I am convinced that more awareness and thought can contribute to anyone’s photographic journey, and creating something new and exciting is a certain path to that. I’d like to encourage you to seek originality as a deciding and paramount factor in your process. Don’t be afraid of it. but rather embrace it and the freedom it brings.

Peloton Blocks Users From Using #LetsGoBrandon Hashtag

Proponents of communism often say it’s never really been tried. Progressivism can no longer make that excuse. Its doctrines are being widely implemented by earnest practitioners with wide establishment support. The results have come in with astonishing speed. Mayhem and misery at an open national border. Riot and murder in lawless city neighborhoods. Political indoctrination of schoolchildren. Government by executive ukase. Shortages throughout the world’s richest economy. Suppression of religion and private association. Regulation of everyday language—complete with contrived redefinitions of familiar words and ritual recantations for offenders

Well, here is the SF Chronicle’s Director of News posting the piece about Boudin on his Twitter feed, and getting retweeted by DA Boudin himself. Is this propaganda…?

“In many ways, you are already in the authoritarian state. You just don’t know it.”

Little known fact: Huge banks have natural immunity against Covid. Only the very huge ones though.

How 12th-century Genoese merchants invented the idea of risk

This is one of the toughest questions in medicine. It comes up again and again. You have some drug. You read some studies. Again and again, more people are surviving (or avoiding complications) when they get the drug. It’s a pattern strong enough to common-sensically notice. But there isn’t an undeniable, unbreachable fortress of evidence. The drug is really safe and doesn’t have a lot of side effects. So do you give it to your patients? Do you take it yourself? …. So they incredibly reasonably assume anything could be a lie. And if you don’t know which statements about pharmaceuticals are lies, “the one that has dozens of studies contradicting it” is a pretty good heuristic!

Zillow Offers tick tock confirming what we knew. It was a conscious decision by management to override their pricing algorithms in order to buy more homes.

New Statesman writers and guests choose their favourite reading of 2021.

The state has far more money than anyone. But they are behind SpaceX, because tech isn’t capital-limited, it’s competence-limited. After all, who knows more about rocket science — politicians or Musk?

One day, the man said, two workers were sent to the bottom of the Bravo’s leg to investigate a leaking pipe. At that point, there were many leaking pipes on the platform. Many grazes and abrasions in its fabric. The bottom of the leg was a stinking, horrible place. Poorly lit and dank. The men had to stand on a metal grate above a stagnant pool of bilge and patch the leak up with a piece of neoprene and a hose clamp. What they didn’t know was that the clear, scentless substance leaking from the pipe was liquid hydrocarbon, which is deadly when inhaled. As it hit the grating below it began to evaporate, swelling back around them in a doughnut cloud.

I would sooner live under the capitalist system than in the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,”

Michèle Mouton’s trailblazing rallying career shocked male-dominated sport

It’s time to revisit the coverage of Kyle Rittenhouse.

If the scale of the fraud that was Russiagate did not cause you to fundamentally change your attitude about US media, either you were not sufficiently attituned to the scale of its fraudulent impact — OR you participated in the fraud. Hence the dividing line it still represents

“The GPS in my car sometimes wants to veer off into off-road travel. Before I make a long trip, I always check the route on my cell phone map…”

Behind NATO’s ‘cognitive warfare’: ‘Battle for your brain’ waged by Western militaries

According to Durham’s indictment, Dolan, while an executive at the PR firm Ketchum, was hired by the Kremlin “to handle global public relations for the Russian government,” as well as its state-owned energy company, Gazprom.

Edit: I might not have underlined this point enough – I sincerely am asking for a better term and would happily use one if offered. If woke, political correctness, identity politics, etc, are inflammatory terms, I’d be happy to substitute something that’s not. But surely something is happening in our politics, and we have to be able to talk about it. So I’m asking for a name.

Last month, the Investigative Unit broke news that organizers hoping to oust Boudin submitted more than 83,000 signatures to election officials in hopes of holding a recall election during next June’s Primary – that was roughly 32,000 more signatures that what is required to put the issue on the ballot.

