2.19

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Most of the world’s olives grow in southern European countries, such as Spain and Italy. In the U.S., California dedicates more than 30,000 acres to the commodity. But Florida may be the next agricultural region for small-scale commercial olive production.

It appears that editors will support Hersh’s work when it serves the interests of the party they support, the Democrats, whether those stories are true or not. His establishment media enablers stayed away from the Biden pipeline piece because it aligned with the belief of many on the right, including senior GOP officials, that Biden blew up the pipelines.

Of liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz’s $195,000 fundraising haul in large donations last week, only $7,500 came from in-state donors.

It’s a tactic Democrats employed nationally in last year’s midterms to mixed reviews from their partisan camp. The strategy involves implicitly siding in partisan primaries with the GOP candidate opponents feel would appear to voters as most conservative in the general election, then going after that candidate and casting them as out of touch with voters after the primary

‘The left has become largely irrelevant in the US because it is incapable of working with the right’, said Nick Brana, chair of The People’s Party, which organised the rally with libertarians. ‘It clings to identity politics over jobs, health care, wages and war, and condemns half the country as deplorables.’

That progress could be overstated and the company isn’t out of the woods just yet, according to an internal memo from one of the company’s top executives that Recode obtained. Meta still faces major business challenges, including Apple limiting its advertising business, TikTok’s rising popularity, and its brand sentiment with users in the US.

This is the reality of the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Washington seems determined to pursue its increasingly illusory goal of maintaining international hegemony, now packaged in spurious claims of supporting “democracy versus authoritarianism.” Not many buyers there. How long will the US continue to flail in endless foreign wars to desperately prove to itself and the world that it is still # 1?

SQLite is one of those projects that I wish I had known about long before I did. I had heard about it, but for many years I never thought about taking a serious look at it because I was under the false impression that is was a tiny database only useful for personal address books and small embedded devices.

As defense counsel has pointed out, and the Government does not dispute, many individuals use a VPN for benign purposes. In the Government’s view, however, the use of a VPN raises several potential concerns. First, a VPN is a mechanism of encryption, hiding online activities from third parties, including the Government. Second, it is a means to disguise a user’s whereabouts because a VPN server essentially acts as a proxy on the internet. In other words, because the demographic location data comes from a server in another country, a user’s IP appears as if it is in that country, and the user’s actual location cannot be determined.

“The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems,” Seshadri said. “They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called ‘Ads’ that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins. (1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement.”

Even before the famous scandal, there was another kind of snow he was interested in: the stuff falling from the sky. His passion for winter weather and vehicles that could traverse those icy conditions became one of DeLorean’s main sources of post-GM income (and a significant pawn in the post-conviction DMC bankruptcy) but was somehow simultaneously his least known business endeavor. In fact, the first DeLorean wasn’t the DMC-12—it was a snowcat.

The suit, filed in 2017 by a sales representative for a competing medical device firm, alleges an illegal kickback scheme between Medtronic and hospital employees. According to the complaint and documents released in the suit, between 2011 and 2018, VA health care workers received steakhouse dinners, Apple electronics and NASCAR tickets, and in turn, Medtronic secured a lucrative contract with the hospital. Meanwhile, the company’s representatives allegedly “groomed and trained” physicians at the facility, who then deployed the company’s devices even when it was not medically indicated.

China’s state-run aviation industry is working toward self-sufficiency because of sanctions. But it is these same sanctions that will make it difficult to achieve.

Denver’s snow plowing response was widely criticized following the December storm, when a sustained cold snap combined with the city’s failure to deploy side-street plows caused mounds of snow and ice to languish for weeks. In response, the city upped its plowing efforts for the Jan. 17-18 storm, dispatching small plows to clear residential streets. Still, due to a sidewalk clearing system that relies heavily on business and private property owners to ensure sidewalks and curbs are accessible, problem areas have inevitably remained.

“The mainstream media, they have decided on their own that we are at war and by ‘we,’ that means the Acela corridor, the expensive suburbs of the East Coast … and that means the rules (of journalism) have changed,” Brecher offered.

Back at the Boulevard Mall, I return to LensCrafters to pick up my glasses. I’m anxious because I have one ear that’s higher than the other and a touch of undiagnosed OCD, and getting them to fit the way I like them—almost floating, not gripping my ears like tight little baby hands—is always an ordeal. But the young man who helped me choose the frames bends and shapes them with such slow and attentive care that I am put immediately at ease. As he works, we talk. His name is Pouyan. He is twenty-eight years old, bearded and solidly built, with intense blue eyes and a warm, open manner. He immigrated to Las Vegas three years ago from Fardis, a city outside Tehran, by way of Turkey, to which he had escaped by foot, and where he was later met by his parents and younger brother. He was an optician in Iran, as was his father, but his family is Baha’i, a persecuted religious minority there, and the Iranian government shut their optical shops down.

The items and issues included the US SPR levels, the North / South divide on the energy transition, the challenges of expanding minerals supply, the IRA, the strong push governments are giving the energy transition, the talk and the mood at Davos, Dan’s perspective on European governments and their palpable return to reality on energy security, the different perspectives that will be showcased at CERA on the energy transition, and the US and China relationship.

Kerry is no stranger to long flights and extravagant stays as Biden’s climate czar. From March 2021 to June 2022 alone, he flew nearly 200,000 miles—the equivalent of traveling around the world more than seven times—to fight climate change, the Washington Free Beacon reported in September. Those flights produced 9.54 million pounds of carbon, roughly 300 times the average American’s carbon footprint for an entire year. In November, meanwhile, Kerry attended an international climate conference in Sharm El Sheikh, an Egyptian resort town known for its long beaches, luxury resorts, and recreational watersports, including windsurfing, an activity Kerry has long enjoyed.

But in America, the exact opposite attitude holds: woke virtue signaling is more important than scientific achievement, but not more important than beating the Steelers.

My Dear Fellow Clergymen: I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham.

An e-battery factory and new cultural center have put Skelleftea at the heart of an eco-urban renaissance

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However, the act has been criticized for its ineffectiveness in preserving newspapers and protecting competition [4].

When electric utilities or electric rates are used to accomplish any public good, any cost increase falls disproportionately upon those with lesser incomes and resources. Power costs tend to function as a highly regressive tax, putting the burden on those who struggle the most and having the least impact on the wealthy. As a practicing engineer I often worried what impact our projects would have on the less fortunate. Now I fear that poor struggling grandmothers will end up paying for the “green” dreams of the financially well off.

