2.27

This post examines how market valuations and revenues of the major stakeholders in the semiconductor ecosystem have evolved over the last decade and illustrates the new contours taking shape in the semiconductor industry.

Woke, feminized CIA sentences to ponder

I love the aughts fashion, the use of the word “victim,” and the fact that “finger-guns” gets a hyperlink in the last caption. The woman in the photo gives an Oscar-worthy performance in the final image — she looks like she’s on the verge of tears — and her male counterpart couldn’t look more smug. The pictures are endearing and capture a kind of humanity you don’t find in your average stock photo.

Intel Unveils BonanzaMine, A Bitcoin Accelerator ASIC

But institutions … don’t work like that. Trading desks have quarterly P&L targets, and traders have annual bonuses they want to make. There’s a widespread culture of “what have you done for me lately?” — you can’t coast on past success. The implicit call option embedded in most traders’ compensation profiles exacerbates this.

The Lost Soul of the Dallas Cowboys

Will Our Military State Fail Us? II

Probably, one of the most dreaded software development methodologies might make sense again for small companies in a operational perspective.

A lab leak in Wuhan, China, is now considered the most likely origin of the Covid pandemic “behind closed doors” in the Government, it has been claimed, after Boris Johnson signalled that security measures would be enhanced to prevent accidental escape….

American workers are going back to bars, movies, sports arenas and weddings—pretty much everywhere but their offices.

Subaru, Kia shut off some car features rather than adhere to ‘right to repair’ law

“Suzy Chaffee had this great idea, let’s throw some music into this,” Howard told me. Chaffee, who became one of the highest-profile stars of the sport, had a figure skating and dance background, he said.3“So she interpreted it in a dance way. I, on the other hand, was more interested in putting on some rock ’n’ roll in the background and just let it happen.”

Seventeen years ago, I bought a fourplex for $106,000 USD. Now, it’d sell for six or seven times that amount, even though inflation-adjusted wages are worth less than back then. No wonder Canadian household debt levels are the highest in the world. Hyper-corrupt Canada’s real estate pyramid scheme is getting worse by the day, but don’t for a minute think it’s nearing a breaking point.

Pujols ended up becoming one of the best baseball players of all time (currently ranked 32nd by WAR). His weight wasn’t a problem, but if you read scouting reports on other great players who were heavy or short, they were frequently underrated. Of course, baseball scouting reports didn’t only look at people’s appearances, but scouts were generally highly biased by what they thought an athlete should look like.

This is the story of how and why Hongkongers have been able to sustain their movement so long, even faced with an overwhelming enemy like China. The protestors have developed a range of tactics that have helped them minimise capture and arrests and helped keep the pressure up for five months: They include enforcing and maintaining anonymity, both in person and online, rapid dissemination of information with the help of the rest of the population, a policy of radical unanimity to maintain unity in the face of an overwhelming enemy and Hongkongers’ famous “be water” techniques, through which many of them escaped arrest.

Notes on Madison East High School’s Fight Video Practices

David Blaska:

Principal Smith is outraged that her scholars recorded another fight at her institution. (Is Don Dunphy at ringside?) Outraged enough to alert parents. Not about the fight, about the recordings. A school wide dragnet is underway to bring the young videographers to justice. No one with an iPhone is above suspicion. The interim principal warns:

“It is important to note, any student who records and shares videos of an altercation is subject to consequences following the Behavior Education Plan, leading up to out-of-school suspension. We will be working to identify and follow up with students who engaged in taunting, baiting, and inciting the altercation. [Oxford comma inserted.]

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

2.20

One critical offset to the tightening market is the current upswing in shale output from the U.S., which could add more than 900,000 barrels a day this year. Without the resurgence in U.S. supply, oil prices would likely be even higher. With new export capacity coming this year, the U.S. will become the world’s largest LNG exporter, ahead of Australia and Qatar. In a tight global gas market, U.S. LNG is critical to avoid a world-wide shortage and keep the lights on in Europe, as demonstrated by the flotilla of tankers headed to Europe.

Did rogue techies spy on the president? Maybe. The one-sided Durham filing can’t be trusted, right-wing misinterpretations of that filing even less so.

Also worth watching the US funded (star-studded) “fake news” propaganda campaign (in the eyes of the Soviets) in support of the Polish dissident fight against the communist govt, and in support of free, rather than controlled opposition, elections

2.13

The whitepaper released today details findings from the first research phase. In this phase, researchers selected concepts from cryptography, distributed systems, and blockchain technology to build and test platforms that would give policymakers substantial flexibility in the potential creation of a CBDC. The paper describes the following findings:

The Cutting Room Files, Part 3: The Future of Canada

Pilots required to wear trackers in Hong Kong.