If it were simple to produce strategic thinkers, the world would be full of them. Certainly, the wealthiest and most stable nation states could develop systems of education, coupled with practical experience, to serve the greater good. Except this is not the case. Indeed, it is a safe assumption that few institutions in human history have unvarnished track records of making strategic thinkers. Why?

Second, dissent is squashed. Earlier this year, as Responsible Statecraft reported, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Leanor Tomero was fired from her job overseeing the NPR because she insisted the process consider Biden’s views on changing nuclear policy and slowing down programs.

1/7 If you worry the $1.2 trillion for infrastructure will be squandered on consulting contracts while nothing gets done, then don’t think about NASA’s way way way over budget return to the moon.

An outstanding challenge is that individuals don’t always know where their data live, and it’s not easy to find out.

Request access to a deceased friend or family member’s account

Perhaps the fatal blow was, in fact, self-inflicted. Zillow expanded its i-buying business aggressively. Opendoor expanded gradually. It offered i-buying services in only six markets after three years, taking its time to refine its algorithms. It is now operational in 44 markets. Zillow added almost as many markets in half as much time. A former Zillow employee told Business Insider that management had been hellbent on catching up with Opendoor, the front-runner. In order to compete, the employee alleged, the company pushed to offer generous deals to potential clients. It called this “Project Ketchup”. Now it has its own fake blood on its hands.

Arrest of Steele dossier source forces some news outlets to reexamine their coverage

This is phenomenal work! There are some great ideas in here for what anyone can do to improve and bring true polish to the #accessibility of their app!

Porch Cameras and Facebook Groups Are Turning Streets into Surveillance States

The root cause is the convergence, or I should say divergence in the business models, from when you had quality and engineering excellence, which has been replaced by concentrating on market share, profits, free cash flow, dividends, and bonuses. I saw it starting to happen in the 1990s.

Pollster: ‘I blew it.’ Maybe it’s time to get rid of election polls.

“I just took [my son] to our local Walgreens to buy him a toy. While there, a man shoved past me so firmly that he sent me into the shelving. Then he proceeded to fill a brown paper bag with Halloween candy and waltzed out of the store. This is one of five Walgreens stores in SF that will be closing in the next two months, in part because of rampant theft. And our city leaders all keep insisting crime is down.”

Advising both Chinese state companies and the Pentagon, McKinsey & Co. comes under scrutiny

Viral Lincoln Project Ads Did Little to Sway Voters, Study Shows

All they wanted was to open a noodle shop. Their tangle with S.F. bureaucracy has them regretting they tried

Monopolies Slowly Destroying the Pentagon

Chinese embassy lobbies U.S. business to oppose China bills-south May

I mention this issue because it’s important to understand that a major problem like port congestion can’t be approached in the same way as something like optimizing the layout of a chemical plant. There is no unified, global objective. All these different actors are trying to make money and shield themselves from having to pay for any extra costs. While there are usually detailed contracts regulating many corner cases, in practice the cooperation between these entities is often done informally, based on long-term relationships between organizations and even between individual people at those organizations.

Whatever else happens, it’s pretty amazing that 10,000 workers struck a Fortune 100 company and got an immediate 10% raise and saved the pension for all new hires.

Private jets flying to COP26 in Glasgow will blast more CO2 than Scots pump out in a year

Buck the system: In Italy, old towns eager for new blood sell homes for about $1

Fortress, Wichita State U ensnared in Mammoth-Sequoia trade secret theft lawsuit

Google’s ad exchange handles more than 60% of display ad inventory sold in the U.S. The company’s own ad buying tools also win more than 80% of auctions hosted on its dominant exchange, unredacted passages state.