I spent Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Washington, D.C. My white friend who earns $200,000 in total compensation as a government worker was enjoying a holiday while the Black service/retail industry workers who get $15/hr had to come in for their regular shifts. Over a leisurely holiday lunch, she explained the current structure of a typical federal agency. “Nobody has to come in,” she said, “and most of the people who work for me haven’t come into the office for months. I go in two or three days a week just to get out of the house, but it is not required.” Why wouldn’t the young people she manages want to come in and get out of their crummy apartments? “A junior programmer wouldn’t get paid more than $90,000 per year, so he couldn’t afford to the live in the city anyway. One guy lives out in Gaithersburg with his brother and it is too much effort to come in. The rest of the Millennials aren’t interested even if they do live, with parental support, reasonably close to our office.”

Someone, usually the general counsel, looks so pained that he or she appears to have just been Tasered. One or two eschew smiles altogether: in this context they are the hostage-takers.

While the AirPods Pro earbuds aren’t certified hearing aids, I am definitely hearing much better. Over the course of five hours one night, for example, I heard every word in a conversation with my wife and son. That never happens. And I watched television with my son with the soundbar volume set lower than my wife usually has it at. That was game changing, with all dialogue sounding crisp and loud enough.

Scarlett Doumato collected the half-eaten cookie and munched-on carrots she’d left out for Saint Nick and his reindeer and submitted them for DNA tests

The relocation of Diversey Inc. to manufacturing facilities Northern Kentucky eliminated between 65 and 100 jobs in the Watertown area, while the company’s headquarters remain in Watertown.

For the last few decades, smartphones have been gradually eating into the dedicated camera market. Most people only benefit from very basic photographic functionality (taking some baby pictures, making a copy of a receipt, etc.). There’s basically zero market for “casual” dedicated cameras anymore; basically anyone who has a dedicated camera today is relatively serious about it, either because they’re using their camera in a professional capacity or pushing the limits of the camera beyond what cell phone cameras can handle.

The labor market may have been much weaker than the government let on in 2022. While the Bureau of Labor Statistics initially reported the U.S. economy added 1.2 million jobs last spring, a new report shows the private sector had a net loss of 287,000 jobs during the same time period, a difference of nearly 1.5 million.

This article was amended on 30 January 2023. An earlier version said that new solar is about a quarter cheaper than the cost for coal plants. At $24 and $36 respectively for each megawatt hour, new solar is about a third cheaper, not a quarter.

The first 747 entered commercial service on January 21 1970 on Pan Am’s New York-to-London route. It entered popular lore, too. The US Postal Service printed it on a stamp. Mitchell sang of “dreams of 747s over geometric farms” in the ballad “Amelia”, and a quarter of a century later, novelist JG Ballard compared it to the Parthenon, writing that each gave shape to “mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical worldview”.

A U.S. judge on Monday said the names of two people who helped guarantee bail for indicted FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried should be made public, but put his ruling on hold pending an expected appeal.

Condit recounted how legendary Pan American Airlines CEO Juan Tripp and Boeing CEO Bill Allen came to terms on the 747’s launch order: “Juan Trip said to Bill Allen, ‘If you build it, I’ll buy it.’ And Bill Allen said ‘If you buy it, I’ll build it.’” That “handshake by giants” started an airplane program that literally changed the world, Condit said.

Looking down on the canyon where we’d moored, I saw a clear stream flowing along its bottom, slicing through the Dominy Formation and pushing out the mess, flood by flood. Geomorphologists have been surprised by the speed at which the hard muck departs. I asked Johnson what she thought of the speed, and she said, “Drastic. It’s changing so fast.” Recently, she and her colleagues went to Dark Canyon, a tributary of Glen Canyon, to document depositional patterns in its reservoir sediment, which was more than 25 feet thick in places. When they arrived, they found that the entire layer had been scoured out by a flash flood. In days or weeks, tons of sediment can be carried off to the lower reaches of the reservoir, mud compounding mud. The problem simply relocates — and accumulates.

My understanding, from these conversations, is that it is still possible in Disneyland (not World) to evade because they rely on the app and credit card swipes to generate single user ID’s, not on a wristband which is subject to infrared detection throughout the parks in Florida.

Most of the largest venture funded technology companies all have exactly the same marketing plan to get big. Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.

A business trip required the use of an unfamiliar travel platform, which required time and effort to learn. I scanned my own lunch items into a kiosk at the airport, which asked me if I wanted to leave a tip (to myself?). When the flight was delayed, I sat in a coffee shop where orders had to be placed via an iPad. After 30 minutes of waiting for a latte, I looked around for help but couldn’t find a human being to complain to (the guy next to me claimed to have been waiting 40 minutes). I eventually boarded without coffee or a refund.

Right away, we can see several things, before we do any calculations or conversions. First, there are not very many 0s after that B! In fact, there is just one zero. It’ll be a little while before that zero rolls over to 1, because the next digit after the 0 is an 8. If we look at more recently assigned ASINs, such as for Jayne Ann Krentz’s forthcoming Lightning in a Mirror, that has already rolled over to a 9: B092V35KJF.

So why stop issuing real return bonds? The government may suspect that inflation will go up a lot more, and it will then have to pay more to bondholders. Non-indexed debt can be inflated away if the fiscal situation worsens. The cumulative 11-per-cent inflation since January, 2021, has inflated away 11 per cent of the debt already. Argentines have seen a lot more.

Mackay also recounts the story of a sailor who ate a merchant’s tulip bulb, thinking it was an onion. He rotted in jail.

1.29

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As per a report from podcast search engine Listen Notes, the number of newly created podcasts had decreased by 80% from 2020 to 2022 worldwide.

GM announced on Friday that it would be spending $854 million to make its sixth-generation small block V8, and $64 million to help its EV efforts, in news that sounds like it belongs in a different year but isn’t. The news also confirms that a sixth-generation small block V8 is happening, which GM says it intends to use to “strengthen its industry-leading full-size truck and SUV business.”

Take the Junaluska apple. Legend has it the variety was standardized by Cherokee Indians in the Smoky Mountains more than two centuries ago and named after its greatest patron, an early-19th-century chief. Old-time orchardists say the apple was once a Southern favorite, but disappeared around 1900. Brown started hunting for it in 2001 after discovering references in an Antebellum-era orchard catalog from Franklin, North Carolina.

The Swiss hacker known as “Maya Arson Crime” blogged Thursday that he discovered a Transportation Security Administration “no fly” list from 2019 and the insecure Amazon Web Services cloud server used by the airline CommuteAir A group of related data.

The industry’s recent job cuts have been an awakening for a generation of workers who have never experienced a cyclical crash.

