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At this point in history barcodes had never been used commercially – though the idea had been brewing for decades following a patent filed on 20 October 1949 by one of the engineers who was now part of McEnroe’s team. The IBM engineers were trying to bring barcodes to life. They had a vision of the future where shoppers whizzed through the checkout with lasers scanning every item they wanted to purchase. But IBM’s lawyers had a problem with the future.

The lawfare against @elonmusk, as gleefully described by the New York Times:

These are the increases in population of Illegal Immigrants in Swing States under the policies of the Biden/Harris Administration.

A billion dollars will have been wasted on losing voters by condemnation versus winning them by invitation.

Anonymous FBI officials had already leaked to the media the official FBI position falsely claiming the agents kneeled for “de-escalation” to minimize potential confrontation. But here’s the truth about what happened…

Because they know what happens when they do something.

This paper, though primarily philosophical, will draw extensively on empirical literature. The seriousness of many concerns relating to surveillance capitalism depend on empirical facts, which philosophical discussions need to engage with. In some areas, the empirical literature is extensive, such as on echo chambers, filter bubbles, polarization, and mental health issues. Here, particular attention will be given to studies that offer a summary overview of existing research (review studies, meta-analyses, umbrella reviews). In other areas, such as whether algorithms exhibit political bias, the empirical literature is still scarce, and we must do without review studies. Limitations, ambiguities or contradictions within the empirical literature will be highlighted throughout.

According to attorney R. Trent McCotter, who represents Bannon, “Those credits mean that Mr. Bannon could have been released to home confinement two days ago on October 19, 2024 (i.e., 10 days before the end of his sentence) – yet the BOP declined to do so, citing its view that there is ‘insufficient time’ remaining on Mr. Bannon’s sentence ‘to process’ the referral to home confinement.”

Soros’s kid is collecting Democratic politicians like they’re rare Pokemon cards, but go on about how Elon Musk is the problem.

Following a @HouseAdmin report, we filed a bar complaint on behalf of Stefan Passantino against former Rep. Liz Cheney for allegedly violating professional ethics obligations by secretly messaging Cassidy Hutchinson prior to her testimony before the J6 Committee:

There is a bona fide scandal here. Since these reports appeared on a Telegram channel which is, at a minimum, very friendly to the mullah regime, and is quite possibly controlled by Iranian intelligence, it’s reasonable to conclude that the intent of the leak was to curtail any Israeli attack on Iran, while causing trouble for Israel’s friends in Washington, DC. The current Biden-Harris administration doesn’t count among those friends, at least not in Israeli eyes.

I asked about that, and Sasan disagreed with me, and we went back and forth for a few minutes on it. It’s Decoder; we have exchanges like this all the time, and I didn’t think anything of it. But then I got a note from Rick Heineman, the chief communications officer at Intuit, who called the line of questioning and my tone “inappropriate,” “egregious,” and “disappointing” and demanded that we delete that entire section of the recording. I mean, literally — he wrote a long email that ended with “at the very least the end portion of your interview should be deleted.”

The environment in which we have been competing will be quite different in the future. The changes ahead will force us and athletic departments across the country to make difficult decisions given the financial impact of the settlement.  We will adjust to the changing dynamics with our values and goals of academic achievement and a competitive athletic experience as our guide.   More.

The Lutheran Tradition is home to some of the best church music in all Christendom. This is due to numerous great composers from our tradition, some of whom I would like to introduce (There are many many more and I am not a church musician, just as a disclaimer)

This administration has surpassed George W Bush in squandering US power.

At the start of 2024, the industry began declaring the end of Peak TV, a term coined by FX Networks Chairman John Landgraf that refers to an era of rampant content spending that gave us shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. For streaming services, the Peak TV era meant trying to lure subscribers with original content that was often buoyed by critical acclaim and/or top-tier actors, writers, and/or directors. However, as streaming services struggle to reach or maintain profitability, 2024 saw a drop in the number of new scripted shows for the first time in at least 10 years, FX Research found.

He also recalled how his warning about election fraud posted on YouTube was taken down, possibly violating his First Amendment rights. In it, he fought the process of sending out ballots, possibly 90 million, to those who didn’t ask for one or weren’t interested in mail-in voting.

Woodward reports in his new book that Biden donors began expressing concern about Biden’s mental fitness in June of 2023. At a Los Gatos event: Biden was “frightening awful” and like your 87-year-old senile grandfather.” “He could not wait to sit down and only took 2 pre-arranged questions.”

Meet Wanda Kagan, Harris’s high school classmate and longtime girlfriend, whom the Times described as “a close friend of Ms. Harris’s when they attended high school together in Montreal.” Kagan, per the Times, “said that Ms. Harris’s mother, who died in 2009, had told Ms. Kagan about the summer job years ago.” What the Times did not tell its readers is that Kagan is a full-throated Harris supporter who has appeared alongside the vice president at several campaign events. She also served as a surrogate for her old friend on television during the Democratic National Convention.

I’d highly recommend, when you have free time, perusing the Richard Nixon Foundation on YouTube, which contains fascinating Nixon interviews as VP, President and after.

I post images from Obama and Walz event this happens… #Censorship

“lesson in two of the most important tactics in propaganda”

Network tribal governance in action.

McQuown left Wells Fargo in 1974, exhausted by all the battles with the bank’s new management. Wells Fargo Investment Advisors — the unit set up to house the new quantitative investment strategies — later became Barclays Global Investors once it was acquired by the British bank. 

“Technically now it’s legal for the US military under this directive to shoot and k*** Americans who engage in political protest because they disagree with policies in the White House.” “This did not come from Donald Trump. It came from the Democratic party, and that’s why I left the Democratic party.”

Still, the fact that Tesla has been testing its ridehailing function with employees proves the company is still dead set on eventually launching the long-promised Tesla Network. First announced in Musk’s Master Plan Part Deux, the Tesla Network claims to allow regular Tesla owners to send their vehicles out autonomously to function as robotaxis while their owners stay at home.