She is in the very safe hands of the Communist party. They will make sure she behaves exactly according to the party. She may already be thinking she made a mistake in exposing this very deep, dark relationship. She has put her family, friends, career at stake. There is no spirit for her any more. She has become another person, and whatever she tells you is not true.

You’re listening to KUOW … like it or not: Mysterious glitch has Mazda drivers stuck on public radio

The Weird and Wonderful Black Hole Photographs: Censored Images From America’s Great Depression

A Genetic Chronicle of the First Peoples in the Americas

Later this year, US merchants will be able to accept Apple Pay and other contactless payments simply by using iPhone and a partner-enabled iOS app

How does UTF-8 turn “?” into “F09F9882”?

I Used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS Tracker to Watch My Husband’s Every Move

Turbine ‘torture’ for Greek islanders as wind farms proliferate

How the Golden State can grow up and fix its crisis

New plant-derived composite is tough as bone and hard as aluminum

“They’re the ones who say, ‘Hey, I’m controlling access to all the big insurance companies. If you want this insurance company to sell your drug, you’ve got to pay the cover charge. All these drugs pay the cover charge to these PBMs through rebates, and because they’re paying the cover charges, the prices are jacked up,” Mr. Cuban told NPR. “We said we’re going to create our own PBM, we’re going to work directly with the manufacturers, and we’re not going to charge the cover charge.”

Scientists must resist cancel culture

Anna I. Krylov, Jay S. Tanzman, Gernot Frenking, Peter M. W. Gill

Censorship – „the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security“ – has been used by illiberal regimes throughout history to suppress viewpoint diversity. Scientists who challenged dominant ideologies have been subjected to various forms of cancellation – ostracism, imprisonment, exile, and death.1–3)

2.6

America’s Favorite Pickup Truck Goes Electric

Inside Operation Warp Speed: A New Model for Industrial Policy

How I Discovered Thousands of Open Databases on AWS

FT US staff seeks union.

It increased revenue for the state that was placed in the cash fund that then disbursed funds to hospitals to supplement their Medicaid reimbursements, rather than directly pay for actual services rendered.

Question 15 asks, “How can Congress work to bolster Americans’ confidence in public health institutions,” particularly in light of “historical wrongs” and “skepticism of more recent public health measures”?

This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. The software for this search engine is all custom-built, and all crawling and indexing is done in-house.

BlackBerry sells mobile patents to patent troll for $600M

Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS

Why do you need the ability to explain an idea? Here’s a secret: many people in our industry aren’t idea-literate.

A thesis: most websites are implicitly designed with a short lifetime

I have to emphasize this, you couldn’t order a pizza in the vast majority of Italian restaurants in America prior to 1945. And the reason you couldn’t order a pizza in Italian restaurants is because pizza isn’t Italian.

Winners of the 8th International Landscape Photographer of the Year competition

And they have the credibility to turn the entire organization, in particular, to impose short-term costs for long-term benefit to cannibalize or disrupt, in the colloquial sense, an existing product for a new one. … The state’s solution to the financial crisis was to stop issuing commercial bank charters for almost a decade and to reward failure by regulating away competition via Dodd-Frank. …. And I think the continental scale of it, which again was accidental by acquisition of territories peacefully and not peacefully, but generally Europe was stuck in a centuries old grid of monarchies, feudalism and all the other baggage they had carried. It just wasn’t able to have a frontier mentality. I sometimes think that that conquest of land, that the open horizons is reflected in the dynamism and the ability to invent that followed. And so block explorers like Blockchain.com or btc.com, that are indexes of the Bitcoin blockchain, or Etherscan.io [which] indexes the Ethereum blockchain. Those don’t look like search engines to people, really, because the data structures they were indexing were things that weren’t really things you thought of as being on Google.

Still, just 0.5% of Americans commuted on bikes in 2019, reports National Geographic.

  • Compare that with the Netherlands, where 27% of the country commutes by bike.
  • The difference is infrastructure. Per a recent National Geographic survey, 70% of people in the U.S.’s 50 biggest metro areas say they’re interested in biking, but half of them say they’re too afraid to bike in the street.