The second season of Great Chefs, which aired in 1983, focused on San Francisco, an era and region that calls to mind rustic grilled pizzas, little mesclun salads dotted with goat cheese, and fruits on plates. Instead, the season is a paean to pate. Of the 13 episodes, seven feature chefs who are French or trained in traditional French kitchens. They don’t all cook true haute cuisine, but their food is much closer to the refined, rich, technique-heavy cooking of traditional French restaurant kitchens than the rustic peasant-style French cooking that inspired Waters and others. The chefs featured in these episodes make salmon mousseline and duck liver mousse; they craft marzipan roses and bread baskets made of literal bread; they wield multiple wine-reduced sauces and stuff chicken legs with veal. There is so much straining. None of the food could be described as simple.

Of course, Arnu had one particular hobby that he felt might be of interest to federal investigators: he had spent the last two decades tending to a popular blog about “Area 51,” the remote military base near Rachel that was known for its shroud of mystery and UFO lore. Arnu’s site, Dreamland Resort, regularly posted news about the base—including articles about its alleged connection to “black projects” and other clandestine government operations. When police crashed into his life that wintry day, he suspected it had something to do with this. Still, running a blog wasn’t illegal, and the force with which the government had come down on him seemed unbelievable. Just what exactly were agents looking for what? And what did they think he’d done?

The museum, which resembles a luxury showroom, houses the wealth of the nation—currency notes of all shapes, sizes and colours. Some of the notes on display are from the ‘Bank of Hindostan’, ‘Bank of Madras’, ‘Bank of Bengal in Lahore’ and other pre-colonial era institutions. But the around 700 unique notes represent just 6 to 7 per cent of his collection.

One of my hobbies is buying up pre-antibiotic medical books. If you look at the history of western medicine, it’s often been a wash: it’s still not all that clear if letting a doctor treat you is a better idea than staying home, eating right, exercising and minding your own business. For example: click here. For stuff like bullet holes, doctors are pretty good from all the practice they get in war and American inner cities. Doctors are also good for prescribing antibiotics; antibiotics are the last big, epoch making breakthrough in medical technology. Public health innovations, such as not drinking toilet water, anesthesia, doctors washing their hands, and making sure people have sufficient vitamins (the ones we know about): these are the past big ones that really moved the needle.

Despite the amount of choices in the consumer market, several big companies own a large majority of major brands, effectively controlling everything you buy.

The biggest problem, however, for the Jetsons is Class B airspace governing air operations near airports. Air Traffic Control compliance is required in Class B air space. “If I’m going to fly in that general vicinity, I’ve got to be really capable.” There are minimum altitudes, visual flight and separation rules, and other requirements special to Class B air space. “Do I really want to have several thousand of these zipping around?” Condit asked.

Recently, Ocean Art Photo Competition announced its 2022 winners and runners up. Put on by the Underwater Photography Guide, the annual contest awarded over $100,000 in prizes to finalists. Kat Zhou’s image of an elderly mother octopus spending her final days with her offspring won the Best in Show award.

In his first journey, in the early spring of 1326, after a trip of over 3,500 km, Ibn Battuta arrived at the port of Alexandria, at the time, part of the Bahri Mamluk empire. He met two ascetic pious men in Alexandria. One was Sheikh Burhanuddin, who is supposed to have foretold the destiny of Ibn Battuta as a world traveler saying:

As the conversation winds down, the waitress returns with the check and a small placard. “If you haven’t been here recently, I wanted to let you know that we attach a 20% Fair Wage and Wellness Fee to all orders. This sheet of paper explains it. It’s… not a tip.” She slides the paper across the table and, somewhat embarrassedly, adds, “If you have any questions, please let me know.”

The people who wanted “special” ASINs were pretty persistent, though, so I threw them a bone: they could have all the ASINs that started with the letter A, and I would start the counter for ASINs at B000000000. Finally, this proposal had to get past Shel, and Shel was not super keen on the idea of someone going through the code and changing every last place that ISBNs were referenced to something that was an ASIN. Even though this proposal actually minimized the hazards in several ways (same length string, same set of allowable characters, ISBNs are still legal ASINs, etc.), it was really going to involve a lot of code being changed at the same time. And an error would be very bad.

We study credit card rewards as an ideal laboratory to quantify redistribution be- tween consumers in retail financial markets. Comparing cards with and without rewards, we find that, regardless of income, sophisticated individuals profit from reward credit cards at the expense of na ??ve consumers. To probe the underlying mechanisms, we exploit bank-initiated account limit increases at the card level and show that reward cards induce more spending, leaving na ??ve consumers with higher unpaid balances. Na ??ve consumers also follow a sub-optimal balance-matching heuristic when repaying their credit cards, incurring higher costs. Banks incentivize the use of reward cards by offering lower interest rates than on comparable cards without rewards. We estimate an aggregate annual redistribution of $15 billion from less to more educated, poorer to richer, and high to low minority areas, widening existing disparities.

Although more rapidly changing the payment system away from fee-for-service will help, the best hope and most progress is to change the behavior of the large systems and universities to view rural areas not as referral pipelines but as citizens and providers that need real population healthcare partners.

Today, however, we know that the blame is correctly assigned to the system, not the individual. “America’s system for handling classified documents is broken, say lawmakers and former officials” (NBC News, 1/24/2023):

President Ronald Reagan’s farewell speech included this Biblical reference: “In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”

There are plenty of reasons you might find yourself in a big unfamiliar codebase. You might have just started a new position. You might be doing technical due diligence on a possible acquisition or contract with an external company. You might be evaluating a third party framework or engine. Regardless of how you got there, learning to navigate unfamiliar code effectively is a useful skill that is seldom taught or discussed. Having evaluated and worked in many (sometimes wildly different) codebases over the years, I’ve developed a personal process for understanding new code that I wanted to share here. This advice is obviously somewhat personal, so should be read through the lens of a game engine programmer (who largely does rendering-esque work), but while the content here is geared mainly towards understanding large codebases, I suspect many of these tips will generalize to smaller codebases or codebases in other domains as well.

It is not uncommon for Gothic cathedrals to be left unfinished, such as the Dom in Cologne, which, as they say, “if will be finished, the world will end”. Or the Duomo in Siena with its large, empty main nave, or Beauvais Cathedral, where the five-hundred-year-old scaffolding itself is already considered a monument. This, however, had a reason as serious as the building itself: war, black death, earthquake. As comical as it was to build a Gothic cathedral in Biniamar, just as banal and farcical was the reason for its failure.

