Hello
I got stuck in a time loop for 33 years,
but Stuff Still Happened.
So what's up?
Let's talk about data.
Don't click away.
I'll make it fun, all right?
Not long ago, I posted a video about what "your data" is.
Like, what do they mean when they say
that these governments and companies want "your data"?
That's a different kind of data.
Today, we're gonna talk about public research data
and like information and stuff.
You know, the things that you're supposed to be able
to look up on the internet.
That data.
So there's a lot of data on the internet, right?
I put it there.
Other people put it there too.
But there's a lot of it.
Some of it—a lot of it— comes from governments
and research agencies that publish their findings online.
Massive amounts of data sets that you probably
have no idea are out there.
Oceanography data and like climate data
and all that kind of stuff.
This data is made available for researchers
and whoever to do things
...like research.
And of course, in many cases, this data is then slurped up
by private corporations who then sell it back to you,
trying to hide the fact that it was paid for
by your taxes to begin with.
Cough, cough.
AccuWeather.
Yeah, by the way, AccuWeather uses government data
and then sells it back to you and then lobbies
to try to restrict your access to that government data
so that you have to get it through them.
Very cool, very cool.
But as we have a new administration coming in,
as is normal with many administrations,
they are scrubbing a bunch of data from these data sets.
But normally, the information they're scrubbing
is old and out of date.
In this case, if it contains the word gender,
it's going away.
The scale and contents of data currently being just erased
from the internet by the Trump administration
because it doesn't fit their narrative is staggering.
Thousands of public data sets
have been straight up removed.
There have been government agency websites such as USAID
that are now just completely offline.
The page you could use to search information on the CDC,
gone.
Now we're gonna focus this down into a single point of light,
a little crystal of knowledge, if you will,
as we understand that the NTSB,
the National Transportation Safety Board,
has just announced that they're no longer going to be
emailing updates to journalists,
instead opting to post exclusively on Twitter.
You heard that right,
as Elon Musk has been wreaking havoc in the government,
and we'll get to that soon enough.
He is also strong armed an entire government agency
to post on his privately held platform.
The agency that publishes updates about plane crashes
is now on a platform where you can be banned.
Sorry, you disagreed with Elon Musk.
You don't get to know if planes are safe.
Reminder, this is a privately held platform.
You have to make an account to be able to even read stuff.
And it is overrun with bots and crypto scams.
But we're not at the ranting about Musk part yet.
We're on the data and whatnot.
So let's talk about what the internet is supposed to be.
At its inception, the internet was made
for being a decentralized place to share information.
It was made for universities to be able to send
research papers back and forth to each other.
Whole lot easier to just like,
look it up real quick on the internet,
than to call up someone and be like,
"Hey, do you have a book and can you mail it to us?"
As time went on, we started to get
more interactive stuff on the web.
So you can make an account, you can post on forums,
you can have a blog, et cetera.
And then companies rolled up and they were like,
"Hey, information actually needs to be locked
behind a login screen for reasons."
Nevermind that everything was publicly accessible before,
we can't make as much money if you're not logging in
and giving us your email address.
So that we can send you marketing emails
that you didn't ask for.
And now a ton of really popular social media services
require you to log in to even see a post.
What?
Someone posted something on the internet
and I can't see it.
It's a honeypot.
They made all these services to get you stuck
in their systems so that they can then close them off
and make it worse.
But at this point, where are you gonna go?
I mean, you shouldn't be on Twitter to begin with,
but still.
Now, I say all of this because I wanted to highlight
something good.
I know this sounds very doomer-y,
but let's talk about something really cool that happened.
While the internet is inundated with massive corporations
trying to squeeze every ounce of money out of it
that they can, there are a lot of really good-meaning people
who are basically making nothing and doing all the work.
Researchers, open source developers, Wikipedia editors,
hacktivists, hobbyists, all sorts of folks
are doing stuff completely for free on the internet
that actually makes the world turn.
In fact, the vast majority, if not all,
for-profit corporations benefit from open source
and publicly funded systems.
They then like to turn around and charge you for that, but.
And among these good folks, there are people at archive.org
who are working to back up all the data sets
that were deleted.
So while the Trump administration doesn't want people
to have access to this data,
for whatever reason they decided,
people on the internet, again, out of their own heart,
put in the effort to back this data up
to ensure that it remains available.
And so I wanna shout it out, archive.org.
They are a donation-based nonprofit
that tries to ensure that data
on the internet stays available.
I've included a donation link for them in the description,
so you can check that out if you want to kick them a few bucks
for saying fuck you to people who want to erase everything.
Policy stuff.