A ProPublica and Capitol Forum investigation found that EviCore uses an algorithm backed by artificial intelligence, which some insiders call “the dial,” that it can adjust to lead to higher denials. Some contracts ensure the company makes more money the more it cuts health spending. And it issues medical guidelines that doctors have said delay and deny care for patients.

Soon, based solely on your effortless knowledge of Gibberish, you were being fast-tracked into influential positions in government. When, at last, you found yourself primed to inherit the most powerful position in the entire world, your inner circle was filled with people who had long since forgotten how to speak any other language but Gibberish.

If you know someone who says the Overton Window has not shifted radically to the Left, show them the DNC Platform of 1992:

Do you think that he wants to go to trial here in the United States of America? Do you think maybe that’s one of the reasons he chose to give $50 million to Kamala Harris?”

Mrs. USOGA: “Why are you watching football. You should be doing yard work. Mr. USOGA: “There was a lot that was done but there’s more to do but I’m pointing out things that need to be done that haven’t been done but need to be done…”

The Atto 3 teardown in Japan revealed one of the ways BYD manages to keep costs down and pass the savings down to the person who buys the car. It’s all about producing as many of the components as possible in-house and integrating them. The source article highlights the so-called “E-Axle” used by BYD, which is comprised of eight different components. It includes not only the motor, inverter, transmission and controller but also the onboard AC charger, the DC-to-DC converter and the battery monitoring system (BMS). This approach, combined with the economies of scale (the larger the number of cars you build, the cheaper you can build them) goes a long way toward explaining how these highly competent Chinese EVs can be sold at such low prices.

Angela Merkel’s memoirs are out next month. This week’s Charlemagne revisits her legacy. She led Germany – and thus Europe – as if in a make-believe world, letting it enjoy an extended geopolitical and economic nap from which it still needs to wake up.

Calling your opponent a fascist when slipping in the polls is irresponsible after 2 assassination attempts. You can’t complain about January 6th and then recreate it It’s wrong for the campaign and for the country.

The Houthi have put an unbreakable chokehold on the Red Sea and all Red Sea shipping. There is no way to break this chokehold. The USN and all other Western navies have tried for almost 12 months and failed utterly. Attempts to conduct strikes on the Houthi, including massive strikes on core infrastructure in Hodeida have yielded ZERO results over a period of almost a year. The Israelis are to thank for this achievement.

I spoke w/ WPR for the audio version of this story. WI is unique among non-expansion states bc we have no coverage gap. Expansion could bring more federal $, but at the cost of higher prices for private payers & forcing low-income people onto Medicaid.

This is hilarious. CNN every day pretends they and the Dem Party are the sole defenders of democratic values. When an intruder points out that Kamala received zero votes to become the Dem nominee (other than Obama and Pelosi’s), they all go wild about how it doesn’t matter:

Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy.

Why it matters: Biden aides and allies privately have trash-talked the vice president during the past 3½ years — and Harris, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and others in her inner circle know it. Harris and Emhoff — along with Harris’ sister Maya and her husband, Tony West — have taken note of Biden advisers and big-dollar donors they suspect of knifing the vice president to reporters or fellow Democrats, two people familiar with the matter tell Axios. B. Beyond those grudges, Harris has a dim view of some members of Biden’s team and would want her own people in place, the sources said.

The Big Steal

Bay Area bridges made a $198 million profit last year, and tolls are already going up $1 on 1/1/25. But that is not enough for MTC, which wants to raise tolls to as high as $11.50 in 2030 to funnel more $ to housing and transit.

The study found some questionable word choices but no widespread pattern, according to a senior intelligence official, one of five who requested anonymity to discuss the review. (None would disclose the words flagged by Ms. Harris because the reports were classified.)

The greatest Hymns in Christendom are found in the Lutheran Church. As the Church commemorates some of our great Hymnists today, I want to introduce you to them and share their amazing biografies.

How the largest pine tree in the world was discovered in Yosemite

Bob Lutz, 5 years ago today: “The Model Y, I think, is terminally ugly. I don’t know who’s going to buy that. “The (Tesla) Smi is certainly never going to be built.”

I’ve been warning you the nastiest fish in the Senate side of the censorship industry septic tank is Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Mark Warner. Do Not take this new threat lightly: this guy oversees the CIA in Congress, pushing to censor speech at infrastructure level.

Did Musk ask the government if it was legal to give away a million a day in his constitutional sweepstakes? OF COURSE NOT! He’s already given away money, meanwhile the lawmakers and the enforcers aren’t sure if it’s legal and aren’t sure what to do and. Yes, move fast and break things. Those damn techies. But that’s why they became heroes to the youth to begin with, that’s why they usurped the power from the musicians and other entertainers. They acted like they owned the world, like there were no limits. Like rock stars used to. We all need something to believe in.

Example:   The Democratic Secretary of State in PA issued a memorandum in September 2020 to all the counties that the statute requiring matching of signatures on absentee ballots was being “waived” because of COVID.  And when the PAGOP sued to ask the court to uphold this black letter law, the lower court agreed but the Democrat-controlled PA Supreme Court overruled and said that no signature matching was necessary, notwithstanding the statutory requirement to the contrary. 

Your reminder that Bechtel will need $2.7 billion and until 2029 to make a launch tower that can’t catch rockets with chopsticks.

The League of Women Voters and the DOJ are able to produce no citizens who were negatively impacted by the removal of these records.

Starship matters. It’s not just a really big rocket, like any other rocket on steroids. It’s a continuing and dedicated attempt to achieve the “Holy Grail” of rocketry, a fully and rapidly reusable orbital class rocket that can be mass manufactured. It is intended to enable a conveyor belt logistical capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) comparable to the Berlin Airlift. That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts launch below the API.

This is filmed in 8x slowmo and it reveals so many tiny little flight adjustments needed to maintain the bird’s position in the sky while at the same time dodging all other birds who come flying by at an incredible speed.

