The fact that so many people think the Fed will step in and magically keep the number up is why I'm pretty certain this is going to turn out like the late-20s.
The cynical nihilists have capitulated to the stock market always going up, that has to be flashing a very bearish warning sign.
> A redditor who's wife and her friend were on the flight said that the 16yo boy next to wife's friend admitted to naming his speaker "Bomb" long enough ago that he had forgotten he'd named it that. Wife's friend got to hear the questioning
That is also stated clearly in the comments.
Reddit really wants to run with the default speaker name theory, though.
> long enough ago that he had forgotten he'd named it that
Actually sounds a lot like "that was the default name but now that everyone's making a big deal about it I'm assuming I must have named it that". I wouldn't assume that this "confession" means that reddit's theory is at all incorrect.
Witnesses are terribly inaccurate sources of information, unfortunately.
(Not to say the alternative also couldn't be the case)
Renaming a Bluetooth device like a speaker permanently for everyone (as opposed to a nickname you give it in your phone or whatever) is difficult if possible at all and usually requires firmware or hardware changes, unless the option is given by the device or its companion app (which is very rare).
So your assumption seems the most likely. I highly doubt a 16 year old kid is firmware hacking a cheap speaker just to rename it for a "joke"
It’s commonplace for Bluetooth speakers to allow changing their Wi-Fi name (SSID) using the related app. Everyone being able to identify each other’s Bluetooth speakers is exactly one purpose of that.
Bluetooth speakers don’t typically have WiFi or SSIDs. The Bluetooth advertising name is changeable on some newer higher end devices, but the vast majority of cheap speakers do not implement this from a practical standpoint. Changing the name on your device only changes the alias that you see, at least on most devices, but it might be possible to hook that on some OSs ?
An, sorry, yes, I confused with Wi-Fi for some reason. Nevertheless, they allow changing the name they broadcast, in the sense that other devices that see it for the first time see the changed name.
Most BT speakers have a battery, which means it has to be in carry-on luggage. Why it would be powered on is the question, but this could have happened inadvertently by getting knocked around in a bag.
It seems pretty obvious to me that this situation was being treated more like a disruptive passenger issue than an actual terrorist threat of a real bomb. So more like the Minneapolis plane diverted to Wisconsin the other day because of an unruly passenger. They took everyone and their devices through screening after deplaning, and it sounds like they found the teenager who owned the device. That was the point of turning around.
They probably do have to treat it seriously just in the unlikely chance it turns out to be some mentally unstable person's way of legitimately making a terroristic threat. But it also needs to be treated similarly to a drunk and violent person who needs to be duct taped to their seat until they can get handed off to the authorities.
Terrorists doing completely stupid stuff, like naming a cellphone "bomb" that they plan to use to control a bomb is par for the course. Forgetting to turn off bluetooth is a plausible next mistake.
Terrorists have a pretty long history of making these kinds of basic operational errors, and if you don't act like they may be real, you miss the opportunity to disrupt/prevent these operations.
The whole conversation is moot anyways. What's the actual odds of getting on an airplane that is going to be the target of a terrorist attack. I'll tell you, they're approximately 0. Far less than 0.0001%.
If you act like they're real you're just going to end up suffering alarm fatigue because the number of actual instances is just so astonishingly low.
Besides that, the terrorists win by creating fear. No damage is necessary. People being afraid to fly is the terrorist's main goal. To get you to think they could be anywhere and are everywhere. It's called a terror campaign because the literal goal is to create terror. Casualties are just a good way for them to achieve that goal, but far from the only way. We spend billions a year to fight a near non-existent threat.
If every business cuts headcount and costs, then you overall get a contraction in the economy and high unemployment and a recession. Everyone's spending is someone else's salary and revenues.
Couldn't get through the rest of it because it was a bunch of overly verbose human-slop writing.
I think the bigger issue right now is also just straightforward economic pressure caused by tariffs and high energy costs and inflation. If the affluent consumer starts to buckle, businesses may get caught in a downsizing spiral where they start posting lower profits, firing actual management, stock prices decline, and the affluent consumer retracts. No AI required to fuel that.
Right now with stocks hitting record highs, the affluent consumer is not changing their behavior at all and just spending even harder, which is keeping profits pumped up, and keeping stocks at record highs. At the margins, though, fewer and fewer people are participating in the economy, which is a trend that is going to be unsustainable.
I think AI is going to be most relevant in the debt collapse that it leaves behind, and in the excuses it gives to shed employees. This economy is going to hit a wall at some point, AI or not.
I asked claude to dig up the current Ford Bulletin for the engine in my truck to tell me the recommended motor oil. And it found the updated recommendations properly. I wouldn't trust google AI because I know specifically that the recommendations changed, and I don't want whatever the published specs were when the engine was first manufactured, which is out of date (and found on lots of low quality blogs). I don't even trust claude, but it gave me the URL to click on to verify and summarized it well enough that I mostly trusted that it wasn't using the cited technical bulletin and not a bunch of random AI-slop web pages.
I wouldn't trust any 'confident stochastic next-word predictor' to tell me fact. There are official sources of information for these kinds of car maintenance questions.
Better than asking your backyard mechanic buddy who believes that you don't need anything other than 10W40 or something like that. You have always had to know who to trust and what level of work you need to do in order to get to an answer which is satisfactory. And in this case, Claude cited the manufacturer's bulletin which is the actual best source of truth that you're talking about.
Right, but standard Google search doesn't find them reliably either. Instead you get answers from enthusiast forums, "quick oil change" franchise sites, SEO slop, and maybe somehing from the actual manufacturer site if you scroll down.
I notice that my allergies get worse, and a theory is that systemic low-grade inflammation and histamine response may be due to diet. I don't have a lot of other conditions, but people with autoimmune conditions (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis) might see it get better/worse with dietary changes.
When I'm eating beans+rice and a bit of protein that I cook myself, my allergies are a lot lower.
When I cheat and eat "crap" I tend to start sneezing and rubbing my eyes.
There are a lot of variables, though, and cheat foods tend to be highly processed, high in gluten, with a lot of additives and made with seed oils, and hidden sugars, and are much higher glycemic index with higher glycemic loading, amongst other things. Plus seasonal allergies are just variable day-to-day which is another confounding factor. So I don't really know what the X factor is. I get similar effects on an atkins-style high fat beef, butter and cheese kind of diet, because it also cuts out most of those things.
My theory is that the inflammation simply high-jacks your body's attention. Meaning, it has to spend more time dealing with it as opposed to handling other conditions. I don't strongly believe that chronic inflammation is the direct causal effect of many of my health symptoms, but I do strongly believe that, overall, it makes them significantly worse than they need to be.
AI is expanding to meet the needs of expanding AI. Why worry about jobs? AI will provide plenty of work. If anything, I worry we'll be working more, not less. All that AI will need someone to vouch for it and to scapegoat when it makes mistakes.
I'm not important enough for anyone in China to go out of their way to attack me. And DeepSeek has to maintain a sufficient level of trust so that users keep using their platform--they can't just act like a keylogger attacking everyone's crypto wallets or trust collapses.
If I was working on something that the Chinese government considered of strategic importance, then I would certainly be worried about it. But I don't do that.
I'm much more worried about techbros in this country using their LLMs to extensively profile me and produce something vastly more dystopian in this country than the real or imagined social credit scores in China. The people trying to convince you that the Chinese government are the people you should be worried about (as an individual in the United States) are probably the people you really need to be worried about.
The cynical nihilists have capitulated to the stock market always going up, that has to be flashing a very bearish warning sign.
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