Here we go, tariffs, they're landing like tomorrow.
And that's 25% on Canada and Mexico, 10% on China,
10% on energy from Canada.
Why? I don't know.
I don't think Trump knows.
And Canada and Mexico certainly don't know.
They're like, why is this happening, my guy?
So what, what is this?
What does it mean?
Let's go over that real quick.
Trump doesn't know what a tariff is
and no one can tell him otherwise.
And so he campaigned on tariffs, not knowing what they are,
and now he's trying to deliver on that,
still not really knowing what they are.
And so at his Florida resort,
he signed an executive order imposing these tariffs.
To bypass the theoretical need for congressional support,
he declared a national emergency...
...because
He said,
the reason is the border and fentanyl.
But what is a tariff?
Why are you poorer?
A tariff is a tax on goods coming into the country.
Once they've been sold, they come in
and the person who purchased them has to pay a tariff.
They cost money to import goods from over the border.
In theory, it's like a way to try to enforce
more domestic production, but that's not how that works.
And so ultimately it just means,
hey, the consumer is going to bear a 25% price increase
on everything from Canada and Mexico.
I hope you didn't want any fresh produce in the winter
at all or lumber to build houses at all.
Like, yeah, we could do more domestic production,
but that takes time and investment.
Not random fucking tariffs.
The way you do that is by crafting policy and incentives
for people to do things domestically
that encourage employment and growth and support.
And instead we're just gonna charge the poorest people
in America more money for basic goods because Trump's ego.
So now our two closest allies and trade partners
are stuck in a trade war and they don't know why.
Economic forecasts show that if these tariffs stay in place,
it could cause massive economic turmoil.
It could spike inflation and cost the average American family
over $1,100 a year.
Functionally, you're gonna wake up 15% poorer when they hit.
It's truly wild because anyone who actually knows
what they're talking about does not want this.
Even the Republicans are bending over backwards
trying to explain why they're doing this
because it's so directly antithetical
to everything they claim they stand for.
And so they're going on TV being like,
oh, it's just a $2 increase.
That's not, everyone needs to calm down.
Or, oh, people are just making a big deal out of nothing.
They got a hunker down for their country
after an entire campaign about bringing prices down.
But suddenly it's just $2, bro.
Calm down.
Anyway, uh
Trump has been very loud about how Canada
could easily get rid of the tariffs
by simply becoming the 51st state.
I wanna be very clear.
It's not a joke.
He was never joking about Canada being the 51st state.
And I said this when he was originally saying it.
He doesn't say things as a joke.
He says things to test the water
and then continues to say them regardless of the reaction.
So now he has imposed tariffs on Canada,
hasn't told them why and said they can get rid of it
if they assimilate into the United States.
I want um...
healthcare.
The government is getting pretty musky
as Elon and his ilk are going around to various departments
and strong arming their way into those systems.
They are literally going into the buildings
and forcing people to allow them to access classified data.
Things that they do not have the security clearance for.
As I was putting this together,
I got a breaking news alert from the AP
that they had gone into the USAID office
and demanded access to their systems.
But the people in that office had security clearances
and said, you can't access this information, it's classified.
We legally cannot give you access.
Those people were put on leave
and now they have access to the classified data
that they don't have a clearance for.
Now look, I'm not a big fan of how often we label things
as classified just to keep them out of the public site.
I get it.
And also Elon Musk and his tech bros are not the ones
that I want rooting around in classified documents.
Like they also have access
to the Treasury Department systems.
They could, in theory, stop payments to certain people
who they don't believe deserve Medicare.
Says here you're in a blue state.
You don't get anything now.
I wanna be super clear here.
This is dangerous and is not gonna stop.
There is no more accountability
in the United States government.
The head of the Republicans in the House verbatim stated
that he does not second guess decisions from the president.
Which is the explicit purpose
of the House of Representatives.
Checks and balances.
In this case, it's just checks to cash.
I don't know, there's a joke in there somewhere.
So please never again ask, how can this be happening?
Because it's happening and it's not gonna stop.
And it's only going to get crazier.
And if you continue to go back and ask,
how is this happening?
You're just gonna drive yourself insane.
Side note, I don't know when being moderately okay
with programming became synonymous with,
you're now allowed to do literally anything you want
with no consequences.
But that's apparently where we are
with our country at this point.
Anyway, let's go in a different direction, kind of.
Let's talk about tech stuff.
Google is gonna not do a layoff.
They're gonna do a not-layoff.
Google did a bunch of layoffs last year.
And this year, all the employees were like,
y'all, I can't keep doing this.
I can't keep having layoffs right around the corner.
I gotta have some stability.