1.30

The inside story of Facebook Marketplace

Alabama farmer sues John Deere for ‘right to repair’

Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

Uniqlo dangles $8.8m salaries to draw talent in Big Tech showdown

Reflecting on a Career in Product Management

A striking feature of the excerpts released in the committee’s January 11, 2022 letter is that the virologists had little doubt that the virus bore the fingerprints of manipulation. The focus of their attention was a genetic element called a furin cleavage site. This short snippet of genetic material is what makes the virus so infectious for human cells. Scientists sometimes add this element to laboratory viruses to make them more virulent, but in nature, viruses usually acquire runs of genetic material like this by swapping them with other members of their family. The furin cleavage site in the Covid virus sticks out like a sore thumb because no other known member of its family—a group called Sarbecoviruses—possesses a furin cleavage site. So how did the virus acquire it?

Instead, we have collectively been subjected two years of draconian and coercive public health policies that implicitly presuppose that each individual, regardless of age or metabolic health, is at equal risk. This strategic omission of fact, and ignorance of scientific reality, has formed the basis for an insidious and seemingly coordinated re-shaping of society by governments around the world.

The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 Did Not Go as Planned

Pilotless operation has several advantages, according to Yutko: “It’s safer. 80% of the accidents in Air Transport are because of pilot errors. With a certified autonomous system, this type of crashes will be minimized. It will take time to come to the safety level needed to get approval for autonomous flight, but once there, it will be safer than piloted flight.
It saves cost: To make future short-haul air transport available for everyone we need to reduce costs. The cost of a pilot is a big piece of the cost of air taxi services as the number of passengers over which to spread the cost is a fraction of regular air transport.”

Drawing Matter recently acquired this design for a table, below. Although the work’s last sale in 1972 attributed the drawing to Thomas Chippendale, we are (perhaps wishfully) hoping that it might be an architect’s own design for desk.

We are all vulnerable to the kind of social manipulation Susan and Mitnick and DePayne honed in those early years at the convergence of telephone and computer history. No password can protect us from trusting the wrong person. Our past is no longer just a story we tell ourselves; it’s a rich store of data that can be mined, studied, and used against us. Even Susan Thunder, in the end, left enough of herself behind for me to track her down. We are all potential social engineers, and we are all potential targets. That’s her legacy, too.

The Old Internet Shows Signs of Quietly Coming Back Despite the new gatekeepers’ best efforts, the old Internet never completely disappeared. Personal websites created by individuals that have always been the meat of the old Internet are still around. They are still about exploration, innovation, fun, and all the rest. Try as the new gatekeepers have, they simply have not had the power to eradicate the old Internet completely. All they can do is pretend it does not exist. And, that is exactly what they do. This means that one does not pursue, peruse, or pour over the old Internet on mainstream search engines like Google or explore it on FaceBook or other mainstream social media platforms. One does not stumble upon the old Internet by chance. If one is to locate it, one must ordinarily go looking for it. Fortunately, the practical difference between the old gatekeepers and the new gatekeepers is that we do not need the new gatekeepers. We can still speak freely and be heard on the old Internet without the permission of any gatekeeper standing guard over the mainstream Internet.

But looking back, Wilkinson thinks Google’s luxurious on-site perks have made workers too dependent on the company, a situation he calls “dangerous.” “This notion that you can provide everything that would support a worker’s life on campus might appear to be extremely generous and supportive,” he said. “But it also has a whole range of potentially negative impacts.”

Robot vacuum cleaner escapes from Cambridge Travelodge

Restaurant reservations in cities with vaccine mandates tank compared to cities without: OpenTable data

1.23

Lady al Qaeda: The World’s Most Wanted Woman

Why don’t we have a street like that anymore? After WWII, our city along with the rest of the country changed how we developed our cities. We started re-developing our cities to accommodate increasing car ownership and ended up building cities that are unsustainable and cannot support themselves. We built big houses with big yards out on the edge of town. We started to build big box stores and a mall on the edge of town, putting downtown out of business. All those big stores and houses required big new roads, new water infrastructure, and took up a lot of land. Every city did this, but what makes Galesburg different? Why are we out of money?

Netflix raised the price of its subscription plans in the US and Canada last week. The company’s standard plan went from $13.99 /month to $15.49 /month in the US, a +10.7% price increase. That same plan in 2011 was priced at $7.99, meaning Netflix has increased prices at an average rate of +6.2% annually over the last 11 years. During the same period, industry prices for cable and satellite television services increased +3.2% annually and US inflation rose +2.0% annually, meaning that in the US, Netflix’s prices have risen approximately 2x faster than cable prices and 3x faster than inflation.

“Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine,” said the letter. “These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than 24 hours. Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to Union Pacific by these same criminals.”

The Graphical User Interface History

Artificial intelligence is being taught to fly warplanes. Can the technology be trusted?