Truthfully, I believe my father (who supported Reagan), would very much approve of saving America, indeed the world, from the highly destructive Globalist forces threatening to take over this planet. And if that footage from FMJ helps Trump make the point that the US military needs properly trained, super tough, focused, dedicated warriors, and not introduce the demoralizing effects of woke-ism, and attracting people to join up simply to have their sexual reassignments paid for, then Trump has my blessing

Yes, gangs did take control of our apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado, and the government did nothing. That is the real story.

Michelin is pleased to present the very first MICHELIN Key selection for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Awarding 271 properties offering the most outstanding stays throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland, this inaugural selection presents 17 hotels with Three MICHELIN Keys, 85 with Two MICHELIN Keys and 169 with One MICHELIN Key.

This changes everything. Since airships are, after all, competitive with 747s on delivery time, you can earn the full revenue associated with air freight, not just the lower trucking rates I had assumed. Cargo airship margins, therefore, can be much higher than I had realized.

A music map.

VW CEO Oliver Blume : “The pie has gotten smaller, and we have more guests at the table”

In 2021 the UK government’s Geospatial Commission prepared a briefing paper for some discussions about address data. It has been released to the journalist James O’Malley after a freedom of information request.  The paper was prepared in response to the long-running campaign asking the government to deliver on political commitments to make the list of UK addresses – and other non-personal geospatial data – freely available. People could then use the data to

It’s a DoD Directive that was re-issued September 27, 2024. It governs the Department of Defense intelligence activities, and now includes provisions authorizing lethal force in certain circumstances, and it supplants the 2016 version which did not mention that.” The DoD Directive is 5240.01, for those who want to read it themselves.

Silicon Valley has lost its moral compass.

Wojcicki has blamed 23andMe’s struggles on a broader downturn across the biotechnology industry. But several people who spoke to the FT, including investors and current and former employees, point to a series of strategic mis-steps?that have precipitated a corporate crisis that threatens its future.

U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema piled up another pricey quarter for travel — including bills for visits to France, Japan and the United Kingdom paid by her campaign. Sinema, I-Ariz., who announced she wouldn’t seek a second term in March, billed about $216,000 for travel between July and September, her latest campaign finance report showed. Her campaign also paid $152,000 for her security-related expenses.

We praise canonical authors for their boundless imagination. Then why do all their plots feel the same? 

Wait for the second attack!! Angry birds IRL. Ospreys rarely attempt to steal from each other but when they do it’s alway very interesting!

meaning Musk already has an incredible 35 MW of power available on site.

USN (US Navy) has 100% failed at FONOPs in the Red Sea vs guys in sandals who have no advanced missiles. This was entirely predictable and cost US taxpayers billions of dollars. But our leaders are signaling to dumb people instead of pursuing effective action.

Most of the European military community has no experience in planning or commanding large-scale combined-force operations involving several nations. It’s made up of separate national armies that, for the purposes of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, lean on America for leadership and coordination. NATO nations have cut back on troops and military hardware since the Cold War. But Europe has cut far deeper than the US. Defense budgets have become a pot that could be raided to fund more pressing priorities, such as treating and caring for aging populations. As a result, much of Europe’s military has become, in the view of some US defense experts, a “Potemkin army” that is ill-prepared to wage and win a prolonged war.

this timeline (we believe) represents the most exhaustive one to date showing the requests and denials related to the deployment of the D.C. National Guard before and on January 6, 2021. Events have been curated from a number of resources including congressional testimony, internal agency investigations, media coverage, videos, and book excerpts.

Applicants seeking taxpayer support for expansion must meet permitting and environmental requirements, as well as exclusive hiring preferences for union and “underrepresented” labor groups and for felons and others with criminal backgrounds. Program designers decided that only broadband fiber would be considered, excluding satellite and wireless companies from the bidding, even though in many places those alternatives would be less expensive for the consumer.

The complaint cites long-standing FCC precedent that broadcasters cannot engage in intentional falsification or suppression of news and seeks an order compelling CBS to release the full unedited transcript of the interview.

Some hospitals have increased coding intensity by upwards of 20%, Mr. Rex told investors. UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson said the trend was driven by a few large systems. 

DHL, the international express delivery company, started its business by offering free plane tickets to people on the street. For the trouble of giving up their baggage allowances, passengers were handed a free round trip plane ticket to Hawaii. More.

Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations conducted a thousand times a day. And that drives the character of life here.

There are government boondoggles, and then there’s NASA’s Artemis program. More than a half century after Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, Artemis was intended to land astronauts back on the moon. It has so far spent nearly $100 billion without anyone getting off the ground, yet its complexity and outrageous waste are still spiraling upward. The next US president should rethink the program in its entirety.

The Houthis’ elevation to a top-tier member of the ‘Axis of Resistance’ presents other opportunities to the whole Iran-led bloc. Under the Houthis, Yemen has become a place from which the Iran threat network can undertake attacks on Israel that Iran itself does not dare to mount—already including ballistic missile and drone attacks on Tel Aviv.¹⁴⁴Yemen might also be used by the axis as a way to mount attacks on other targets—such as U.S. forces—in a way that may not draw retaliation on more pain-sensitive parts of the axis—for instance, Iran. At present, the Houthis have used the boogey-man reputation of hypersonic weapons as an attention-grabber, but in the future, Yemen could be an ideal site for such weapons considering its geographic placement and its proven ability to conceal launch sites in its rugged interior.

Using Hetzner and Azure, we trust that our unencrypted in-memory data and business logic are housed in professional data centers with strong physical security measures. However, Cloudflare has built its Workers and serverless offerings on top of its Cache/CDN and anti-DDoS infrastructure, which operates out of questionable ISP and IXP colocation facilities in various jurisdictions with dubious standards.