Don’t look to greed for the explanation: look to public policy. (I assure you the big developers of the 1950s were as greedy as the ones today.) Minimum lot sizes and zoning-related caps on density and height do a lot to incentivize larger houses, because they put a floor on the fixed costs, such as land and infrastructure, associated with a single unit of housing. The soft costs associated with permitting fees and delays in receiving permission to build have the same effect, privileging deeper pockets and larger projects.

In fact, many countries are doing the opposite of what the hardest-line voices in Washington seek. Instead of decoupling or deintegrating economically, many countries are instead deepening trade with China even as they hedge against potential Chinese pressure by diversifying business operations, building new supply chains in third countries, and reducing exposure in the most sensitive areas. Perhaps that is why, in 2020, despite years of American warnings, China overtook the United States as the European Union’s largest trading partner. Both EU exports to and imports from China grew in 2022. And Asian and European leaders, spurred by the November 2022 visit to Beijing by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, now look set to beat a path to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s door, with trips by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., French President Emmanuel Macron, and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni likely to drive a broader trend.

Our mission to automate the toughest tasks in farming now extends to tree fruit, with our robotic apple harvester. By reusing the majority of our custom technology that we use in strawberry harvest, we have gained a lot of momentum after just one season.

The authors argue that, in addition to minimizing the risks of major escalation, U.S. interests would be best served by avoiding a protracted conflict. The costs and risks of a long war in Ukraine are significant and outweigh the possible benefits of such a trajectory for the United States. Although Washington cannot by itself determine the war’s duration, it can take steps that make an eventual negotiated end to the conflict more likely.

Live Nation was put on the spot Tuesday in the very first hearing of the new Congress. Many such moments are easy for corporations to dodge, with a few old uninterested men reading boring questions that are easily dodged by slick lawyers. This time, the opposite occurred. For four hours, Live Nation’s President Joe Berchtold had to absorb the anger of both Republicans and Democrats, virtually every one of whom accused the corporation of having and abusing its monopoly. The Senators were so good that some moments became TikTok memes.

Sprightly and trim at 83, Kelvin described a can-do culture that produced the 747 in the 1960s, an attitude he credits to inspirational upper management led by Sutter, the chief engineer. His team, “close-knit” and determined, pushed forward at a frenetic pace. “We worked a lot of hours, seven days a week, 12 hours a day for quite a while,” Kelvin said. “I don’t think we ever thought anything but success.”

1.22

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“When somebody retires, I look at that and think, ‘Oh no’. We need two young people to replace one that leaves.”

In 1957, the Kellers built a three-wheeled loader with two drive wheels in front and a caster wheel in the rear — the precursor to the modern skid-steer loader. The loader came to the attention of Melroe Manufacturing Company (now Bobcat Company), which invited the Kellers to demonstrate their invention in their booth at the Minnesota State Fair in 1958.

That apparently is all it took for Limited Run Games, which immediately fired an employee for holding conservative viewpoints. The same day that PT ran its dossier on Lynne, Limited Run tweeted that it had “investigat[ed] a situation” and that an employee had been “terminated”. This decision, Limited Run said, was made in order to “[support] an inclusive culture” and “foster a positive and safe environment for everyone”.

She did assure a questioner that rezoning to permit duplexes on Whitney Way was not part of the plan, but that is no longer true. Before the holidays, a small group of alders ignored a staff recommendation and added designated historic districts to the affected rezoning overlay.

Congratulations, you have reached the current equilibrium point for your app! To break free from that point you either have to meaningfullyimprove your churn rate or sign-up rate. But changes to each of these will likely just create a new equilibrium point from which you’ll need to move from.

Additionally, the cumulative abundance of shale supply delivered over the past 15 years continues to shelter Americans from the sky-high natural gas and fuel prices that have rattled other developed economies, giving its industry a competitive advantage and its households more disposable income.

With each changeover, Kyrgios continued to criticise the umpire, calling his performance “outrageous” and “embarrassing”. As the first set reached its climax, Bernardes issued Kyrgios a warning for audible obscenity, then docked him a point for unsportsmanlike conduct, after the Australian loudly said to his friend in the stands that he could do a better job than Bernardes. Upon losing the set with a double-fault, Kyrgios went off at Bernardes once more, shouting repeatedly “What is unsportsmanlike?” before smashing his racket, demanding to see a higher-ranked tournament official, and receiving a game penalty. “Everything is just the worst when you’re in the chair,” Kyrgios later said to Bernardes.

Well, the premise isn’t correct. “Hydrogen is not a fuel. It is an energy carrier,” he said. “It looks just like batteries. It takes energy to produce it, and you can get energy back out of it. The problem is that everybody who is a proponent of hydrogen wants you to use green hydrogen.” Hydrogen comes in green, blue and gray colors. Gray hydrogen is produced from methane and has a byproduct of carbon dioxide. “If you’re interested in the environment, that’s not a great idea,” Condit said.

Despite expecting 12.5 million electric cars by 2035, California officials insist that the grid can provide enough electricity. But that’s based on multiple assumptions — including building solar and wind at almost five times the pace of the past decade — that may not be realistic.

On January 2, American Airlines implemented new cockpit procedures including changes to cockpit communications during critical events including takeoff. Allied Pilots Association, which represents 15,000 American pilots, said the implementation involves an attempt to alter critical procedures through a 35-page bulletin and changes in a 65- page manual rather than through in person training.

Here is a list of people whom I admire for their ability to teach development and programming in any form. (Not in any particular order).

My advice is from someone who…

  1. has almost always been on small, lean teams where we have to do a lot with very little.
  2. values working software over specific tools.
  3. is starting new projects all the time, but also has to maintain a number of systems.
  4. values engineer productivity over most other considerations

How Americans of Different Generations Spend Their Money in 2021

Tesla maximized and optimized its online ecommerce experience and internal operations by creating an ERP software of its own. This ERP software includes the ecommerce software that powers Tesla’s online sales model.

Fake bylines. Content farming. Affiliate fees. What happens when private equity takes over a storied news site and milks it for clicks?

Yet the “policy that shall not be named” has made a comeback in the past four years, in large part because pollsters have found overwhelming support for policies that aim to returnmanufacturing jobs to the U.S., especially among swing voters in swing states. Welfare improvements and climate change mitigation are popular if they are spun in terms of jobs and wages. Government investment into real resources and production guidance has become a rare point of bipartisan agreement. From National Economic Council (NEC) director Brian Deese, who has proclaimed industrial strategy to be the Biden Administration’s central economic framework, to Republican Senator Todd Young, who is pushing to fund regional tech manufacturing hubs, libertarian and neoliberal attitudes in Washington have begun to crumble.