Okay, but what is a Cyclorama?

Comprehensive and up-to-date policial information is critical in civic tech, academia, data journalism, PEP checking, and many other areas. And Wikidata is going to be a key element of all those areas. So: explore and play, help make the data even better, and let us know how you get on! Tony Bowden created the EveryPolitician project at mySociety in 2015, and led it to becoming a key dataset of politicians worldwide. For five years before that he ran a funding and training program for civic tech projects across Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the South Caucasus, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

How Campbell Soup Turned New Jersey Into a Tomato-Growing State

Security flaw found in smartphone app for Olympians in Beijing

The differences among these many styles can be as profound as the difference between, say, the pit-smoked brisket you might find in Central Texas and the oven-baked carrot-and-onion-smothered brisket that you might be served in Brooklyn. So it’s important to not paint with too broad a brush when using the phrase “Mexican food.”

Arm Predicts Stagnation if Nvidia Deal Fails

Since my credentials at the IRS will soon no longer work, I opted to create an ID.me account and share the experience here. An important preface to this walk-through is that verifying one’s self with Id.me requires one to be able to take a live, video selfie — either with the camera on a mobile device or a webcam attached to a computer (your webcam must be able to open on the device you’re using to apply for the ID.me account).

Who could have believed a year ago that America would now beg Saudi Arabia and Russia to pump more oil—as we pulled our own oil leases, and canceled pipelines and oil fields? Our path to systems collapse is not due to an earthquake, climate change, a nuclear war, or even the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, most of our maladies are self-inflicted. They are the direct result of woke ideologies that are both cruel and antithetical to traditional American pragmatism.

Prayer-Bots and Religious Worship on Twitter: A Call for a Wider Research Agenda

For detractors of new styling, it means all BMWs are going to be ugly, not just the electric ones. That might be a tad harsh.

Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.

1.16

Streaming Availability API enables you to look up which shows are available on 20 services including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Max and Hulu across 60 countries!

Forced by shortages to sell chipless ink cartridges, Canon tells customers how to bypass DRM warnings

Spaniards have long been leaving poorer rural areas for better opportunities in richer cities. Politicians in rural areas lament this. But it is not obvious that pricey infrastructure will do much to curb it. Mr Jácome notes that Zamora, until recently the high-speed trains’ last stop en route to Galicia, has gained weekend tourists but continued to lose population since their arrival in 2015.

As you see, there is a tipping point where being a company stops being cheaper: for EU citizens or permanent residents it’s around 8500 BGN per month, for others it’s around 6000 BGN.

Respected cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike has written up some thoughts on Ethereum and the modern ‘crypto’ ecosystem. Although I was involved in Bitcoin right at the beginning, I’ve never been involved in Ethereum or Web3, don’t currently own any cryptocurrencies and I broadly agree with a lot of what he says. Nonetheless I disagree on a few critical points. In this essay I’ll summarize parts of Moxie’s argument, lay out a couple of disagreements and then provide some suggestions for a path forward.

Tech Startup Wants To Gamify Suing People Using Crypto Tokens

GM recognizes California’s authority to set vehicle emissions rules

Boulder County allowing farmers to grow GMOs on open space after organic utopia didn’t materialize

Flexible work arrangements have become non-negotiable for job-seekers and employees alike — so much so that people now value such flexibility as much as a 10% pay raise, according to new research from the WFH Research Project. But not all companies are on the same page as their employees when it comes to remote and hybrid work. Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, co-founded the research team in May 2020 alongside Jose Maria Barrero, an assistant professor at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in Mexico City, and economist Steven J. Davis. Their latest research, shared on Jan. 3, collected responses from more than 17,000 employees in the United States about their attitudes toward working from home versus returning to the office. About 50% of respondents who have worked from home during the coronavirus pandemic said they would prefer a hybrid schedule once the virus is under control. Although large shares of people prefer a remote or hybrid work arrangement, Bloom, who has studied remote work for nearly 20 years, tells CNBC Make It that he expects there to be “huge battles” between employees and managers over remote work in the coming months.

Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab – but feared debate could hurt ‘international harmony’

A voyager named Tupaia guided Captain James Cook through the South Seas and drew an island-filled chart that has puzzled scholars for more than 250 years

Special Conditions: FedEx Express, Airbus Model A321-200 Airplanes; Installation of an Infrared Laser Countermeasure System.

A mortgage is a product, which is built by specialist workers using an immense and costly capital edifice, to be sold into a supply chain for consumers of that product. It incidentally happens to involve a house and a loan, but those two facts do not drive most behaviors of the mortgage industry. The structure of the manufacturing process, and the consuming supply chain, do.