The mental strain of having to look at oneself over hours of Zoom meetings results in what Stanford University psychologists call “mirror anxiety,” while “Zoom dysmorphia” describes a user’s anxiety about dark circles, wrinkles, or bad hair. From a sample of 10,322 subjects, 14 percent of women felt “very” or “extremely” fatigued after Zoom calls, compared to only 6 percent of men. The researchers devised a Zoom and Exhaustion Fatigue scale to assess how serious the problem felt across five dimensions of fatigue: general, social, emotional, visual, and motivational (readers can test how susceptible they are at bit.ly/332zRaS). In addition to mirror anxiety, more women than men felt trapped: they took fewer breaks and felt obligated to hover within the camera’s frame. Established research tells us that looking in a mirror raises self-consciousness and self-criticism about one’s appearance. In what sounds like a good idea, researchers suggest making some meetings audio-only as a way to “reduce the psychological costs, especially given that these costs are born unequally across society.”

We will discuss why there is progress for land transport and lack of progress in the air, what projects we see will contribute to changes in how we provide energy for air transport, and when this will affect curves like those in Figure 3.

We need new, young blood entering the serious photography (and video) markets. For the camera makers to continue to succeed, they need to cater to a group that grew up with a smartphone in their pocket and the accompanying sharing apps. Right now it’s a pretty big leap from 9:16 1080P-sized capture to the 3:2 8K-sized capture the camera companies really want to sell. Not just in price, but also in “usability” from the standpoint of that younger crowd. 

Yet like Ms. Harris’s scripted reversals on fracking, immigration and Medicare, her push to build more single-family homes contradicts her past positions. As California’s attorney general, she wielded the state’s environmental laws against new residential developments, exacerbating the affordability crisis that her campaign plan aims to address.

In theory, betting markets may offer a more accurate forecast of election results than polls and models, though fee structures, market sizes and other limitations can cloud those results. Polymarket competitor PredictIt infamously gave Hillary Clinton roughly 80 per cent odds of victory in 2016 before her loss. PredictIt traders also continued to give Trump a 10 per cent chance of winning the state of Wisconsin weeks after the race had been called in the media.

Jamie Fleet, then-Democratic staffer for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the Committee on House Administration (chaired, at the time, by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who was later appointed to Pelosi’s January 6 Select Committee) had a team of counselors working in anticipation of coming debates and objections from states—including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia—about the certification of the electoral college vote. Knowing that objections would likely be raised on January 6, Fleet’s team began contingency planning to prepare for the possibility that the proceedings would “not [be] traditional.”

In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room. There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever.

The NYT seems to be saying: Please be encouraged about Harris, though there’s nothing positive that she’s said or done that we can elaborate for you today. Leave the Harris door shut, and look at Trump. Isn’t he terrible in the same way we’ve considered him terrible for an entire decade… or, uh, no, at some new more worrisome and ever lower level of descent into hell?

In my experience, most journalists failed to understand the significance of the blogosphere. This was partly due to the fact that, like Dr Johnson, they thought that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”, and so bloggers must be weird. (Which is hard for those of us who happen to be both bloggers and hacks.) But it was mainly because mainstream media was hypnotised – and blind-sided – by the vertiginous rise of social media. Journalists came to assume that the blogosphere must be old hat, a relic of the past, a meeting place for cranks, nerds and ponytailed men wearing shoes like Cornish pasties. Social media was what mattered.

One of the most important anthropologists of the 20th century was a dirt-poor mestizo woman called Helena Valero. After having read the one and only book in English about her, I’m convinced of that. Her insights into a primitive society is worth more than that of the vast majority of anthropologists, for one simple reason: Helena was there for real, as a member of those societies. She didn’t only study stone age life. She lived it. For two decades, she lived among the Yanomamö horticulturalists of the Amazonas, after having been kidnapped at the age of 11, in 1937.

The ancient masterpiece is a stunning example of Hiberno-Saxon style, thought to have been composed on the Scottish island of Iona in 806, then transferred to the monastery of Kells in County Meath after a Viking raid (a story told in the marvelous animated film The Secret of Kells). Consisting mainly of copies of the four gospels, as well as indexes called “canon tables,” the manuscript is believed to have been made primarily for display, not reading aloud, which is why “the images are elaborate and detailed while the text is carelessly copied with entire words missing or long passages being repeated.”

Take, for example, Vista Equity Partners’ $1 billion acquisition of Acquia in 2019. Acquia is the main commercial backer of Drupal, another popular open source CMS. In the years since the acquisition, the Drupal community has visibly struggled. Acquia appears to be contributing less code and providing less financial support to the ecosystem.

In a world awash with digital data, private intelligence companies now compete with state agencies, turning everyone into potential spies and transforming the age-old craft of espionage into a high-stakes technological arms race.

The de facto Kaspersky ban in the USA is having a global impact: Google kicks the manufacturer and its products out of the Play Store.

Select the areas to target via postcard and map search, filter by Income, Home Value, Rental Status, and more —no printing, no postage, no hassles

How Wisconsin is trying to speed up beer sales at Camp Randall Stadium

I can see how these 2 positions could be coordinated. Both candidates state something that sounds absolute, but I don’t think either really means it that way. I would think the real question is what should be defined as criminal, and then, how do you enforce the law. What should be left to the parents, and when should the state invade the home?

Before I get to the Top 10 Worst Offenders, first let’s take a look at some of the notables on the list who fell outside the Top 10.

Tennessee’s HPR Law and Its Transformation of Nashville’s Housing Market: A Model for Other States

The lawsuit alleges that Williams intentionally excluded qualified Republican poll workers from the hiring process for the upcoming November 2024 election, hiring only 15 Republicans out of 804 total election staff.

 I had come for the American Dream but America was no longer selling it.

Incredible. I spoke too soon about @60Minutes. Also note how many breaks there are in her answers in the ‘full’ version of her interview.

But sometimes, it takes an erratic, moody, inhumanely demanding person to make things happen. And, time and again, Musk has made things happen—to the benefit of us all. Presidents can’t afford to turn their backs on people like Musk. They do so at their own—and the country’s—peril.

Remember when multiple major US media outlets — as well as all the small of handful of “think tank experts” they always quote — tried to convince Americans and Europeans that it was mostly likely Putin who blew up his own Nord Stream 2 pipeline? I do.

“We have to stop, every time one side loses an election, saying the election was stolen.”