Social Security & Medicare Lifetime Benefits & Taxes: 2020

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Decades of research led by scientists at Kansas State University offered evidence reintroducing bison to roam the tallgrass prairie gradually doubled plant diversity and improved resilience to extreme drought.

This all adds up to an enormous burden on the American people and our economy. Filing taxes takes up an estimated 6.5 billion hours each year—as the right-leaning Tax Foundation points out, the equivalent of 3.1 million people working full-time for the whole year. Assuming average wages for the types of work involved, that adds up to a $313 billion burden on the economy. In terms of actual business, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are 83,190 tax preparers, making an average income of $51,080. Payroll processing is also a big business, and a necessary employer expense.

A few rivers and basins also start in the U.S. and end up in Mexico, including the Rio Grande from Colorado to Tamaulipas. Further south in Central America and the Caribbean, most of the basins don’t have major rivers and empty into the nearby oceans.

A two-page statement filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, issued on behalf of the State Department by Justice Department officials Brian M. Boynton, Anthony J. Coppolino and Laurel H. Lum, announced that the “Defendants” in the case brought by the Accidental Americans “wish[ed] to alert the court of the Department of State’s intent to…reduce the fee for processing” what are known as Certificates of Loss of Nationality of the United States, or CLNs, “from the current amount of US$2,350 to the prior amount of $450.”

This year marked a return of Lisa Su the CEO, president, and Chair of AMD. Of all the major tech CEOs and companies today, Su and AMD are at the center of many of developments most exciting to the industry represented at CES. AMD runs gaming consoles, gaming PCs, PCs, and laptops, and provides chips for machine learning and running cloud workloads. Combine this with Su’s matter of fact yet entertaining stage presence and technologist-at-heart approach to describing products and the keynote can be quite compelling. Su is by far the most commanding tech leader today, at least among those willing to speak at a third-party conference.


Finally, did you note the article’s URL? Very SEO (search engine optimization) friendly, given that it includes the words Olympus and Canon. Of course, it doesn’t use the words PowerShot, Cybershot, or Coolpix, so what’s the point? As a paying NYT subscriber, this article isn’t up to the level I expect as a reader, and the title (“hottest”) and sub-head (“opting for”) aren’t supported by the facts in the article.

Instead of a global consciousness, we have a giant machine for selling ads

Using a 5% significance level, we find no evidence that Medicaid expansions affect any of the outcomes in any of the treated states or all of them combined. Moreover, there is no clear pattern in the signs of the estimated treatment effects.

Raspberry Pi has announced Camera Module 3, a new series of camera systems designed for use with the company’s line of compact DIY computers. There are four different variants of the Camera Module 3, each of which now have autofocus, improved resolution, HDR capture and more.

Identity thieves have been exploiting a glaring security weakness in the website of Experian, one of the big three consumer credit reporting bureaus. Normally, Experian requires that those seeking a copy of their credit report successfully answer several multiple choice questions about their financial history. But until the end of 2022, Experian’s website allowed anyone to bypass these questions and go straight to the consumer’s report. All that was needed was the person’s name, address, birthday and Social Security number.

Our concern is that FD2030 is ill-suited to counter the realities of the nature of war. It is a given that war, from low-intensity to near-peer conflict, all share the very same nature of war a greater or lesser degree; it is chaotic, uncertain, disorderly, complex, bloody and violent. Other truisms of war …

Montefiore reported $199 million invested in “limited partnerships” like hedge funds and private equity in 2020, according to tax filings reviewed by The Lever. Mount Sinai reported $68 million in investments in “Central America and the Caribbean.” Typically, investments in this region are in tax shelters like the Cayman Islands.

Images that are explicitly marked as CC0 from these museums can be used without further research. Not all of their images are CC0; you must confirm the presence of a CC0 license on the specific image you want to use.

Our research focuses on a single technological advancement in one specific context, but we argue that the epidemiological transition that Italy experienced resembles that of many other countries. Therefore, some of the mechanisms we highlight may be applicable to other regions. More specifically, we show that new technologies, especially when they are relatively more affordable by the majority of the population, can lead to a substantial reduction in both mortality rates and health disparities.

Space Activity in 2022.

One of the key features of SQLite is that it is a serverless database, which means that it does not require a separate server process to operate. Instead, the database is stored in a single file on the user’s device, making it easy to integrate into applications.

SSH is yet another example of an ancient technology that is still in wide use today. It may very well be that learning a couple of SSH tricks is more profitable in the long run than mastering a dozen Cloud Native tools destined to become deprecated next quarter.

The current subscription-based business model removes the opportunity to create a hit. In the way the film economy works now, it is rare to generate a profit large enough to be shared by the parties responsible for making the film. The subscription model also closes the opportunity for additional ancillary profit in foreign markets or home video, which, in the past, could come from different outlets such as digital rental, cable, or broadcast television.

The goal of the Restaurant Edge Compute platform was to create a robust platform in each restaurant where our DevOps Product teams could deploy and manage applications to help Operators and Team Members keep pace with ever-growing business, whether in the kitchen, the supply chain, or in directly serving customers.

“Some communities, as we all know, have let the elite just, you know, run wild,” Maui County Councilman Gabe Johnson, who lives on the island, told Hawaii News Now.

Among his most significant commitments during this period was to the cause of Algerian independence in the late 1950s. “I didn’t choose Algeria over France,” he said. “I chose the quickest possible end to a useless war.”

Why? It’s partly because there is simply not all that much demand for a heavy lift rocket. Another factor is that SpaceX has increased the performance of its Falcon 9 rocket so much that it can complete a lot of the missions originally manifested on the Falcon Heavy. However the main reason for the low cadence has been due to a lack of readiness of payloads for the new rocket, particularly from the US Department of Defense.

SpaceX made several other commitments, including working with NSF as interference and new challenges are brought up by the astronomy community and also coordinating with the NSF’s Office of Polar Programs to work to minimize the impact of SpaceX on remote geographical radio astronomy sites in polar regions.

If you’ve spent any time with GPT-3 or ChatGPT, you’ve likely thought about how useful it would be if you could point them at a specific, current collection of text or documentation and have it use that as part of its input for answering questions. It turns out there is a neat trick for doing exactly that. I’ve been experimenting with it using my Datasette web application as a rapid prototyping platform for trying out new AI techniques using custom SQL functions.

For one, as grains have longer growth cycles, it’s harder to justify growing them inside, where they take up valuable real estate. Traditional row crops, such as lettuce and tomatoes, have faster growing cycles and can be harvested at significantly higher rates in vertical farms versus traditional farms.