If you're gonna do something like offer us buyouts.
And so they're doing that.
It's not a layoff, it's a buyout.
This not a layoff is affecting their platforms
and devices sector, which is like Android and Pixel
and hardware and whatnot.
Does this mean it's the end of the Pixel line?
I don't think so.
I don't.
Also, it's Google though.
They kill like everything they ever make.
Zuckerberg wants that masculine energy.
It's not a good time to be Zuck.
Well, one, he literally said that companies
need more masculine energy,
which is a fucking gross statement.
Two, he did that like wild heel turn
about Meta's content moderation policies.
And it's just trying to suck up to Trump.
And Republicans aren't really buying it.
They're pretty skeptical.
I mean, they have spent the past, what, eight years
just railing on Meta, claiming that Meta
was censoring Republican voices.
And now he's like, nah, y'all like me now, right?
No, no one fucking likes you Zuckerberg, give up.
To cap all this off, there are now rampant rumors
about him having a divorce with his wife.
I haven't actually seen anyone, any reputable source
say this is real, but the fact that the internet
is ablaze of people just assuming that everything
is so fucked up with Zuck right now
that he must be going through a divorce.
I think that explains where he's at.
Oh, hey, if you use WhatsApp, you may have gotten spyware'd.
Not trying to scare you, calm down.
You would know at this point, I think.
So WhatsApp was compromised.
They announced that they disrupted a spyware operation
going on inside of WhatsApp that affected about 100 people.
They said it affected journalists
and people from civilian life.
So they wouldn't say who, it could be anyone.
The attack was called a quote zero-click attack,
which means you didn't need to actually interact
with anything to be hit.
The spyware itself was developed by an Israeli-based
spyware company called Paragon.
They also have a branch in the US
and they were about to sign a contract with ICE
to do like spyware for ICE's investigation division
that thankfully didn't go through.
It's actually on hold.
It didn't not go through,
but a Biden era executive order prevented it
because of like a crackdown on using spyware
on our own citizens.
Hey, maybe we shouldn't do that,
but it's an executive order
and Trump really likes to undo Biden's executive order.
So we'll see how long that holds.
All right, okay.
I promise this one is, this is, this is, it's neutral.
It's at least neutral.
I don't know if you recall Pebble smartwatches,
but before the Apple Watch and all the Samsung
and Google watches, there was the Pebble.
It was a, it was like a modest device.
It had a pretty shitty screen,
but it had a long battery life
and it did most of the things you would want it to do.
Unfortunately, it didn't quite take off.
And when like Apple and Google and Samsung came out
with their very flashy ones, it just got creamed.
So it eventually got bought by Fitbit
and then Fitbit got bought by Google
and Google did nothing with the Pebble IP
until now where Google has now open sourced
the original Pebble operating system software.
And so the original founder of Pebble was like, fuck yeah,
I got my shit back.
I'm gonna go make these watches again.
So he's looking to start a company
to make more accessible smartwatches
at a cheaper price point with a longer battery life
using this like open source software
so that they're more like user modifiable and whatnot.
That's pretty cool.
We like that.
So yeah, you don't need a smartwatch,
but if you do want one, I mean, you know.
Lightning round.
Dr. Phil has been going on ride alongs with ICE
as they detain migrants so that he can exploit them.
Sorry, so that he can interview them.
The LA Palisades and Eaton fires have now been officially
100% contained.
That's really fucking good.
Ron DeSantis has been working overtime
to pass like anti-immigrant legislation
and just crack down on migrants and whatnot,
trying to be a mini Trump.
And it's so much that his own state legislature,
which leans Republican,
is starting to finally push back on him.
They're like, "Dog, you gotta calm down."
So it turns out on the heels of the Black Hawk helicopter
that crashed into the plane,
there's a lot of specifically Black Hawk related incidents
in the army, specifically training incidents.
They're probably not all training incidents,
but since 2014, we've lost 47 service members
to Black Hawk training exercises.
The Teamsters and Costco were at a standstill
informing a new contract for the next three years.
And at the 11th hour,
they met a tentative contract to prevent a strike.
All sorts of benefits beyond just pay,
unionize your workplace.
And finally for today, after Google agreed to change
the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America on Google Maps,
they have now identified America as a quote,
We're really sensitive.
That means that we've got disputed borders
or fucked up governance.
I don't think that's actually what it says
on their like help page,
but that's how I would describe it.
Thank you so much for listening
to today's episode of "Stuff Keeps Happening."
Head to skh.news for sources, bonus content,
and my own backdoor into the US Treasury systems.
My name is Endeavorance.
I'll be back on Monday.
Take care and be well.