Sources consulted for this story said the use of Smartmatic software in the municipal and the presidential elections was meant to be kept under wraps, and that Venezuelan officials and company executives agreed to use another company to hide Smartmatic’s involvement.

Popular car brands are collecting and sharing driver data from braking patterns and odometer readings to vehicle location and voice recognition information, consumer advocacy group Choice has found.

If you only take away one thing from this article, it should be the concept of Strength-Based Feedback. Unlike traditional approaches that attempt to “fix” weaknesses, strength-based feedback acknowledges that, realistically, weaknesses can only be managed, not fixed. This approach shifts development conversations from problem-solving to focusing on growth, empowering employees to excel in doing what they do best. Strength-based feedback can lead to meaningful engagement and performance improvements and allows individuals to contribute more effectively to their organizations.

U.S. Navy “On the Scene” Shortly Before Nord Stream Sabotage

we cannot make them at the rate that they are aging out of service, the fleet gets older and smaller every single year, it’s pretty grim.

Neeleman went out of his way to bring up SAFs in a keynote interview, making sure the world knew he was opposed to the idea.

Dubbed the Global Police Summit, the most recent event took place over three days in October 2023 at Apple Park. It was timed to precede the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference in San Diego that year, according to emails obtained by Forbes via a public records request with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD).

UnitedHealthcare said that while Duke Health is one of the most expensive health systems in the southeast and has a much higher cost than other peer academic health systems in North Carolina and surrounding states, the health system continues to require price increases that consumers cannot afford

But whatever my feelings about private equity in general or Silver Lake’s management of WP Engine in particular, I care far more about the integrity of open source licenses, and that integrity is under direct assault by Automattic’s grotesque claim for WP Engine’s revenues.

This person says their job was to handle reports about users and decide a punishment. They note that one of the most common reports women make about men is “I just don’t like him.”

The mice are so bad right now in Rock Island State Park off the northeastern tip of Door County that rodents are reportedly chewing through campers’ Crocs, shredding tent floors and chomping their way into Rubbermaid bins.

Today, Airbus is playing from a position of strength and dominance. Boeing is playing from a position of weakness and financial trauma.

So today, we’ll examine the statistical underpinnings of the Kevin Bacon game, digging into three key facets of game lore:

overestimated by 42% because of unaccounted for weather station aging, reports new study.

If it’s a town hall, you’re not supposed to have the questions in advance. It’s supposed to test the candidates. If the answers are pre-written, the candidate is cheating on the test, posing as capable of spontaneity, when she is actively protecting herself from the risk of spontaneity, and hiding that self-protection from us. She’s asking us to see her as our protector.

This one is so funny and so important about a corruption of the press.

A new In-N-Out is headed to Las Vegas, and by all accounts, it’s going to look and feel unlike any other In-N-Out in America.

No car manufacturers produce vehicles that are already ready for patrol, and transforming a commercially sold Tesla into a crime-fighting machine is no small feat. Beyond the standard emergency lights, sirens, radio, antenna, push bar, partition and gun rack that are added to the car, the vehicle gets a serious upgrade with ballistic panels to toughen it up for the streets, according to a report prepared by a different California city that investigated adopting Teslas for police use.

Thanks to Sweden’s allemansrätten, or right to roam, it is possible to visit all year if you bring your own tent and supplies. I, however, am slipping in just before the cabins (Stockholm area: Stockholm Archipelago Trail) here close for the season.

Dominion announced the acquisition of the Diebold products on May 19, 2010 [2] and the acquisition of Sequoia Voting assets on June 4, 2010 [3]. Dominion also hired much of its personnel, probably retaining ties to extremely sketchy Smartmatic. Sequoia/Smartmatic systems had been used in the Venezuela 2004 referendum, which Hugo Chavez “won”.  Smartmatic is a British company with Hugo Chavez ties, headed by “Lord” Malloch-Brown (former UN Deputy Secretary-General, UNDP, UNHCR, VP of Soros’ Quantum Fund, and Vice Chair of Soros’ Open Society Foundation) [7], and linked to electoral scandals all over the world [5].

In football terms the Book of Romans is a playbook for life. Fundamentals that will point us in the right direction toward God. Paul gave us the gospel in a nutshell-the road to salvation. Rom 3:23, 6:23, 3:25 &10:9-10 detail man’s sin, God’s remedy, & how it’s attained.

The Kamala-Mayorkas Invasion was an act of Demographic Warfare against all American citizens.

After Newt Gingrich, there was literally only one Republican who ever did anything fun and effective during a budget battle shutdown with Dems. That was President Donald J. Trump.

Ina threw herself into running the Barefoot Contessa with well-heeled Hamptons clients, including a woman who came in every week to buy 10 pounds of grilled lemon chicken. “And finally after weeks and weeks of this, I had to say, ‘What are you doing with ten pounds of grilled lemon chicken?'” Garten recalled. “She said, ‘My cat likes it.'”

The roof would soon collapse, causing them and their 6 year old grandchild to drown. Their daughter and mother of the child took the photograph.

Any good essays/books/advice about software sales?

“We are now working on over 1-GW data centers, which I didn’t think we would be thinking about just maybe even two years earlier, and all of this needs energy, ” Pichai said during a talk in Carnegie Mellon’s Highmark Center as part of the university’s 2024-25 President’s Lecture Series. Pichai spoke on “The AI Platform Shift and the Opportunity Ahead,” as he focused his company’s advancements in AI and his vision for a future driven by AI.

She explained that her late husband, Oswald, was an actor. In the late 1960s, he had recorded the “Mind the Gap” announcement for the Northern Line on London’s sprawling underground network. Even after he died in 2007, McCollum could always come to the station, sit on the platform, and listen as her husband’s distinctive, sonorous voice boomed a safety warning to passengers, reminding them about the gap between the train doorway and the platform. It was a ritualized comfort, a tiny audio link to the man she loved and deeply missed.

“and that she was sleep deprived the morning she picked her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.”

This basically erases Steve Jobs’ contribution to America.

Bloomberg Opinion’s climate columnist visited Michigan, the former heart of the solar industry, and China to learn how good, old-fashioned capitalism won out.