Nowhere else would you find Toyota Land Cruisers and Porsche supercars all vying for the same prize. Among the entrants was a group of German Opel Kadett 4x4s, Russian Ladas, and British Range Rovers. Mitsubishi, winners in 1985, arrived with even faster versions of its proven Pajero SUV.

They say you should “always look up in London”, or you’ll miss half its charms. But we should also remember to look down when exploring the city — not at our phones, but at the innumerable features at our feet. Here are 15 pavement oddities we’ve spotted on our walks around the capital.

The only way to avoid a growing support problem or a temporary slowdown is to allocate time to develop admin tools from day one. Provide useful administrative tools for your team, and other internal employees to leverage. Ideally, you want to write administrative tools along with the features. Include supportability in the acceptance criteria, or design documents. There will always be some support load the tools won’t be able to meet, but overall, the load will not grow. There is always time to improve the tools built into the development budget.

New York City schools ban AI chatbot that writes essays and answers prompts

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Maya Yang:

New York City schools have banned ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that generates human-like writing including essays, amid fears that students could use it to cheat.

According to the city’s education department, the tool will be forbidden across all devices and networks in New York’s public schools. Jenna Lyle, a department spokesperson, said the decision stems from “concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of contents”.

ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, an independent artificial intelligence research foundation co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015. Released last November, OpenAI’s chatbot is able to create stunningly human-like responses to a wide range of questions and various writing prompts. ChatGPT is trained on a large sample of text taken from the internet and interacts with users in a dialogue format.

According to OpenAI, the conversation format allowsChatGPT “to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests”. Users can request rephrasings, summaries and expansions on the texts that it churns out.

The decision to ban the chatbot in New York schools comes amid widespread fears that it could encourage students to plagiarize.

1.8

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Charlie Munger, the blunt and brilliant vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., isn’t big on small talk. My first encounter with him was in 2004 at the Sunday brunch Warren Buffett used to hold at Berkshire’s annual meeting. I was getting something at a buffet table, and Mr. Munger walked up and began ladling food onto his plate. I introduced myself and held out my hand: “I’m the guy who just revised the Graham book.”

Now that I work at a satellite imagery company, I’ve become acutely aware of the long sequence of hurdles every satellite image must navigate to arrive safely before your eyes. The more I’ve learned about these hurdles, the greater my sense of wonder has grown that people figured this stuff out in the 50s… Launch is hard. Manufacturing is hard. Getting stuff built and tested on Earth to work in a zero G, frigid, irradiated vacuum is hard. Summarily: space is hard.² Because of the challenge of space, there’s another key part of every mission that is criminally overlooked. It’s the very foundation of the modern space technology stack, the bedrock of the two-way communication between humans on Earth and assets in space known as the “ground segment” (“ground” for short).³ You could say…ground is hard ?.

ONE of the world’s most-loved hymns was first heard on this day 250 years ago. Amazing Grace was written by John Newton for a sermon he gave on New Year’s Day 1773 at the parish church of St Peter and St Paul in Buckinghamshire, where he was a curate.

But never have I seen the chaotic meltdown of an airline like that seen during the Christmas period of Southwest Airlines. On Boxing Day, the Luv airline canceled two-thirds of its flights. Its hubs in places like Baltimore and Chicago Midway were a sea of humanity and baggage. Southwest’s meltdown was simply unbelievable.

A decade ago, only a handful of launch companies existed in the US; United Launch Alliance was the big dog, with SpaceX starting to nip at its heels. Since then, however, a multiplicity of new launch startups have arrived in the United States, many of which developed their own rocket engines. As a result, we are now in the golden age of rocketry, with many different startups and approaches to pushing payloads into space.

Liu is repurposing the top electronics contract manufacturer into an electric vehicle powerhouse. Foxconn, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, is gearing up to supply cars, and the chips and batteries that go into them, to global marques. It sees automakers entrusting the company with production in Indonesia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, the United States and beyond. By 2025, Liu wants to take 5% of the global electric-vehicle market and generate annual revenue of T$1 trillion ($32.6 billion) – roughly 15% of Foxconn’s forecast 2022 top line, per analyst estimates from Refinitiv.

What does that mean in practice? For starters, a lot more oil trade will be done in renminbi. Xi announced that, over the next three to five years, China would not only dramatically increase imports from GCC countries, but work towards “all-dimensional energy co-operation”. This could potentially involve joint exploration and production in places such as the South China Sea, as well as investments in refineries, chemicals and plastics. Beijing’s hope is that all of it will be paid for in renminbi, on the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange, as early as 2025.

Unlike Chouinard, however, Green said that his decision was because he “chose God.” He explained that his faith was the “true source” of his success, and giving away his company came down to his own struggle between considering himself an owner of his company, or a steward.

Back when I was consulting for a non-Japanese camera company early this century, one of the constant discussions we had was “how do we fix the user problem?” Not the engineering problem, but the user problem.

China is pausing massive investments aimed at buildinga chip industry to compete with the US, as a nationwide Covid resurgence strains the world’s No. 2 economy and Beijing’s finances. Top officials are discussing ways to move away from costly subsidies that have so far borne little fruit and encouraged both graft and American sanctions, people familiar with the matter said. While some continue to push for incentives of as much as 1 trillion yuan ($145 billion), other policymakers have lost their taste for an investment-led approach that’s not yielded the results anticipated, the people said.

With HSS’s new guidance, it’s critical to have BAAs signed for destinations that will handle PHI. Remember that some platforms like Facebook, Google, and Hubspot won’t even sign a BAA. Other tools charge extra for a signed BAA. To prevent inadvertently sharing PHI where you don’t have a BAA, you’ll need to invest in putting workflows in place.

In its pre-Covid prime, the total value of Chinese worldwide travel was roughly the size of Portugal’s gross domestic product, or just over a quarter of a trillion dollars. The number of Chinese who made trips outside the mainland in 2019 — some 155mn people — represented a population slightly larger than Russia’s. In that same year, Chinese overseas spending on luxury goods was larger than the current $90bn market capitalisation of General Electric.

Following a yearly habit: this is the eighth edition of the list of visualizations, charts, graphics, maps, data and satellite journalism and science photography lists, version 2022.

Stunning and adventurous, Roland’s 50th Anniversary Concept Piano combines sound, design, and connectivity into an instrument of the future.

Google had a confidential plan to turn the collection of slides into an immense archive that — with the help of the company’s burgeoning, and potentially profitable, AI business — could help create tools to aid the diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other diseases. And it would seek first, exclusive dibs to do so. “The chief concern,” Google’s liaison in the military warned the leaders of the repository, “is keeping this out of the press.”

As a startup, what are your must-have sections for a landing page?

