Sitting here in Canada, watching Trump randomly threaten tariffs every other day whenever it strikes his fancy to demand some new concession from us despite decades of free trade agreements and frameworks in place to supposedly prevent this, thinking this isn't actually an Iran problem.

The Lagrange points are only stable as long as the object in them is much, much smaller than the planet is. Once it becomes large enough to be exerting gravitational influence of its own the Lagrange points become unstable and it drifts out.

I don't think it's widely accepted as plausible any more, but I recall reading a theory that Theia (the planetoid that impacted Earth very early in the solar system's formation to cause the formation of the Moon) formed in one of the L4/L5 points in exactly the manner you're proposing but then collided with Earth once it got too big to remain stable there. IIRC more recent simulations suggest Theia had to hit at a higher velocity than this scenario was capable of producing, so that's why it's been deprecated, but the formation-then-instability bit is still valid.

"And then it got worse" is the chorus for Russian history.

Perhaps, but then it'd need a big oil reservoir to store the oil when the cuff is deflated.

I ran this question by an AI (I know, boo hiss AI, but it gives references for the stuff it said). It said there actually are some quiet and discreet pneumatic compression stockings that came on the market recently (the Venowave VW5 was mentioned specifically), but they go down on the calves rather than having anything mounted on the waist. It said it couldn't find any hydraulic equivalents available anywhere. It also says that Trump's diagnosed chronic venous insufficiency isn't something that would normally need pneumatic compression stockings like this, it would be overkill. These sorts of things are more often for post-operative situations when a person is bedridden.

Other suggestions the AI gave me were a very large phone in a back pocket (we of course know how addicted Trump is to social media on his phone) or a poorly-tailored bullet proof vest plate (for some reason Trump, despite being worth billions, dresses in ill-fitting off-the-shelf suits. Maybe a result of some kind of weird witch's curse that affects his bulletproof vest too). It also dug up news articles about other weird rectangular bulges under his clothing going back September of last year so this may not be anything new.

I wouldn't think he'd be walking around in a public engagement with those on, though. They've got an air compressor running in them, it makes an obvious noise.

They were never designed for routine "cycling" to begin with, it was originally meant as an emergency thing that wouldn't routinely be tapped just to keep market prices even. It was there so that the military could continue operating in the event of an extreme shortage.

It's basically just some old salt mines that a bunch of oil got pumped into.

AIs benefit from negative examples too. As long as the inputs are accurately labelled then it enhances what it knows.

For example, if I go to ChatGPT I can ask it to produce a wild parody of a far-right rant about something and it'll be able to do so. I could feed it an existing far-right rant and ask it to analyze what it's actually talking about and it'll have a better ability to figure out what's going on if it knows that style from its training. I could tell it "write an article about this subject that specifically avoids the tropes and pitfalls of far-right media."

We've seen frequently the pitfalls of trying to censor a model's training data to exclude something that's part of the common world around it, the model either "fills in the gaps" itself or just ends up insane. When the nude human form was excluded from training data for early image AIs it wound up making weird Cronenbergs because it had no idea what was really going on underneath the clothing, for example.

Security robots should be able to fill most of those roles, I would imagine.

Trump doesn't joke. He doesn't really comprehend the concept. What he does is say something outrageous and then if there's pushback he'll claim he was joking so it doesn't look like he's backing down.

Alas, sometimes smart people do really dumb things now and then.

It really baffles me sometimes how clever people can make such basic mistakes when doing crimes.

If you're planning to do something illegal don't literally document your crime. Or if you do need to do some written-down planning ahead of time, a major part of that plan should include how to destroy that documentation at the earliest possible moment.

It's a real thing.