This interview with the Longshoremen’s union leader is worth watching for its full 17 minutes. Mind-blowing blue collar perspective. Wow!

All this to say, Epic is a monorepo of unfathomable size and complexity. Facilitating the broad range of workflows and users involved in the many modules and applications they’ve built over the years entails a massive data model. The Epic EHI Exportspecification gives us a small glimpse of this – while it does not include all the non-patient-related data structures, it alone has 2,541 tables, meaning the real size of the data model is even larger. This size, this complexity, and these decades and decades of code all funneling to a single shared instance are Epic’s undeniable and near-impregnable moat.

For no particular reason, here are some extracts from British fiction about sausages. The first few are primarily about breakfast – the real thing, not that Full English Breakfast that was invented by marketing people.

If you want to escape from the sadness of the end of the world, I recommend tuning into this episode. Sometimes. You just need to listen to smart women discuss the corruption we fight. It will make you feel better, I promise. @NicoleShanahan is my hero.

“Rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans, she’d like to censor people who engage in ‘misinformation.’ I think that is a much bigger threat to democracy than anything that we’ve seen in this country in the last 40 years.

Also, how the faulty component, part of an optional autoland system, ended up on a MAX though United hadn’t ordered that option

“Are you talking about that faith or some nebulous, general ‘faith’ that says we’re good enough, and smart enough to make our own decisions? What ‘faith’ are you talking about?”

“Ambient listening is a solution to a self-created problem of requiring too much data entry by clinicians.”

Epic wouldn’t be where it is today if it weren’t for the federal government.” “We digitized the health records over the past 20 years,” another veteran of those efforts recalls, “but lost the hearts and minds of clinicians along the way.”

Pretty soon my perfectly automated system was not just a UI mess but all the logic was about handling different circumstances for running the business. 

I’ll note here both Mr. Trump and JD Vance have now taken questions from reporters in Wisconsin without the campaign deciding who gets to ask them. That hasn’t happened yet with either VP Harris or Tim Walz.

These cases still carry the downsides of database-owned code listed above, but are also places where the benefits of putting them in the database outweigh the costs

A group of private helicopter pilots working on their own at great risk to rescue people deep in the mountains of storm-ravaged Western North Carolina. Their time, money, heart, soul.
Their day started like this.

So @fema is broke? What did they do with their funding?

One vehicle regulation that needs to change is, a software update is not a recall. @Reuters knows that, but they also know their readers are stupid, so they can continue to tell lies with their Tesla headlines. Actually, their last paragraph usually does mention a software update, but they know their readers don’t read that far.

It seems to be a simple matter of incentives: the more illegals imported, the higher the Dem vote over time. It will only backfire on the Dems if there is a revolt by existing citizens, otherwise it is a certain path to permanent single-party rule!

EV prices relative to traditional vehicles in the US market are higher than in China and the EU, and Washington has reduced competitive pressure by walling off its market to Chinese exporters with 100% tariffs.

Just last week:

Mayorkas 3 months ago: FEMA is “tremendously prepared” for hurricane season

Mayorkas today: FEMA is out of money and can’t make it through hurricane season. “We do not have the funds”

The point of this op-ed was to reassure readers that noncitizens don’t vote. It does the opposite. Registration lists are updated but they aren’t kept anything like “current.” Voters must affirm they are eligible but that’s not really a safeguard against persons who don’t pay attention, don’t understand or are going to vote anyway. That doesn’t mean that there is widespread fraud but it also doesn’t assuage concerns about election security.

The Network Swarm used bureaucratic lawfare against Musk to coerce him into alignment. It backfired, and the government lost some legitimacy.

Why has the greatest entrepreneur of my generation (@elonmusk) risked his career to side with Trump? Why has the most consequential grassroots environmentalist of my time (@RobertKennedyJr ) sacrificed friends, family, and reputation to side with “The Orange Menace?” Why has the most courageous peace activist of the twenty-first century (@TulsiGabbard) left our party? Because Tulsi, Bobby, and Elon see what I see.

“What they were buying was the ability to charge patients who were consuming a non-shoppable service,” Adelman says — one for which patients are unable to compare prices. If you’re having a heart attack, you’re not going to call around to hospitals to find out who is going to give you the best deal.

Diehl was a fixture in Wisconsin Dells and Lake Delton for 57 years and helped the area build a tourism industry that went from largely a summer endeavor to a year-round enterprise that now has an economic impact of more than $2 billion annually. Diehl was still in college when he was hired by Tommy Bartlett in 1967 to manage the Tommy Bartlett Motel and the water ski show concessions for the summer. Diehl later began teaching but continued to work for Bartlett in the summers and was promoted to general manager in 1973.

The $500 million dam-removal project, which sought to finish before the fall run, was directed by PacifiCorp, the utility that ran the hydroelectric dams, and the states of California and Oregon.

The Brutalist Manfesto

This cost per usage needs to be passed on to users, either by making software more like a utility, like electricity (some will be) or a usage based pricing based on value.

The problem is: that’s not really the problem going forward — nor the challenge, so we are overwhelmingly built for the past — one gigantic sunk cost we cannot shake off EVEN as warfare is being radically redefined in Ukraine and globalization, per this op-ed, is moving on without us.

A destination in Blue Mounds, channeling Harry Houdini.

While the numbers have been dwindling, Tupperware still has a salesforce of more than 465,000 worldwide, the company said in a bankruptcy court filing this week.

The answer is fairly clear: the Post Office must become a humbler organisation, serving its local postmasters better rather than wasting money by throwing its weight around from London. It still behaves more like a state-owned company than a private franchise business, with too many management layers, and plenty of debilitating indecision and inefficiency. The results speak for themselves.

And so the climax of a modern Tour, the Rome of it, must be south-east Asia. Perversely, it can be easier to grasp the magnitude of the continent from somewhere like Vietnam or the Philippines than from a billion-plus nation. Each is more populous than the largest EU state. Each belongs to an Asean that has around double the population of the US. And in the end, the visitor reflects, this is a subregion of Asia. The Grand Tour of old was meant to impress on men as high on themselves as Byron that there was a world out there. The modern version can’t fail to induce the same humility.