A structural change in the plumbing of the banking system is dampening the impact of monetary policy and may even make rate hikes inflationary. Rates hikes now directly increase the asset returns of banks while leaving their funding costs unchanged – effectively encouraging credit creation. This is because banks have shifted their funding structure away from rate sensitive money market funding to rate insensitive retail deposit funding. The shift is due both to Basel III raising the regulatory costs of money market funding and also the superabundance of retail deposits from pandemic fiscal spending. On the depositor side, the public is also unlikely to see the increases in deposit rates that would arise from a competition for funding. This means the opportunity cost of holding cash will remain low well into the hiking cycle. In this post we review the transition to an asset return implementation regime, show how it changes the incentive structure of banks, and suggest that rate hikes may not be effective in slowing down economic activity.

Chicken Checker See how often salmonella was found at the plant that processed your chicken or turkey

Crypto Cities

Google’s Street View helps us navigate the world, but it’s also a portal on forgotten places and secret moments

Generator-maker Generac set to buy smart thermostat startup Ecobee

The company recently said it would stop making new offers in its home-flipping operation for the remainder of the year. The decision came after the company tweaked the algorithms that power the business to make higher offers, leaving it with a bevy of winning bids just as home-price appreciation cooled off a bit.

Silicon Valley wants to power the U.S. war machine

Danish @Maersk orders 2 @BoeingAirplanes 777Fs. They will join subsidiary Star Air and are the first triple sevens in the 767-fleet.

Rumble setting up US headquarters in Florida.

The whole Payroll Support Program idea was to have the government pay employee salaries to enable some level of continuity once the pandemic finished. For 18 months the airlines didn’t have to worry about payroll costs, but they certainly did anyway. They all put out early retirement and voluntary leave programs and dramatically slashed employee numbers, and that upset is what is causing so much pain now.

“I have lived here all my life. I have been a commercial truck driver for last 25 years. I consider myself to be ‘blue collar,'” Durr’s campaign website reads. “I believe in God. I am hard working, trusting, and very loyal. I believe in fiscal responsibility, transparency, and lower taxes. I also support the Second Amendment. I am not a polish politician who is looking for a career; instead, I would like to see government return to the hands of the people.”

TLSNotary A new kind of auditing – cryptographic proof of online accounts

1/ The established order makes foresight taboo Every known political order in the past died off Yet the current order pretends to be “the last word…perhaps the only word” If people start thinking why and how the current system might expire, they’re less likely to play ball

1/ Zillow made the same mistake that every new quant trader makes early on: Mistaking an adversarial environment for a random one.

Here’s Why Rapid COVID Tests Are So Expensive and Hard to Find

In footage obtained by Human Events, the FBI appears to have taken aerial footage of Rittenhouse and the other participants involved in the shooting. Some of the footage, which is black-and-white and grainy, was shot from an FBI surveillance drone.

Why Your Car Will Become Even More Like an iPhone

All of this has caused deep concern within the profession. “I am a danger to the public working for CVS,” one pharmacist wrote in an anonymous letter to the Texas State Board of Pharmacy in April. Public officials and corporate executives have been hearing the complaints for years. But when things get really bad, the typical response from higher-ups for flagging morale is to… buy their pharmacists pizza. And that condescension from corporate executives and human resources officials is what finally lit the spark.

This paper examines the relation between CEO’s individualistic cultural background and corporate innovation. Using hand-collected data on birthplaces of US-born CEOs, we provide robust evidence that CEOs born in frontier counties with a higher level of individualistic culture promote innovation performance. Firms led by such CEOs increase both quantity and quality of innovation outputs, measured by the number of patents, citation-weighted patents and the market value of patents. Besides innovation performance, we further show that CEO’s individualistic background causes a change in the innovation style, leading the firm to focus more on breakthrough innovation. Our extended analysis suggests that CEOs’ individualistic background promotes corporate innovation through building an innovation-orientated corporate culture and accumulating human capital by increasing the inflow of inventors.

A new indictment continues the slow unraveling of a 2016 political scandal.

Individualistic CEO and Corporate Innovation: Evidence from U.S. Frontier Culture

Re-Organizing the World’s Information: Why we need more Boutique Search Engines

A series of under-the-radar local races signal where the country is really headed.

