Fine, I'll talk about the balloons

Listen to this episode on the Stuff Keeps Happening podcast.

Stop losing your balloons I guess?

Two? Three? FOUR? A non-zero number of additional balloons have been shot out of the skies over the US and Canada over the past few days. To me this was nothing until it was suddenly SEVERAL BALLOONS BEING SHOT BY FIGHTER JETS.

We have gone from no aerial takedowns in US mainland airspace to several in a matter of days. There's still very little info on what the objects actually were, but they were flying at altitudes which would have interfered with air traffic so we didn't really stop to figure it out before just sorta blowing 'em up.

Obviously now that we're at like four of them, people are hungry for answers. The government has been pretty quiet about it so far. One official noted that they're "not ruling anything out yet" which has the UFO community ablaze.

The Ohio train disaster is really bad

A train in Ohio carrying dangerous chemicals derailed and spilled its payload. The solution from the local government? Burn it. This has sparked outcry from all directions as the dangerous fumes could cause any number of ecological issues and health problems.

So. There's that.

Is there anyone actually still left in tech?

As of January 2023, the massive wave of tech layoffs reached 250,000 people. A quarter of a million people suddenly lost their jobs, most of them via casual emails or sometimes even just a public blog post from their CEO (with or without an MLK quote).

This figure does not include the tens of thousands more who have already been laid off in February and does not seem to be slowing down.

Weird though, I've not seen much in the way of the CEOs and board members losing their jobs, despite virtually all of them claiming it was their fault.

Seattle PD already gives up on AI body cam reviewer

Cops in Seattle were planning to use an AI system to review otherwise-never-seen body cam footage to find bad behavior among their forces. That effort is now being shitcanned and no, they do not with to further elaborate why.

The Superbowl Happened

I honest to god didn't realize it was happening, but I kept seeing articles about Superbowl ads and realized that was happening. I hope your team won and/or I hope the team you were rooting for to lose lost. Also the halftime show was good according to people in my timelines.

The situation in Turkey and Syria is atrocious

The death tool is rising through the double-digit thousands, and now as the chances of finding more survivors wanes the Turkish government is going after those possibly responsible for shirking building codes.

The sun is doing some wild stuff

Thanks to the our powerful Space Binoculars, we were able to see a wild sun THING happen for the first time. A huge amount of material broke off of the sun's surface and created a solar polar vortex, with material whipping around the pole of the sun at over 60 miles per second.

Correction: Original version credited the JWST, which was not the telescope used to observe this phenomenon.

More Stuff

• Mississippi posts a 900% rise in infants with syphilis
• Elon Musk is personally asking people to engage with sponsored tweets
• Google employees point fingers at Sundar Pichai for rushing the Bard launch

A somber note

If you have not heard, a 16-year-old girl, Brianna Ghey, was murdered this weekend. Two suspects have been arrested. There is no currently available known motive. There has been an outpouring of love for Brianna by the local community and her family. Brianna was trans, sparking further questions around the reasons for her murder. Regardless of what happened, this is a reminder: Be good to people.