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Black Market Tinkerers on Facebook Marketplace Offer to Hide 'Recording Lights' on Meta Smartglasses

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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.

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fxer
12 hours ago
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Seems a little silly to put recording lights on glasses when we're already recorded by over 70 unblinking cameras a day.

https://kdvr.com/news/trending/caught-on-camera-americans-are-captured-an-estimated-70-security-cameras-each-day/amp/
Bend, Oregon
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idk if this is an usamerican thing or not but it always blows my mind as a small european country…

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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

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fxer
12 hours ago
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Europe only has three apples? Sad.
Bend, Oregon
hannahdraper
17 hours ago
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Washington, DC
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Trump and Elon take beef

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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.

The post Trump and Elon take beef appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

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fxer
16 hours ago
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Bend, Oregon
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This Day in Labor History: June 7, 1912

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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.

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fxer
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Packwood

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Bob Packwood is dead. While his name became a joke of 1990s politics due to his serial sexual harassment and his resignation from the Senate due to that behavior, he is actually a far more interesting character than that and a man who represents what the Republican Party could be at one time, which was not in fact always terrible, despite the fact that he personally was an awful guy.

Born in Portland, Oregon in 1932, Packwood grew up in an old-time Oregon political family. It was a Republican family, but a relatively moderate one. The Oregon Republican Party was pretty right-wing and business dominated for sure, but Packwood rose despite being a lot less committed to these ideas than your average Republican. He went to Willamette University, which was the college most connected to Oregon politics, and not only because it is literally across the street from the state capitol building. His long-time colleague in the Senate, Mark Hatfield, was also a Willamette grad.

In fact, Packwood rose in the state Republican Party by so diligently working for Hatfield’s governor and then Senate campaigns. The two men would have little in common personally, with Hatfield being an intense serious Baptist and Packwood someone who, ur, enjoyed the fleshy pleasures of life, but they would have a long working relationship around ideas of moderate Republican politics.

Packwood rose fast. He was elected Chairman of the Multnomah County Republican Party (Portland for those who are not too familiar with Oregon) in 1960, only 28 years old. Then in 1962, he became the youngest member of the state legislature when he won an election that got a ton of attention for the sheer energy he brought to the race. That would be a Packwood hallmark in these early years—youthful energy. Reading about this campaign now, six decades later, it’s clear that Packwood was helping to work up a lot about modern campaigning. What people found so remarkable was the intense door-to-door campaigning of himself and his volunteers, as well as festooning the area with yard signs. This is all pretty normal today but was not necessarily at that time. This got a ton of attention and he started training other Republicans on how to do this, which helped the party take the Oregon legislature in 1964, the only state body the party won as LBJ was making mincemeat out of Barry Goldwater that year.

For Packwood, one of the lessons of his campaigning and his politics was that the Republican Party should not be a far-right organization. One of the reasons he felt he and his candidates had so much success is that they were Republicans for the present, not a bunch of old angry people who longed for 1929 or wanted to nuke the Soviets. No Curtis LeMay or Goldwater, here. And Packwood, who was as ambitious as any politician of the late twentieth century, build on this. Shortly after his election to the state legislature, he started the Dorchester Conference. This was Packwood’s space to push his liberal Republicanism. The idea behind this was as a space for liberal Republicans from around the West to get together, push their own ideas, and resist the Goldwater/Reagan takeover of the Party. Obviously that didn’t succeed and today this is mostly just a networking place for Oregon Republicans who make Goldwater look like Lyndon Johnson. But still, this was Packwood’s baby and for a long time, it actually mattered.

In 1968, Packwood decided it was time to take the plunge for a big job. He decided to take on Wayne Morse for the Senate. Now, Morse was a legend. He was famous for standing up against Lyndon Johnson’s rush into Vietnam and voting no on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. A former Republican himself, Morse was now a Democrat. But there weren’t enormous ideological differences between him and Packwood. They were both independent minded politicians. However, Morse had two things that made him vulnerable. First, he was a deeply arrogant individual who was personally hated by nearly everyone who dealt with him. In my own research on Northwestern politics, this comes up again and again. Morse was a difficult person who had burned a lot of bridges in the state. Second, he was old. Not by the standards of the modern 21st century Senate where the gerontocracy rules supreme. But he was 68 and starting to decline.