There was a time not so long ago when the vendors would bring the products to you. The Watkins Man was in my mind a panel truck that carried dry goods to the folks who lived in the country or didn’t have transportation to go to a store. They specialized in baking goods and medical supplies of its time along with items of this and that. As a matter of fact that truck would carry over four hundred items that the house wife just couldn’t do without and thanks to him they didn’t have to.

The Federal Aviation Administration is prohibited from creating safety regulations for private spaceflights until October 2023. Initiatives like AstroAccess are aiming to guide the way that government agencies think about accessibility on spaceflights.

Data from the mobile-app research firm Flurry indicates that only 15% of U.S. consumers opt into tracking when offered the choice—no surprise, given that the only advantage for consumers is that the ads they see are more targeted. In August, Flurry noted that at least 80% of iOS devices had been updated to versions of the software with the new tougher ad standard.

We can see this secular move as a kind of Christianization of society—a fulfillment of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. And yet, in thinking we can make good on the sermon simply by redistributing wealth or legally enforcing “equity,” however defined, is to make light of the paradox and dissonance of Constantine’s Sword.

At the point at which we all had an iPhone in our pocket, we expanded greatly into bricks and mortar

Haiku thread follows. If a pandemic caused by a new bat-derived sars-like virus breaks out in a city and The city has no similar viruses in its local bats and Has no sars-like antibodies in its people and Has no infected animals in its markets and…

Comparison of damages (in %) when shipped in raffia baskets vs plastic crates, accounting for stacking layers; Source: Babarinsa et al 2018

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

The eviction moratorium hit mom-and-pop landlords hardest.

Clement and Tribe nailed it. Catastrophic delays, with disastrous consequences for patient care is exactly what happened.

Location Data Firm Got GPS Data From Apps Even When People Opted Out

Imagine if Zuck picked the next CEO of Facebook by appointing his smartest-seeming son rather than whichever executive was most capable. Do that for five generations and you’d have the NYT.

Policies should incentivize employment; not discourage it.

YouTube is about to pull its apps from Roku, and the fight is going all the way to Congress

Today, about 400 MAXs are back flying. But Boeing’s business and reputation have not recovered

A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore, causing freight to pile up because trucks are stuck sitting on empty containers, thus causing a cascading failure that destroys supply lines and brings down the economy. That certainly sounds like something that was in an early draft of Atlas Shrugged but got crossed out as too preposterous for anyone to take seriously.

Hospital Prices Are Arbitrary. Just Look at the Kingsburys’ $100,000 Bill.

What every software engineer should know about search

mRNA Inventor on COVID Response: “Is This Really About the Vaccine or Is It About Something Else?”

These are the deadliest national parks in the U.S.

The Distorted Market for Woke Capitalism

SAN FRANCISCO CLOSES IN-N-OUT BURGER AFTER DEFYING CITY’S VACCINE RULE

“The strategies we previously turned to for safety are risky.”

Most Americans do not recognize that Beijing and Washington are following the same playbook, because they believe the United States is a noble democracy that acts differently from authoritarian and ruthless countries such as China. But that is not how international politics works…

1) Executive order effective immediately over riding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high instead of the current limit of 2. Make it temporary for ~120 days.

Antitrust battle latest: Google, Facebook ‘colluded’ to smash Apple’s privacy protections

. @antoniogm on “Optionality”. Is that really the curse of our generation?

Too many potential paths to the Promised Land ends up diverting us from any? pic.twitter.com/ytuO1ffZUt

— Matt Bilinsky (@mattbilinsky) October 9, 2021

The Shocking Immaturity of JavaScript

Another major expense will be batteries. Bray said a three-person landscaping crew will need to carry 30 to 40 fully charged batteries to power its equipment during a full day’s work.