The hotel would be built at the site where the American League was founded, an event memorialized by a plaque on a stone barrier on the southeast side of the property, according to members of the Society of American Baseball Research.

Duplicate registrations aren’t always some sinister voter fraud plot. They can happen when a person is registered under variations of their name. For example, John Smith is registered to vote under the name John Smith at the DMV and John J. Smith when they fill out a voter registration form at a fair. Another common example is a woman who is registered to vote under her maiden name and her married name.

After reading a Popular Science article on the concept in 2011, Caltech Board of Trustees lifetime member Donald Bren approached the school in hopes of making the science fiction idea a reality. The resultant Space Solar Power Project, co-funded by defense manufacturer Northrop Grumman alongside the Bren family’s $100 million endowment, saw its first major milestone completion yesterday via the SSPD arrival above Earth.

Goodwillfinds.com is an e-commerce site, which sells previously owned merchandise, which has been donated to Goodwill. We cover many of the tactical challenges (onboarding SKUs, product content, fulfillment, and curation), as well as the opportunities of this new “CircularCommerce” space. We also get some of Matt’s predictions about what’s coming next in digital commerce.

Let no one make this out to be a joke or idle talk; I am in dead earnest, since by the grace of God I have learned to know a great deal about Satan. If he can twist and pervert the Word of God and the Scriptures, what will he not be able to do with my or someone else’s words?

The panel, which was required by Congress under a 2020 law to reform how the FAA certifies new airplanes, includes MIT lecturer and aerospace engineer Javier de Luis whose sister was killed in a MAX crash, as well as experts from NASA, the FAA, labor unions, Airbus (AIR.PA), Southwest Airlines (LUV.N), American Airlines (AAL.O), United Airlines (UAL.O), GE Aviation (GE.N), FedEx Express (FDX.N) and Pratt & Whitney.

Then . . . nothing happened. No other media outlets pursued the story. Not the six local TV stations or WNYC, or Politico, New York, the Times, the Daily News. Not even Newsday, the formerly-august news source for Long Island. Grant Lally, the publisher and owner of the North Shore Leader, told me he didn’t get a single call from another publication inquiring about it. “If this had run 25 years ago, it would have been gobbled up,” he said. “There’d have been 20 follow ups from Newsday and other publications and the weeklies.”

Apollo believed in Carvana’s plan to sell cars online and thought that the 10.25 per cent annual coupon on offer in the overall $3bn bond issuance offered plenty of protection. The firm was also reassured by a study into Carvana’s business model it, along with other investors, had commissioned from Bain & Co in early 2022. Apollo, considered by many to be the canniest credit investor in the world, had been a longtime investor in the online car retailer’s debt.

The next blue bird might be a surprise peace in Ukraine, which instantly lowers energy and food costs. A thaw in the US-China cold war, which boosts global trade. A new digital technology that revives productivity, helping to contain inflation. None of this may seem likely, but then surprise is the essential nature of blue birds.

It was the Global East and South that were harmed the most by this fraud. And I will argue that the reason these countries let the fox in the hen house yet again was misplaced trust due to centuries of social conditioning, which has historically resulted in little “white” soy-boys like SBF being given an automatic seat at the proverbial table, no questions asked.

An unexpected ancient manufacturing strategy may hold the key to designing concrete that lasts for millennia.

1.1

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Happy New Year!

General guidance when working as a cloud engineer

This is not the case for the logic used by many of the authors and I think their advice regarding the issue is not particularly worth paying attention to for this reason.

In some cases, filling a tank with gas has become cheaper than charging an electric vehicle

It was only one of the many agencies from the government to “help” Twitter.

BCN Ranking collects real sales data from approximately 40% of the Japanese retailers – this is not a worldwide market share report.

When it comes to assigning dates to military campaigns described in the Bible, the parameters of the debate take on almost biblical proportions. Exactly when did the Amalekites wage war against the Hebrews in the wilderness? Did Joshua fight the Battle of Jericho in 1500 B.C. or in 1400 B.C. — or at all?

The NTSB’s critique noted that the final report failed to include its comments and misstated other documents and findings in assessing the blame to Boeing. The NTSB also concluded Boeing was partly culpable.

And the world that we are currently living in, John Cleese now says, is so “woke” that it no longer allows for creativity. This is the same environment that just four years ago said that Monty Python’s Flying Circus would never get made today because the group wasn’t “diverse” enough. In an interview with Nick Gillespie for Reason magazine, Cleese talks about his career in a wide-ranging interview and talks about being creative and making people laugh.

For more than two years, members of the House of Representatives have enjoyed a privilege unavailable to any of their predecessors: the ability to vote on legislation without being in the Capitol.

Banks have become absentee landlords. When banks were mostly making their money from interest and from small loans, the CEO and the bank employees lived within the community. There was not an insurmountable wage and savings gap between the top of the bank and the lower rungs of its workers and of the community it served. There wasn’t a huge income inequality between people in the finance sector and everybody else. The check cashers employees are next door neighbors, they are not being driven in to work everyday and then driven out after hours to escape the people they served just hours ago.

The Weekend Australian unearthed a paper Fauci wrote for the American Society for Microbiology in October 2012 in which he argued in support of gain-of-function research. Such research involves making viruses more infectious and/or deadly. Experts have raised the possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic could have originated from a potential lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, where gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses have been conducted.

The Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index enables business leaders, government policymakers, and taxpayers to gauge how their states’ tax systems compare. While there are many ways to show how muchis collected in taxes by state governments, the Index is designed to show how well states structure their tax systems and provides a road map for improvement.

Bankman-Fried’s collaboration with Lewis is said to have been ongoing for around six months, long before financial irregularities were spotted, but it was first reported after FTX’s collapse in November, when entertainment newsletter The Ankler leaked a note from Lewis’ publishing agency pitching the book to potential movie rights buyers.

3. Boeing engineers. Martha, a former Boeing engineer, points out, “How depressing to work for a company that just said they’re not going to do a new commercial jet for a decade.” Well said. CEO Dave Calhoun’s demotivational management style might not be working.

So, we are midway through this order when we learn that it’s going to get much more difficult for us. Meanwhile we can see in the distributor’s system that payments for the first orders have been approved for payment but there is a hold on the checks. We reach out to the distributor and are informed that we are indeed on payment hold and that the food broker was incorrect when he told us that this order was unique because it was for a specific retailer and supposedly had a place to go. We were now in too deep to stop and we knew our only way to get paid would be to finish the order so it could leave the distributor and go to the retailer.