Abandoned History: General Motors’ High Technology Engine, and Other CAFE Foibles (Part I)

Madame von Meck offered Tchaikovsky her generous patronage, but spoke to him only through letters.

1.9

Rogan generates so many views and has grown so quickly – strictly because he allows open dialogue, civil discourse and approaches things with honest intent – that there is no financial incentive to de-platform him. Ever notice how YouTube apparently had no problem taking down Rogan’s interview with Malone, but hasn’t banned Rogan’s channel from the site yet? One issue for media and political elites to consider is the fact that Rogan has supporters on both sides of the aisle. These supporters watch him because he routinely touches on topics that are considered faux pas or irreverent. The question of whether or not Rogan’s legacy and impact are here, and are going to remain here, can be answered with a resounding “yes”.

People don’t quit enough.

Hospitals Still Not Fully Complying With Federal Price-Disclosure Rules

The Doctor’s Office Becomes an Assembly Line

AT&T Slashed Promised Life Insurance for Former Workers—and Time Runs Out at Year-End. The company, which is sparing its executives from the cut, says it brings benefits in line with what other firms offer

Churches Target New Members, With Help From Big Data

The thirty-year fixed-rate prepayment-option mortgage is an economic disaster. It encourages mass malinvestment. Policies designed to help low-income people build wealth actually trap them at the worst possible time. It presents macroeconomic risks (as we learned in 2008), but those risks are artificially understated due to the behaviors of lenders. And it artificially raises the volatility of one of the most important economic indicators in the world, leading to excess volatility and worse investments globally.

Austria, one of the most repressive European countries during the coronavirus pandemic, has recently overtaken Sweden in terms of total covid mortality, showing that almost all government interventions have been ineffective and unjustified.

Farming for the climate: Off-season ‘cover’ crops expand as U.S. growers eye low-carbon future

More pieces of the puzzle appeared in the form of copper artifacts from seemingly unrelated digs elsewhere. In the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, Greece, a 2016 analysis of three-legged cauldrons revealed that the metal came from the mines in the Arava Desert, 900 miles away. And an Israeli study published this year found that several statuettes from Egyptian palaces and temples from the same period, such as a small sculpture of Pharaoh Psusennes I unearthed in a burial complex at Tanis, were also made from Arava copper. The Edomites were shipping their product across the ancient world.

we launched the 777-300ER 50 tons heavier than the -200ER 10 years later and here is now a 787-10 HGW only 6 tons more, 18 years later (audience laughter) – a Boeing Poem

At a crucial moment during 2020’s racial justice protests, Seattle police exchanged a detailed series of fake radio transmissions about a nonexistent group of menacing right-wing extremists.

87% of US teens have an iPhone.

The liberal international order, erected after the Cold War, was crumbling by 2019. It was flawed from the start and thus destined to fail. The spread of liberal democracy around the globe—essential for building that order—faced strong resistance because of nationalism, which emphasizes self-determination. Some targeted states also resisted U.S. efforts to promote liberal democracy for security-related reasons. Additionally, problems arose because a liberal order calls for states to delegate substantial decisionmaking authority to international institutions and to allow refugees and immigrants to move easily across borders. Modern nation-states privilege sovereignty and national identity, however, which guarantees trouble when institutions become powerful and borders porous. Furthermore, the hyperglobalization that is integral to the liberal order creates economic problems among the lower and middle classes within the liberal democracies, fueling a backlash against that order. Finally, the liberal order accelerated China’s rise, which helped transform the system from unipolar to multipolar. A liberal international order is possible only in unipolarity. The new multipolar world will feature three realist orders: a thin international order that facilitates cooperation, and two bounded orders—one dominated by China, the other by the United States—poised for waging security competition between them.

The Pentagon and CIA Have Shaped Thousands of Hollywood Movies into Super Effective Propaganda

Toyota to remanufacture cars up to three times in UK

N.Y. governor proposes 1st-ever statewide ban on gas hookups in new buildings

History may tell that the French presidential campaign of 2022 started with one of the most common slurs in French. On Tuesday when President Emmanuel Macron promised hell to the unvaccinated to convince them to go and get their shot in the arm, he threatened to “emmerder” them (metaphorically, to cover them with, well, shit) until they did.

“These teenagers will continue to become consumers in the future and hopefully continue to buy phones into their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s,” said Harsh Kumar, an analyst for Piper Sandler. The firm recently found that 87% of teens surveyed last year own iPhones.