Several books could be written about the story that these two pictures tell. pic.twitter.com/5Wc18v4wwA

— mckaywrigley.eth (@mckaywrigley) October 11, 2021

Farm equipment security at DEF CON 29

The State Of Web Scraping in 2021

“If eight submarines won’t be fully operational until, say 2038, will that really matter to the strategic balance in the Western Pacific?” Spending this kind of money on aircraft – even, say, B-21s – would get something fielded, and relevant, way before then.

Thank OpenSecrets, too, for noting that the historic $1 billion that outside groups spent in “dark money” in 2020 “largely boost[ed] Democrats,” especially Biden—who raked in six times more “dark money” contributions than President Donald Trump.

A higher fidelity social product would automatically nip and tuck our social graphs over time as they observed our interaction patterns. Imagine Twitter or Instagram just silently unfollowing accounts you haven’t engaged with in a while, accounts that have gone dormant, and so on. Twitter and Facebook offer methods like muting to reduce what we see from people without unfriending or unfollowing, but it’s a lot of work, and frankly I feel like a coward using any of those.

but voting, nah? pic.twitter.com/RnGe7pENt4

— Adam Townsend (@adamscrabble) October 12, 2021

“It’s game over for the existing launch companies,” says Peter Diamandis, a US space entrepreneur. “There’s no vehicle out there on the drawing board that could compete.”

Firstly, we need to create companies much like reputable brands. Smart contracts, by nature, should be, and are, open-sourced. Theoretically, this means anyone can then copy-paste all the code and create clones. But just like fake CryptoPunks and forks of popular open-source repositories, if the branding isn’t there, it’s worthless. Imagine the U.S government started incorporating this global ledger to account for home ownership — automatically, they have a reputable brand. Since the code itself is out in public, it can be trusted and audited. Take this idea further and imagine the UN starts to keep track of land ownership for the entire world! Same deal — brand and trust, both satisfied.

The prosecution agreement, criticized for the way it let Boeing executives off the hook, was filed by the then-U.S. Attorney in the northern district of Texas, Erin Nealy Cox. Cox left the Department of Justice after the agreement and in June joined Kirkland & Ellis, Boeing’s lead corporate criminal defense law firm. On Kirkland’s website, she was welcomed to the firm as a partner by Mark Filip, who had signed the DPA on behalf of Boeing. Forkner’s indictment was filed by her replacement, acting U.S. Attorney Meacham.

On Election Day, the consultant would drive Beren to the polling place and tell her how to cast fraudulent votes. She then allegedly engaged in multiple illegal activities such as advising in-person voters to support a certain candidate, casting votes herself in other people’s names and encouraging voters to cast additional votes for family members who were not present.

Delicious. Christopher Steele, the single most discredited actor in the entire Trump Russia Collusion Hoax, is set to be interviewed Monday by George Stephanopoulos, the single most pompous of all the brood of lying, self-important talking heads that spent more than four years trashing Donald Trump.

That’s ours to figure out. But people are dying because we haven’t come up with an answer to that question. The healthcare system now tells people: “Start to die and then we’ll deal with you.”

The carbon footprint of household energy use in the United States

Every day there r American University students smoking weed in the park next 2 our house. Whenever I see them I tell them they r not in dc they are on federal park land and if park police catch them they will have big hassles. Every1 thinks weed legal everywhere in dc @AmericanU

Touching the Third Rail: The Dangers of Electricity Market Design

New study reveals iPhones aren’t as private as you think

Walmart heirs have spent heavily to promote their view that water markets are the best way to deal with a dwindling supply

Spending on PCR tests in China soared months before first COVID-19 cases revealed: report

Revealed: The secret notes of Blue Origin leaders trying to catch Space – “They’ve got a ton of money, and they’re not doing a lot,”

McKinsey Never Told the FDA It Was Working for Opioid Makers While Also Working for the Agency

Salesforce Accidentally Teaches Us About Visual Weight

The Apple A15 SoC Performance Review: Faster & More Efficient

Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet

Robots Take Over Italy’s Vineyards as Wineries Struggle With Covid-19 Worker Shortages

Jony Ive on What He Misses Most About Steve Jobs

The Covid money tracker.

