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Hello. I cannot come to the phone right now.

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Because stuff has happened.

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So what's up?

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A not-so-super conductor.

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If you have been anywhere near online discussions about science recently,

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you may have heard about LK99.

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LK99 is a material that has the potential to be a superconductor at room temperature

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and just completely upturn the entire concept of energy as we know it.

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And it's probably not real.

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There's been a lot of discussion about this because if it was real and if it worked,

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it really could change humanity.

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But it does... I don't think so.

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The research paper that everybody's talking about came from a Korean lab and was published on Archive.

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ARXIV.

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Let's talk about that real quick.

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Archive is an online preprint server.

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It's a place where you can submit papers that have not been peer-reviewed.

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If you ever hear of something that sounds too good to be true,

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a miracle cure for cancer, unlimited energy, anything like that,

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and the source is on ARXIV.org...

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Wait.

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Just because it's published there doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong.

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But it also doesn't mean that it's been peer-reviewed and confirmed and accepted.

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You do need credentials to publish stuff there,

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but just because something is published there doesn't mean that it's fact.

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It's just... a paper.

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There is a very big difference between I wrote a paper and put it on the internet

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and the global science community has peer-reviewed and validated the claim.

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And so a lot of discussion about this miracle substance

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and a lot of discussions that kind of work the same way,

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just wildfire, taking over the internet discourse,

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they tend to point back to this website.

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I had multiple people in my comments asking me to cover this,

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and I didn't.

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Be... because of this.

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All I'm saying is make sure you understand the sources that you're using before talking about them.

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ARXIV is not a fake news website,

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it's just a repository for papers that have not yet been necessarily confirmed.

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Which is why, despite having a bunch of people making videos that went viral about it,

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the world economy has not been overturned yet.

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But boy howdy doesn't make a catchy headline. Let's move on.

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Wildfires in Maui, spread by hurricane winds,

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have completely leveled the historic town of Lahaina in Hawaii.

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It has been completely burned to the ground.

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There are still ongoing fires, they are being contained,

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but this is still happening.

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Dozens have been killed, thousands have been displaced,

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and this is among the biggest natural disasters in the history of the island.

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It was the perfect storm of fire starting in nearby vegetation,

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and then hurricane force winds just whipping it around

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and spreading it faster than anybody could respond.

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The smoke in the air and the winds and the weather in general

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made it so it was virtually impossible to get rescue choppers in the air.

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People were jumping into the water to get away from it,

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and so the Coast Guard is helping out, looking for people.

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This is a horrifying disaster that shouldn't have happened,

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but it did happen and there's not much we can do,

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but try to send aid where we can.

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If you want to donate, my recommendation would be to give money to the Maui Mutual Aid Fund.

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It's an on-the-ground group that's doing mutual aid on the ground.

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You can search that, I'm also going to include links to that

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and multiple other donation options in today's newsletter,

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as well as the description of the YouTube version of this show.

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I have no transition.

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Um, like, damn.

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So let's instead just talk about the UK,

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and how the UK Technology Minister wants to read your texts.

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I mean, not literally, but I mean basically.

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Michelle Donnellan, who's effectively big technology girl in the UK,

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is saying that we should not have encryption be so encrypty.

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Long story short, while we've got COSA in the US,

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and I made a video about that a while back,

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the UK is no different.

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They want to make it so that it's harder for you to have privacy

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from the government snooping on what you're talking about.

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End-to-end encryption is more and more prevalent these days

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in a lot of popular messaging services like iMessage and WhatsApp,

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and I would recommend using Signal instead, but still.

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They don't like that, because they can't see what you're saying.

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And so they're like, nah, nah, we just need to protect the children.

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We want to know if you're sending bad pictures of kids to each other.

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That's why we have to see everything.

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It's always save the children when they want to take away your privacy.

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That's just a song that I wrote for you.

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Here's a quote from Michelle.

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Quote, technology is in development to enable you to have encryption.

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As well as to be able to access this particular information,

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and the safety mechanism that we have is very explicit

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that it can only be used for child exploitation and abuse.