So Packwood saw an opportunity to kick out Morse and he took it. He provided that energy that had served him well so far. A televised debate was a disaster for Morse and supercharged the Packwood campaign. Packwood, who had few strong policy principles, also criticized Morse over refusing to fund the war, more because the war was still pretty popular among white voters in 1968 and that was the vast majority of the Oregon electorate. Packwood won in a squeaker. But it is worth noting that the other Oregon senator, Mark Hatfield, crossed party lines to support Morse due to their shared disdain for the war, and while these two men would serve together in the Senate for a very long time to come, their relationship was never fully repaired after this.

As senator, it did not take Packwood long to insert himself into debates, often to the annoyance of more senior leaders of both parties. Packwood was a bit of a blowhard and a massive self-promoter who loved the limelight. This did often lead to him parachuting in on issues to get headlines and bigfooting other politicians, both in the state and on the federal level, who had done hard work to get an issue to a given point. Packwood’s inability to make allies would eventually hurt him. It was somewhat ironic that he took out Morse and the same problems that led to the end of Morse’s career would become Packwood’s.

What Packwood did believe in was moderation. As such, he would stand up to both his old but now often erstwhile ally Mark Hatfield or Richard Nixon. He became a thorn in Nixon’s side. He voted against both of Nixon’s racist Supreme Court nominees in Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell. He was the first Republican senator to call for Nixon to resign during Watergate. He opposed expanding gun rights during the rise of the National Rifle Association. He was staunchly pro-abortion rights. In fact, he introduced the first national abortion legalization bill in 1971 without being able to get a single co-sponsor, two years before Roe. He opposed much of the expansion of the defense state, including Nixon’s expansion of the defense state. He opposed the development of the B-1 bomber and the expansion of the nuclear submarine program.

Packwood did not always have easy reelection campaigns. Morse desperately wanted his job back and was the Democratic nominee in 1974, even though he was dying. Morse’ death in the summer of 1974 might well have saved Packwood. Overall, Bob Packwood ended up being about as good a Republican as can be imagined. Yes, there were issues he wasn’t great on if you are a Democrat, but he wasn’t a troll and he was generally considered quite reasonable.

Packwood, ironically considering how his career would end, was a staunch supporter of abortion rights through his career. He brought a national abortion legalization bill before the Senate in 1971, before he could even get a co-sponsor. So support for reproductive rights wasn’t something of expedience; Packwood really believed in it. Moreover, he held to that his whole career. Only two Republicans voted against Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court in 1991 and Packwood was one, based on Thomas’ anti-abortion stance. If only more Republicans had felt this way about a personal liberty issue, a topic many gave lip service to, but only applied to white men doing whatever they want with guns. For all his support, Packwood won many awards from women’s rights organizations over the years, including from Planned Parenthood in 1983 and the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1985.

One of Packwood’s real contributions was on environmental issues. Today, in the mind of liberals, Mark Hatfield tends to be seen as the bigger person and the more worthy figure because of his principled stands on Vietnam and other issues. But it takes little away from Hatfield to note that he was a completely bought and sold hack of the timber industry, especially in his later career. It’s just that environmentalism in the post-Vietnam era was not seen as critically important as did Vietnam and foreign policy. On the other hand, for example, Scoop Jackson of Washington is someone seen as villainous for his support of endless wars. Not blaming anyone for that, but it is worth noting that Jackson was very good on environmental issues and this is forgotten as well.

So what did make Packwood a Republican anyway? Basically, he hated taxes and he loved deregulation. While chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he played a major role in pushing forward Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax reform package. But even here, Packwood was primarily concerned with individual taxes and he worked the package so that business taxes would rise and income taxes would fall.

So Packwood was much closer to Democrats on a lot of environmental issues than he was to Hatfield. He was a big supporter of saving Hells Canyon from the high dam mania still popular in the late 60s and early 70s and helped create the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, which was something of a compromise between environmental and development interests. He was a big supporter of Oregon’s bottle bill, the only western state to promote this idea and very much over the organized lobbying of the glass and aluminum industries who despised it and claimed it would destroy their businesses. He pushed for more solar energy investment and for bike lanes and things like that.