What went wrong with housing, however, is a shortage caused by excessive government — not a “market failure” that socialism can fix. New construction is discouraged by the miasma of building permits, rent controls, the rage for climate change codes and above all zoning rules shaped by the 1950s vision of the US as a suburban nation of single-family homes on large lots.

The targets won’t just be terrorists. Our computers are vulnerable, and increasingly, so are our cars, our refrigerators, our home thermostats and many other useful things in our orbits. Targets are everywhere.

A Chinese space startup conducted what it called a “high-altitude” test flight of its Nebula-1 rocket on Sunday, launching the vehicle to an altitude of about 5 km or so before attempting to land it back at the Ejin Banner Spaceport in Inner Mongolia.

Trulove was acquitted in March 2015 and went on to a role in the film “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” A federal lawsuit he filed after his release — noting he was stabbed in prison when he failed to give his cell’s bottom bunk to a gang leader — cost the city and county of San Francisco $13 million. In a new podcast interview, he recounted his conviction: “I’ll never forget, when I turned around, and I looked, and I seen Kamala Harris — we locked eyes this one time, and she laughed — she literally just kinda busted out laughing,” said Trulove, who’s endorsed, Donald Trump.

Competitors receive vastly more subsidies than SpaceX or Tesla. The success of SpaceX/Tesla is in spite of competitor subsidies!

we need to claw our way back to base-level human civilization.

From the Google antitrust trial today: the US Census Bureau spent $364MM in paid media to promote the 2020 Census.

Alibaba’s Qwen has been shining on benchmark tests, despite chip restrictions.

Telegram updated its privacy policy on Monday to say that the company will provide user data, such as IP addresses and phone numbers, to law enforcement agencies in response to a valid legal order

There’s no other way to describe the role the 900 U.S. troops in Syria are playing, for example. With the collapse of the ISIS caliphate in 2018, then-President Donald Trump announced that “we have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there,” adding that there would be a “full” and “rapid” withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country. His defense secretary, Jim Mattis, and his Middle East guru Brett McGurk—who is now Biden’s Middle East guru—resigned in protest.

 “We urge policymakers to strengthen Wisconsin hospital price transparency laws and enact a medical fee schedule. Both polices would improve our state’s economic competitiveness and help employers who are facing record-setting inflation.”

The ad, produced by conservative Oconomowoc-based political action committee Wisconsin Principles Inc., falsely claimed Keyeski gave herself a 16% pay raise while on the Lodi School District Board of Education — a position she has never held because she never previously ran for or held elected office.

The clerk’s office adds, the duplicate ballots have identical barcodes. If a voter were to submit two absentee ballots, only one can be counted. Once the barcode is scanned, the voting system does not allow a ballot with the same barcode to be submitted. “I would just tell the voters that you can destroy one of the ballots,” Verbick said. “Please do not send in both ballots, only one vote, one ballot and the other can be destroyed.”

With the end of the department store in sight, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris has put on an engaging and thoughtful exhibition about its beginnings, examining the grand magasin as social, architectural and economic phenomenon from its birth in the 1850s to its zenith in 1925, the year of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs from which Art Deco got its name (until 13 October). The show opens, somewhat unexpectedly, with a display of maps, street plans and railway guides, for it was the reconfiguration of Paris in the mid-19th century, between the fall of the restored monarchy and the collapse of the Second Empire, when the great boulevards were cut through the city and the web of railway lines spread around it, that enabled the mushroom growth of an entirely new form of commerce.

Since I’ve spent many years developing the map tile infrastructure for MapHub, I decided to open-source it so anyone can use it. With OpenFreeMap, you now have the option to either set up your own server with just one line of code or use our public instance.

BBC sound effects library is now free to use.

In the latest slap at a pharmaceutical company by a local government, the city of Baltimore has filed a lawsuit accusing Biogen of striking an “unlawful” scheme with the largest pharmacy benefit managers to block generic competition of a best-selling multiple sclerosis treatment.

Who did this?

In other news, Apple has silently now included nuclear in their definition of clean energy

Three mile island Microsoft deal.

Big banks back nuclear power.

DoD Breaks Ground on Project Pele: A Mobile Nuclear Reactor for Energy Resiliency

It is a victory, indeed, and we celebrate it with a great guardian of the Constitution, the rule of law and justice: Lester Pines.

We are so busy in our health care system billing and coding and paying each other and every stakeholder has their gigantic lobby in Washington D.C. and everybody’s making a lot of money except for one stakeholder, the American citizen. They are financing this giant expense of health care system through their paycheck deduction for health insurance and the Medicare exercise tax as we go down this path of billing and coding and medicating.

The business model that funded the internet is going away, and the open web will never be the same.

It also appears that [Harris’s // Trump’s] dalliance with [Antifa // January 6] rioters in 2020-21 left more of a sour taste in the mouths of independent voters than [Democrats // Republicans] had imagined. Voters concerned about elitist influence on American politics were deeply put off by the partisan involvement of billionaires like [Mark Cuban // Elon Musk] and celebrities like [Taylor Swift // Hulk Hogan]. Few voters, it turns out, were swayed by cross-party endorsements by marginal characters like [Dick and Liz Cheney // Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard].

And while the U.S. is trying to remedy this with a Polar Security Cutter programto build a series of new heavy polar icebreakers (to be followed by a series of medium icebreakers), the program is going poorly. When the contract was first awarded in 2019, the plan was to have the first icebreaker completed by 2024. But as of July this year, the design of the ship was still incomplete. If and when the ships are completed (currently 2029 for the first vessel at the earliest), they are expected to cost $1.7-1.9 billion apiece, roughly four to five times what a comparable ship would cost to build elsewhere. Icebreakers, then, are another unfortunate example of the costs inflicted by binding national interests to an inefficient shipbuilding industry.

