failed. In 1912, having formed the International Association of Car Men, the rail workers tried to convince the management of the L as it was called (as opposed to the T today) to negotiate an agreement. The L’s leader, William Bancroft, responded by hiring over 200 union workers. With Bancroft unwilling to be a decent human being, the workers voted 1389-8 to strike. Over the next 6 weeks, an intense strike took place.

The strikers were willing to enforce order through beating scabs. So Bancroft called over to Harvard and had students come to work as enforcers against the union. The courts, staffed heavily with Harvard graduates, were happy to do things such as sentence union members to prison for using the word “scab” as an insult. Things got so bad that finally the Boston political class intervened, including John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, a rising power in the city. Arbitration and a political class with working class roots now turned on the elites used to running the city forced the company to back off, with very real threats of the city taking over the rails. Eventually, an open shop was established, but also a union contract. It was a real win for the workers.

Interestingly here, the region’s women’s colleges saw students come up to support the strikers and lambast college men for hurting the poor. Wellesley students particularly challenged the Harvard, as well as Yale, students who came up to strikebreak. Wellesley students raised over $1,000 to support the strikers and wore buttons proclaiming their support of a boycott. And lest you think that these women’s college students were some sort of radicals, in 1911, the students at Wellesley–considered the most liberal of the women’s colleges–voted down support for suffrage by a 2-1 margin.

Again, Harvard would learn nothing here and its students remained active strikebreakers for years. Sometimes, workers struck back against these Harvard assholes. In 1919, Harvard, MIT, Tufts, and Brown students all came together to try and break the telephone operators strike. Some of the strikers began targeting college students and beating them nearly to the point of death. At least one had his teeth kicked out. These were male supporters their sisters and girlfriends and wives striking, which tells us that these college students were happy to break any strike. And they were back in the 1923 telephone operators strike too. Oh, and guess which major really was into strikebreaking? Oh yeah, it was the engineers. Some things never change. After all, those damned strikers got in the way of efficiency and getting the job down to maximize profit. Is there anything engineers won’t do in service of that goal? That’s a rhetorical question–morals have never entered into the minds of engineers.

This Harvard example of strikebreaking is far from the only one. There’s a bunch. My favorite is a bunch of University of Washington students busting a strike in Seattle around this time. This is my favorite for the simple and pure reason that I hate the Huskies and Go Ducks so now I can use this against the evil purple people.

I borrowed from Stephen Norwood, Strikebreaking and Masculinity: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth Century America to write this post.

This is the 606th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

The post This Day in Labor History: June 7, 1912 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.