Accounts differ but most reports say a low number of years. Older flash memory is more stable than the newer stuff, because it only stored one value per tiny capacitor, so the charge had to drop by 50% for the bit to be lost. In newer flash memory they use each cell to store more than one bit, which means they need to make finer discriminations between charge levels, so there’s less tolerance for weakening charge levels. Many people report losing data after only a couple of years unpowered with modern devices. Some older devices can go for more than a decade. I don’t have any studies to hand but if you search for information about bit rot in flash memory you will find plenty of discussions online.

If you power up the device and read all the data, this will refresh the charges.

It will. A pandemic response requires cooperation and coordination around the world. The USA will not cooperate with anyone, and the most deluded antivaxers are going to be the running US health policy this time. RFK wants to defund vaccine research, dismantle scientific institutions and withdraw even well established vaccines from the market. So any virus that starts to circulate will find a huge pool of unvaccinated people in the USA, where it can continue to circulate and mutate and reinfect other countries.

And from what I’ve read, the bird flu has a human mortality rate of about 51%, compared to COVID which was around 1 or 2%. With luck, that will actually prevent it spreading too widely, but it could be very bad even if it becomes less aggressive. And clearly it’s capable of spreading widely in other species while maintaining a very high mortality rate. So the world needs to be very ready, not arguing about whether the medicines that have protected people from serious disease for hundreds of years should be abandoned because some guy’s brain worm told him so.

Since it’s all of those, they’ll deal with it by oppressing trans people.

The device itself degrades from writes, but the data degrades anyway as long as it is not powered. The bits are stored as charges in tiny capacitors, and if you leave it unpowered this charge gradually leaks away, leading to data loss over the long term. The device needs to be powered up to be able to refresh the charges and preserve the data.

It’s both.

I take her point, but it’s naive to say things like, “That’s not something an Ivy Leaguer would say.” I’ve known many people from Ivy League and other prestigious universities, and they don’t all write well. There are still malapropisms and overly verbose sentence constructions, and some people fall into a habit of trying to sound clever or cultured out of insecurity (a common problem in a highly competitive and judgmental institution). For a while I used to edit people’s theses and journal papers and I’d constantly be rewording things to sound less clunky or just to fix basic grammar or word choice. Most of this “manifesto” is pretty plainly written, and the couple of clunky bits don’t really prove anything. I’ve seen worse from highly educated people.

My understanding was that flash memory, especially modern flash memory with tiny gates and multiple bits per cell, degrades the fastest of all storage media (possibly apart from badly made plastic discs). Especially if it isn’t regularly powered up, the memory cells will just use their charge after a while. If you used three it would reduce the risk, but if they’re all degrading untouched at the same speed they might still all lose data around the same time.

They’re pretty expensive.

Especially if they fuck over the working class.

Michael Jarman, pictured between two people…

That’s a funny photo caption.

Donald Trump breaking a promise? Whatever will happen next?

The NYT’s true colors are showing more obviously every day.

harms hundreds of thousands if not millions of innocent people

Billions. He’s intent on ramping up the use of fossil fuels, dismantling climate science and outlawing protections against pandemics.

Corporate encouragement.

If people understood the very first thing about economics it would be glaringly obvious that his proposed tariffs would drastically raise grocery prices, and the prices of many other things. Unfortunately, people don’t understand, and the media carefully avoids explaining it to them.

The lifetimes have improved, but according to your link, the currently measured average age of a drive at failure is 2 years, 10 months. They expect that to increase as they roll over to newer, more reliable drives. These drives are under heavy use, unlike drives used for offline storage, but still it’s not really the kind of lifespan you’d ideally want in an archival medium.

I’m sure the new regime will get to work on defunding and silencing these scientists.

That’s the reaction Netanyahu wants people to have. It allows him to deflect all criticism of his government as mere prejudice, and to guilt people into silencing their criticisms. Don’t play into his hands.

That’s technically promising, but I can’t see it being a mass-market item since most people don’t care about backups, so it will likely be prohibitively expensive for most home users.

Seems like the world has decided to re-learn the lessons about fascism the hard way.