Kivirist and the other plaintiffs argued that the categories are arbitrary and lead to situations in which, for example, Kivirist could serve her homemade muffins to one of her B&B guests but couldn’t sell a box of them for guests to take home. In the case of the Radls, when a friend who sells honey and maple syrup suggested that they sell the coffee beans they had roasted as a hobby for years, they enthusiastically bought a professional coffee bean roaster, only to learn from a local health inspector that honey and maple syrup were OK, but selling coffee beans was illegal.

I have always loved Texas, as much as any Texan is given to love Texas. The beauty of its peerless landscapes blazes in my memories even now, brighter than the day before me. I think of calamitous slate thunderheads hulking over a green afternoon parking lot hissing with summer rain; fields of cobalt bluebonnets ridged with paintbrushes the color of umber and fire; the crisp, clear, neon perfection of a single Sonic Drive-In square in the center of some interminable grassy plain on a shadowless, starry night. But I have also been transfixed by Texas’ brutal counterpoints. I remember a heifer I saw lying at the bottom of a creek with an eye as milky pale as an opal; a garter snake my mother hacked in half with a hoe in our garden at sundown; every steer skull and cowhide a reminder that death is nearby in pitiless, harsh places, which can also be beautiful, even sublime. My constitution has been shaped by the home I loved, so maybe I had neglected to accept that I had walked away.

Del Prado’s motto is “Food and service over systems,” trying to eschew corporate trappings. “Once you are corporate you are done.” But therein lies the paradox.

12.25

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Merry Christmas

Israel’s decades-long peace with Jordan is unraveling, a development that threatens to upset a fragile regional stability that is being challenged by countries like Iran, Russia, and China, a think tank report warns.

Offenders committed at least 420 acts of hostility against 397 separate churches in the United States between January 2018 and September 2022. These cases include everything from arson and gun-related violence to vandalism and bomb threats, the copiously documented, 84-page report specifies.

The picture is widely viewed as a work of art. More importantly to its creator, however, it was also a feat of electrical engineering. The longtime Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor used it to illustrate a lecture, famously titled “How to make applesauce,” in which he explained the pioneering flash technology that helped him take the shot.

“People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority,” Mr. Toyoda said to reporters during a visit to Thailand. “That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.”

The Ukrainian army has released an instructional video explaining how Russian soldiers should surrender to a drone:

Port Authority Inspector General John Gay said: “This sophisticated, internationally coordinated conspiracy allegedly targeted hard-working taxi drivers trying to earn an honest living. The Port Authority has zero tolerance for bad actors violating the law at our facilities. We thank Damian Williams and the Southern District for their partnership as we continue our relentless commitment to detecting and disrupting illegal behavior at our facilities across the region.”

Many of those newly liberated works were forgotten, partly due to their great age, but also because no one knew who they belonged to (Congress abolished the requirement to register copyrights in 1976), so no one could revive or reissue them while they were still in the popular imagination, depriving them of new leases on life.

Tired of the tactics, a pair of energy industry groups have filed a lawsuit, alleging the Biden administration has failed to comply with federal mandates regarding how often auctions of land for oil and gas drilling are held.

“Foreign government-controlled laboratories should not be eligible to receive U.S. taxpayer dollars while they disregard our policies, dodge congressional oversight, or act against our national interest,” seven watchdog organizations led by the White Coat Waste Project wrote in a letter sent Friday to lawmakers on the House and Senate appropriations committees.

One of the problems with perverting the federal bureaucracy, as the Democrats have done, is that pretty much everyone loses faith in the integrity of government. At this point, there is no reason to assume that government numbers are accurate and unfudged. We have been lied to, too many times.

Gus Gran says it took them five hours to get only three miles back home.

After that Saturday night trip, I started asking my passengers how much they’d paid and comparing it to what I’d earned. The results were all over the map. I had two trips where I got more than 80 percent of the total fare, including tips. I had a couple of others where I earned less than 30 percent.

Not long ago, CIA veterans tell me, the information above the “tearline” of a U.S. government intelligence cable would include the station of origin and any other CIA offices copied on the report. I spent much of today looking at exactly similar documents, seemingly written by the same people, except the “offices” copied at the top of their reports weren’t other agency stations, but Twitter’s Silicon Valley colleagues: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, even Wikipedia. It turns out these are the new principal intelligence outposts of the American empire. A subplot is these companies seem not to have had much choice in being made key parts of a global surveillance and information control apparatus, although evidence suggests their Quislingian executives were mostly all thrilled to be absorbed. Details on those “Other Government Agencies” soon, probably tomorrow.

The Essay: 2022 gave us many reasons to be encouraged about our future 5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … Rule of the Robotsauthor Martin Ford on the impact of artificial intelligence

“Always be positive”; Rejoice!

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My father has always emphasized positivity. I have learned much from both parents in this respect.



And, so it was while chatting over lunch recently that a long time friend mentioned that my posts have become cynical.

Maybe?

Perhaps my news flow needs a re-think.



Philippians 4:4-7:

Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice.

5 Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand.

6 Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.

7 And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.



While traveling a few months ago, the proprietor of a superb and affordable restaurant asked where we were from? I replied “United States”



We then spoke of his farm, family, the long time “tavern” where a seemingly endless mezze was on offer for €20.00 per person and the joys of friendship over a terrific meal. Ah, the delight of fresh food and a bit of wine, finished off with a delicious date cake.







Later, he turned to me and asked if I had heard of the World Economic Forum? I replied yes.

“You know they are screwing us”, he said while continuing to mention currency and debt manipulation combined with globalist policies – “sticking it to the little guy”.

I thought a bit and replied there are always challenges and opportunities.

Yet, we live in a time of incredible opportunity. It is easier than ever to create something, work with people anywhere and learn, constantly. Admittedly, there are plenty of challenges, but we must balance that with the new new thing.

As ever, while zooming through Advent and just days from Christmas, this is a terrific time to count our endless blessings. We pray for wisdom, smart and well intentioned elected officials, great neighbors and health for all.



So, I pray for a vigorous, healthy and successful 2023 for everyone.



Merry Christmas!





P.S.

What is Advent?

While chatting in a cafe recently, one of the employees inquired about Advent? Another jumped in: “my neighbors gave us an advent calendar, which is fun”.

I replied that it is a time of preparation to celebrate the birth of Christ, our savior on 25 December.

One of the great things about this time of year is the opportunity to “slow down” and observe this preparation. For some, it’s outdoor lights. For others, a very elaborate outdoor pageant. Still others, a time to visit with friends and enjoy parties, social and spiritual events.

The long nights offer those of us in the Northern Hemisphere an opportunity to observe preparation and celebration throughout our neighborhoods.

Ecclesiastes 2: 24 – 26

“A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?”

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