What American Christians Hear at Church

Americans’ Trust in Media Dips to Second Lowest on Record

I wouldn’t ask for a raise if i made 13.2 million dollars either

pic.twitter.com/lQ9GeepKbz

— Michael Kovrig (@MichaelKovrig) October 8, 2021

Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller: A 21st century Billy Mitchell

The Off-Grid Laws of Every State in America

Biden mocked for ‘Truman Show presidency’ over fake White House set

After ~10 years, Google is winding down its Material Design custom UI work on iOS in favor of pure UIKit. Why? UIKit got better, and “time we’re saving not building custom code is now invested in the long tail of UX details that really make products feel great on Apple platforms” https://t.co/bkXn9ZmyGm

— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) October 8, 2021

The most important issue of this decade is restraining government power. The logical progression from mask mandate to vaccine mandate to “freedom pass” is undeniable. This thread… from a great country, formerly free and prosperous. https://t.co/fET1PB48dU

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) October 9, 2021

Concentrated power has decimated the House and made legislators into actors. Here’s how many votes have been allowed on floor-offered (not prescreened by speaker) amendments by year:

2011: 414
2012: 153
2013: 61
2014: 96
2015: 94
2016: 29
2017: 0
2018: 0
2019: 0
2020: 0
2021: 0

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) September 26, 2021

Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA’s secret war plans against WikiLeaks

In the midst of unprecedented crisis, Boeing sales chief embraces optimism

SpaceX satellite signals used like GPS to pinpoint location on Earth

Officials in Beijing have a distrust of younger American officials, whom they consider hostile to China and focused too much on ideological competition. They prefer to deal with trusted “old friends” such as Thornton, who is among very few to have maintained ties and access to some of China’s most powerful officials.

From Varlam Shalamov “Forty five things I learned in the gulag”

Over an 18-year period, China has granted or loaned money to 13,427 infrastructure projects worth $843bn across 165 countries, according to the AidData research lab at William & Mary, a university in the US state of Virginia.

Revisionism on Deborah Birx, Trump, and the CDC

EyePhone: How one doctor is using the iPhone 13 Pro’s macro capabilities to remotely assess patients

How did 30,000 Haitians get to Texas?

The Opendoor Memo: Keith Rabois on The Origins of Opendoor from a Conversation with Peter Thiel, Why Cash is Not a Competitive Moat for Startups Today and What People Misunderstand About Black Swan Events in Real Estate and How it Impacts Opendoor

We are not doing an in-depth dive into Gov. Evers ‘People’s” Commission maps at this time for 2 reasons: 1) The Commission omitted the Voting Rights Act from its criteria. And in the drawing of their maps it appears this cornerstone of American civil rights was ignored

The Chinese are very happy to see woke culture spread in America.

Clarifying the structure and nature of left-wing authoritarianism.

Weyerhaeuser cites crime in Pioneer Square for delay in reopening its Seattle headquarters

“The fact that the president came to the Hill and whipped against his own bill is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”

The Democrat-backed plan seeks to reform federal EV incentives by resetting manufacturer quotas and upping the ante to a $12,500 electric vehicle tax credit. Conservatives have bashed the plan as anti-competitive and socialist, citing that the money coming from taxpayers should not be used to soften the financial blow for electric-car buyers that have typically been higher earners anyway. The updated policies are also embedded in a $3.5 trillion social spending bill Republicans have alleged is too broad. Meanwhile, supporters of the bill have claimed it’s the most direct way of ensuring EV adoption among low-income groups and will likely speed up the nation’s transition to alternative energy vehicles.

“In his later years, however, he spoke and wrote at length not only about his belief in God but also, with more reluctance, about his opposition to abortion.”

The paper lifted my reporting about the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist without any attributionpp

Confessions of a Michelin Inspector

How to Deal with Complexity Like a Pilot (Part 1)