But most importantly, Packwood was someone would environmentalists could talk to in the height of the spotted owl crisis. It’s impossible to overstate the difficulty of any Northwestern politican at this time. The spotted owl is the moment that the conservative backlash really hit the Northwest. This was a region noted for its moderation from both political parties. Idaho could elect relatively liberal Democrats such as Frank Church and Cecil Andrus, even though it was fundamentally a conservative state. Scoop Jackson could be basically a right-wing Democrat from Washington and be elected over and over. Hatfield and Packwood were moderate Republicans in Oregon. State-level elections tended to reflect this reality in all three states.

The symptoms for the radicalization of Northwestern politics were already there by the 1980s. It’s not as if the region was immune to the white backlash politics on the right from around the nation or from the increased emphasis on cultural liberalism and extreme individualism on the left. There were plenty of places where people no longer could find room for common ground. But the spotted owl, that was the final straw. It hit straight at the heart of the traditionalist Northwest’s deeply held thoughts about itself as a white working class place where pioneers and their pioneery descendants wrested a living from the land.

This was the landscape of Packwood’s later career. As the Republican who could talk to environmentalists, it was especially hard for him to manage, but at least he could try. Since he never really trusted Reagan and of course hated Nixon, the far right certainly hated him, but he was still a Republican and still powerful. Packwood tried to play both sides here. He was the guy who environmentalists could reach out to and he would take their calls. He would also push amendments to bills in the Senate to lift logging restrictions, which he knew would fail and maybe even half wanted to fail. But he could go home and say that he had fought for loggers. Moreover, Packwood had to run for reelection anyway in 1992. And he was running scared. Now his environmentalist background might hurt him. Was he liberal enough for Portland and Eugene? Was he too liberal for Coos Bay and Baker City? So he tried to demonize the Endangered Species Act to build up his election bonafides. In 1992, he said the ESA was “a freight train that rolls over every community in sight with no regard for anything but science.” I mean, attacking it for doing proper science? That wasn’t the way to go. The way to go, as Republicans were rapidly discovering, was to say that it didn’t do science at all but was rather part of the global liberal conspiracy. C’mom Bob.

But again, Packwood had that election campaign. He won a nasty fight against Congressman Les AuCoin, in a very negative campaign that made neither look good. Many in Oregon felt it was about time for Packwood to go and he only won that election 52-47, by far the closest since his defeat of Morse. But for Packwood, far worse things were to come.

But then Packwood got busted for his routine sexual harassment of women. In November 1992, shortly after his reelection bid, the Washington Post ran a story detailing all of this. They could have run it before the election, but chose not to. The paper claimed the story wasn’t finished, but others noted that this was more cowardly journalism than anything else, not wanting to impact an election by reporting.  Nineteen total women came forward to tell their stories about Packwood. Amazingly, and through supreme arrogance, he had written all this down in his voluminous diaries that reached well over 8,000 pages. The Senate Ethics Committee demanded it all. Packwood balked, but eventually handed it over. However, he had clumsily tried to edit all the bad stuff out and it was not hard to discover that. Packwood responded by seeming to threaten other members of Congress with exposing their misdeeds.

It is somewhat fascinating that Packwood was the one who would go down for horrible behavior toward women. Not that it wasn’t deserved, the guy was an absolutely creep and lech. But this was more than norm than the exception in these years. The Senate was a total Boys Club of creepy dudes looking to hit on anything in a skirt. If there was one thing truly bipartisan, it was sexism. Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd were notorious for this. Heck, Bill Clinton became president despite these allegations. And anyone who was involved in New Mexico politics in the 90s and 2000s has stories about Bill Richardson’s utterly atrocious behavior toward women. So, yeah, I am sure Packwood had plenty of dirt to dish if he had wanted to go out that way. And look, everyone knew about all of these assholes. It was just wink wink ha ha ha when talking about these guys, very much including Packwood, Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd, etc. Everyone knew about this for years.


