Some years ago in a very idle moment I was searching for a place on Earth where you could anchor an hypothetical space elevator.

You'd need a place near the equator, preferably unsettled but still politically stable. A mountain would be nice to shorten the length, but mountains are difficult.

For my internal fantasy I settled on Ascension Island, part of a British Overseas Territory, at 7.5° South.

It's not natively settled, the only people there are for work, military, spooks, space agencies for tracking and telecommunications. With the arrival of European explorers there was an ecological extinction, mostly the island seems to be barren.

And the name, of course, is perfect for a space elevator fantasy.

There's an interesting cognitive bias in the western media that tends to define freedom of the press (and freedom of expression) as exactly what is perceived as freedom in this side of the iron curtain.

Libgen domains are "seized", and tiktok "goes dark", but of course other countries "censor" porn or news outlets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index

That's a lot of confidence, you must know something I don't. I'm but a bystander Canadian without much of a dog in this race, but it's a pretty serious allegation to suggest that tomorrow's World's Most Powerful Man is on the ByteDance/TikTok payroll.

Are you able to expand a bit?

Goddamn, if that’s how smooth eInk is now maybe it’s time for me to finally buy a reader.

We tend to see these types of articles popping up any time a new American administration moves in. With the defense industry commanding government contracts worth trillions there is a lot of incentive to spread doubt and uncertainty about the current state of the art.

Conveniently, once enough fear, uncertainty, and doubt, have been sown amongst the public, the people pushing these stories will also push to have their AI/Drone/{insert recent tech} company be granted a new defense contract.

This method has been used countless times to waste the current defense budget on unproven tech that often goes nowhere.

These "antique" scanners give out such good quality, but it's a shame they're so awkward to use. I was too scared of a reconditioned hand-me-down and having to deal with missing trays and emulated windows XP. Instead, I managed to get a consistent-ish setup for scanning negatives using a Sony A7 III camera, though this was a case of digitising an existing collection, so I went through them all in one go with a 3d printed mask and feed mechanism.

With the author lamenting about SD cards being awkward; it reminds me of one thing has been immensely useful with the A7 III is the built-in FTP auto-upload. This surprised me as reviews didn't mention it, and as a seeminly high-end consumer camera I wasn't expecting such a "professional" feature. I just have it upload everything to my NAS.

Now my next task is to do the same with thousands of dirty slides, which is turning out to be far more challenging...

Check Affinity, they have a top product for developing and editing.