All the more reason for them to be transparent, name the problem, remove the affected stock from sale, set up some kind of recovery and/or compensation service, and write off the loss. Otherwise “SanDisk” will mean “you have shit on your shoe” forever. In the storage space a brand has to mean “safe” or its dead.

Maybe they are still finding the edges of the problem. Maybe.

Welcome to your self-wiping stock price WD.

Surely they need to be completely transparent at this point to avoid the Ratners effect? I am certainly never buying SanDisk / Western Digital labelled storage ever again and I will be researching carefully next time I need storage to make sure I don’t buy relabelled stuff.

I currently have SanDisk microSD cards in my DSLR so I will have to think about getting a different manufacturers card in there and saving to both in parallel just in case. I might just bin the sandisk card just to be sure, though. Their name is in the gutter already - do they realise that?

I really hope Elon starts complaining about his baby being deadnamed in the media.

The only government department that actually listens to us when we pick up the phone.

Also don’t feel like you have to tie yourself down to your family. My mum turned out to be an utter shit so I was delighted to be free of that surname choice anyway, and my dad had passed away years before I came out as trans and, while he had a kind heart, who knows how he would have reacted to the news? Don’t be afraid to forge your own path. Don’t feel like you have to associate your new name - first name or surname - with your assigned-at-birth names, even if your current relationship with your family is good.

Well, I knew from a story my mum told me ages ago my dad wanted us all to have biblical names, which is weird because he wasn’t religious in the traditional sense at all. He must have just liked the idea? And sure enough my assigned-at-birth name as well as my sisters names were from the bible. I wrote a list of female names from the bible that I could remember as a way of honouring my dad’s memory and one just popped out at me.

I had already picked my mums maiden name as my last name because I was changing that too, because my original last name had a glottal thing in it that always annoyed me and sort of tripped me up? And when I put them together it was so obviously … me.

Speaking to other trans and non-binary people that seems to happen a fair amount, but don’t worry if it doesn’t. Names grow on you especially with use. As it happens I got married, changed my last name and added a middle name, and I prefer this version a lot more so who knows.

I hear you all about having nice, starchy pasta water but it is important to have enough water that the pasta can move around freely or else it can end up being cooked unevenly. I think that’s probably where the water ratio recommendation comes from.

Dilution will kill Reddit. Wait until the AI scraping gets into a feedback loop with AI posting.

I said “stay” eight hours ago and he’s still there though.

Loads of love. There’s always ASCII art.

I’m not really a car person now but my first car was a burgundy mk3 Ford Capri I found on a database I was helping put together for my friend’s dad, who was a second hand car dealer. Turns out it was right at the back of the lot. I went back there to see and instantly feel in love. My friend’s dad sold me it for £400 the lovely man. Stupendous machine.

Talk Talk - Spirit of Eden / first track

Edit: loud

That’s true. None of what I said applies to the 19 year old who seems to have been either cajoled or coerced onto that submarine.

Ignoring the fact that some of these people were billionaires, I think all of them forfeited any respect for their lives when they chose to step into a metal tube and put several miles of water between them and the breathable atmosphere, for fun. Same as mountaineers choosing to climb into a “death zone”. If you choose to go there for fun then that’s how much YOU value your own life and your relationships. I don’t see why I should then have a huge amount of sympathy when these people inevitably die.

I cannot understand why the military was mobilised at huge cost? Surely these people should sign a much more wide ranging waiver saying they are doing this at their own risk and should not expect any rescue attempts beyond what the organisers insurance policy covers?

Thank you for the immense amount of work you have done over the years. It is not diminished by this episode in any way. I hope you can find a new community to enjoy in whatever capacity suits you, here or elsewhere.

I just squealed BABY! and startled my husband.

Oh yes definitely do what makes you happy and heals you!

The law of the sea was an early attempt to codify and organise the customs and rules of conduct that applied in international waters. We kind of take it for granted that there is a thing called “International law” but its actually a relatively recent development and not as obvious as we might think. I mean historically most legal jurisdiction springs from some claim of right that one family has because they were once powerful enough to assert that they were destined to rule by God, for some definition of God. But no such claim exists for international waters. The national territorial claims just kind of fizzle out and become less believable the farther away from land you get. Er that was a bit of a tangent I know.

Yes Karl Popper says that science must limit itself to working on ideas that are falsifiable.

But that doesn’t mean that we can just go about making life-changing decisions for ourselves or for others based on any beliefs we want and claim science has no say because those beliefs are unfalsifiable. Its the other way around: public policy must be constrained by fact and evidence even if our individual beliefs are influenced by more than that.

When Hugo Grotius was working on the law of the sea, which became one of the bases of modern international law, he imagined laws that would hold fast even in the absence of God. If we cannot do the same then we are doing no better than throwing rocks at each other for our individual betterment.

Hmm. On the one hand very much no, in the sense that I am a scientist, and I believe in the scientific method, and I think society should deal with facts and evidence when agreeing how to manage itself.

But on the other hand, individually, I am a creature of emotion and I feel connected to the universe, and I believe everything ebbs and flows in connection with everything else.

I don’t feel the need for my scientist brain to hold that emotional part of myself to account or ransom, though. I don’t need to know how it works or why it might be because it just is what it is.