In other words, it’s not that Packwood shouldn’t have been forced out. It’s that a lot of other powerful men should have joined them. But Packwood was really awful. Most of the known sexual conquests he made were his own staffers and the pressure these women must have faced was astounding. Even Mitch McConnell, a man with no moral standards at all, was disgusted and wanted Packwood gone, although this could have to do with Packwood’s relative liberalism as much as any real outrage. The stories of the women who Packwood harassed are pretty hair-raising. The man, simply put, had no respect for the personal boundaries of women, even as he supported their political rights. But the hubris of men like Packwood knows no boundaries. He simply thought the rules didn’t apply to him and the fact that he was a political feminist only increased his indifference to the harassment he forced upon the women unfortunate enough to cross his path.

Packwood finally resigned in October 1995. Ron Wyden won the special election to replace him and has held the seat ever since. Packwood went into an alcohol rehab facility, blaming his behavior on the booze. But as Mike Cooley noted in “Women Without Whiskey,” “You know the bottle ain’t to blame and I ain’t trying to/It don’t make you do a thing it just lets you.” Indeed.

In the aftermath, Packwood went to the old standard move of having a long career in lobbying. After all, the Beltway could be pretty forgiving of hitting on an aide. His expertise in finance and taxes made him a super useful person for corporate lobbying and he worked for a lot of giants, including Marriott and Northwest Airlines. He also developed a passion for repealing the estate tax, which he mostly won over the years.

He also kept trying to create space for Republican moderation and kept his Dorchester Conference going. But that was a lost cause.

So that’s the legacy of Bob Packwood. He was a really interesting guy with an enormous personal failing that doomed him. I don’t think the history of the Northwest or the nation would have changed had he not tried to fuck every woman he saw, but if there is one Republican in modern American politics (we will define this as my lifetime here) who one might have respected as a liberal, it was Packwood. But he blew it. Big time.

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fxer
1 day ago
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Well he led to Wyden one of the greatest senators of all time
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First US test of modular reactor reaches criticality

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Just over a year ago, the Trump Administration issued an executive order meant to accelerate the development of nuclear power in the US. While an entire starup ecosystem has developed around the use of different—and typically smaller—reactor designs, only one of them has been fully licensed so far, and there are no plans to actually build any instances of that design.

The executive order directed the Department of Energy to have three different reactor designs reach criticality in a bit over a year. On Thursday, a startup called Antares announced that a test reactor it had placed at the Idaho National Laboratory had reached criticality, making it the first new design to cross this threshold. Criticality means that the nuclear reactions inside the hardware had become self sustaining; it does not mean the reactor had started to generate power.

Antares is one of a number of companies that is basing their design on a new fuel system called TRISO that takes some of the complexity and safety out of the reactor design and places them in the fuel design. The fuel design is based on tiny pellets with a uranium oxide core. The pellets are surrounded by several layers of carbon that can moderate the energy of both the neutrons and lighter nuclei that are released by fission reactions. All of that is encased in a hard ceramic shell that's designed to withstand the highest temperatures that can be produced by the encased uranium.

As long as your reactor can keep the TRISO pellets contained, then there should be no risk of meltdown or even the release of the most dangerous isotopes produced from the reactions. There are still some safety concerns, as neutrons will still escape and can potentially convert some of the surrounding material into unstable isotopes. But the Antares design surrounds the TRISO with a graphite sheath, which should slow most of these neutrons down.

To mitigate against non-radioactive risks, he Antares design uses sodium to take heat from the reactor to a heat transfer. The heat is transferred to pressurized nitrogen, which then drives a turbine in a closed Brayton cycle setup.

At the moment, Antares is just testing what it calls a Mark 0 reactor, which is not connected to the power-generation portion. Instead, it's being used to validate the company's modeling of the physical conditions in its reactors and generate safety data that can be used during licensing applications. Attempts to run the entire system, including electrical generation, are expected to happen next year.

While the work was done at a Department of Energy Lab, the company is working with the Department of Defense's Project Pele program for developing a mobile nuclear reactor. The company has also received support from NASA.

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fxer
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