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That is a lie.

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I mean, maybe it's not a lie.

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You could probably construe like a hashing algorithm for images and whatnot,

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as like not seeing your personal information.

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It doesn't matter.

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That's not how it works.

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You don't have conditional encryption.

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You don't have encryption except for certain material.

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If you have an accept, then you don't have encryption.

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No, it's totally going to be safe.

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Just ignore this back door.

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It is very much a give-and-take-a-mile situation.

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End-to-end encryption works.

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And while you should be thoughtful about who you are trusting

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to be the provider of an end-to-end encryption service,

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like WhatsApp is still owned by Facebook,

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it still helps a lot.

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True zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption means that only you

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and the recipient can read your messages.

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Unless, of course, somebody just shows the messages on their phone to somebody else.

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But it does mean that the service and anybody else

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is not capable of intercepting your message and reading it.

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There's not going to be anybody going into a database

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and downloading all of your messages.

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It's just impossible.

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At least with our current technology.

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But don't worry, they're actively working on quantum computers.

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And once they figure that out for realsies,

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that encryption won't matter anymore.

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Oops! That's a bit of an exaggeration.

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But still.

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Hey, so Africa's future is kind of up in the air right now.

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To catch you up real quick, Niger had a coup.

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They got rid of their sitting president,

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and now there's somebody else taking the place

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that is not very friendly to France and the US and the West in general.

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This is because France and the US and the West in general

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have spent a long time colonizing Africa.

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And modern day Africa sure has a lot of countries

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that are still like one degree away from still being colonized.

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You know, just the classic,

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we'll give you security in exchange for just you give us all of your resources.

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So essentially where we're at right now is the coup in Niger

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has support from some neighboring countries who are saying,

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hell yeah, independence.

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And other neighboring countries are saying,

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no, we kind of need to stick with the West

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and have international relations and all that stuff.

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It's going to get messy.

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France and the US have pulled out of the area

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because it's suddenly not convenient.

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And we're really just sitting back and waiting to see what happens next.

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US and French politicians have said they haven't seen much movement

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from the new leadership in Niger budging from, you know, their current position.

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And there's murmurings between countries about,

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oh, we're going to back this up with war if need be.

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So we may be at historic points in the history of Africa,

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but, you know, maybe it's time to let African countries

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be African country instead of just proxies.

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This day in the year 3114 BCE marks the start of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.

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You may know it as the Maya Long Count calendar or just the Mayan calendar.

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Remember the whole 2012 end of the world thing?

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That kind of.

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That wasn't the end of the world.

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A lot of historians are saying that's really a shitty interpretation.

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Apparently, if we got to the end of a long count,

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it would have been a huge party, not the end of the world.

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But long story short, our Gregorian ass calendar just has like a looping year system thing.

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Their calendar said this is like the creation date,

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and then we're just going to count from there using our own system.

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Long counts are sort of like a measurement.

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They're like a big chunk.

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And one of them would have ended in 2012.

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So if you're an ancient Mayan, let me know.

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Lightning wrap.

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Dianne Feinstein is back from the hospital again because she fell.

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Retire.

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Lawyers are now reviewing several more complaints

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brought against Lizzo for sexual harassment.

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This is on top of the original complaints.

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Disney announced that they're going to invest in ways to crack down on password sharing

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and also it's their turn to raise their streaming pricing rates.

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In the ongoing Reddit bullshit, the subreddit Male Fashion Advice,

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which I obviously don't frequent, has completely imploded

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as their moderator staff were kicked out by Reddit administration

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and then replaced with people who have no idea what's going on.

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Actor Keith David will be replacing the late Lance Reddick,

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voicing Zavala in Destiny 2.

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Eyes up, Guardian.

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And finally for today, WeWork may be on the brink of collapse

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as their stock is really not doing well

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and they just announced that they're not sure if they're going to be able to continue operating this way.

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Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.

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Head to StuffKeepsHappening.online for sources, bonus content, and a heat advisory.

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My name is Endeavorance. I'll be back on Monday.

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Take care and be well.