One of the other initiatives we took two years ago was to buy 108 acres owned by Bagels Forever, who were planning on building a bagel factory at the intersection of Highway M and Woodland Drive,” Grosskopf said. “We placed several conservancies over it so it will never be developed.”

The problem was that Boeing demanded the engines be sized for the 787 when the 787-9 was a 220t aircraft and demanded 64klbf thrust, and the 787-8 was a 205t aircraft demanding 58klbf thrust. We know what happened: The 787-8 landed at 228t, needing 72klbf thrust, and the 787-9 landed at 253t, needing 76klbf.
That is a 20% increase in thrust needed on engines designed tight to the original specification. The result was turbine sections that were highly stressed, where the GE GEnx-1 handled it better than the Trent 1000.

Well here’s a statistic for you: GoPro alone sold about 2.9m cameras in 2023. Given that CIPA reports all cameras shipped in 2023 as 7.7m units and that it’s leaving out all these “odd-ball” cameras from countries other than Japan, can you see the problem more clearly now?

I have flown on many DC/NYC shuttles where one or more House or Senate members is sitting in the first row of first or business class and I am sure they didn’t pay extra for their ticket. If anything I have assumed that those seats are chosen for the politicians for security reasons. If airline upgrades are graft, then we should be able to arrest and empty out the Congress and start over which might be good for our democracy.

Overheard in Silicon Valley: “The transition from the Jobs Way to the Musk Way in US startup culture is fascinating to watch. The founders are switching from artistic UI hippies to weightlifter hard executors.”

As you may know, the IRA made several statutory changes to the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit. As a result of the rushed provisions in the IRA Part D redesign, Medicare premiums increased by 21% in 2023. Additionally, Medicare Part D premiums were expected to rise even higher this year when open enrollment begins in October. Yet, the Biden-Harris Administration very deliberately initiated a demonstration program to address rising costs for seniors only in an election year.

Here’s the full 16-minute edited video of @Gwynne_Shotwell speaking to the Texas House of Representatives. I removed pauses and answers by other panel members. It contains some great information

What a man, hero! Consider bookmarking this @JMilei speech and making time for it if you haven’t already. The world needs more dissent

Some of the instructors there were burned agents who had returned from the field; others had never been agents themselves, but had expertise in other fields that turned out to be remarkably useful for spycraft. The school’s first explosives instructor was Bill Cumper, a boisterous character who walked around with his pockets full of bomb parts and “a detonator behind his ear as if it were a cigarette.” Cumper was an army engineer who knew, as all army engineers do, that the world has two kinds of engineering journals: civil engineering journals, which explain how to build bridges, and military engineering journals, which explain how to blow up those same bridges.

Earlier this week, The Trade Desk, Inc. filed preliminary proxy materials for a special meeting of stockholders.  The purpose of the meeting is to approve the reincorporation of the corporation from the State of Delaware to the State of Nevada by conversion.  This particular proxy statement caught my eye because it specifically calls out several Delaware court decisions

For those inside the tennis bubble, this is much needed. It was perfectly valid of the All England Club chairwoman Debbie Jevans to repeat on Friday that Wimbledon is in danger of losing its status as the world’s premier tennis tournament. The three other grand-slam tournaments — the Australian Open, French Open and US Open — have all grown their player facilities and spectator capacity in recent years.

An employee of IBM just about writes the “Jerry Maguire letter”.

What the authors report–and supposedly this is common knowledge at the hyperscalers–is that a couple cores per several thousand machines are “mercurial.” Due to subtle manufacturing defects or old age, they give wrong answers for certain instructions. These can cause all sorts of impossible-to-diagnose issues. Some rare problems at Google that were traced back to bad CPUs include:

Every major pillar of the US health care system, as a statement of economic fact, makes money when Americans get sick. The most valuable asset in this country today is a sick child. The pharma industry, the hospital industry, and medical school industry make more money when there are more interventions to perform on Americans. And by requiring insurance companies to take no more than 15 percent of premiums, Obamacare actually incentivized insurance companies to raise premiums to get 15 percent of a larger pie. This is why premiums have increased 100% since the passage of Obamacare, making healthcare the largest driver of inflation while American life expectancy plummets.

“Regulation is a blocker to innovation. If you care about prosperity and you kill innovation, you’re going to kill prosperity”

Glad that someone is talking about this

In an afternoon, we extended our data service library to perform large-scale data migrations. It reads token ranges from a database, checkpoints them locally via SQLite, and then firehoses them into ScyllaDB. We hook up our new and improved migrator and get a new estimate: nine days! If we can migrate data this quickly, then we can forget our complicated time-based approach and instead flip the switch for everything at once.

An entire HR team was terminated after their manager discovered and confirmed that their system automatically rejected all candidates – including his own application.

Plain text accounting

It’s a snapshot of what it takes to run a massive scale viral YouTube operation in the 2020s, as well as a detailed description of a very specific company culture evolved to fulfill that mission.

Twenty injuries might sound like a lot, but Waymo’s driverless cars have traveled more than 22 million miles. So driverless Waymo taxis have been involved in fewer than one injury-causing crash for every million miles of driving—a much better rate than a typical human driver.

He says, “In guarding their fortune, men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal.”

Field inventory at the dealerships at the beginning of April, 2021 was 61,330 units and that inventory level grew to 90,148 by the beginning of August, 2024 or 32%.

Both sides have accused the other of engaging in a lengthy negotiation process that has stretched over two years. The Guild has put forward a number of proposals that management has balked at in totality, including a four-day work week coupled with significant increases in pay, full coverage of all health care premiums for employees and family members, guaranteed RSU grants for all members of the unit, and non-performance-based annual bonuses, all of which the company estimates would cost over $100 million over three years.

The DOJ published a press release earlier this week that named Rudy’s Performance Parts and its owner Aaron Rudolf for making, selling, and installing emissions defeat devices. Rudy’s pleaded guilty and was sentenced on Tuesday, Sept. 10, to pay $2.4 million in criminal fines for conspiring to violate the CAA. This follows a previous sentencing and fine from April in which Rudolf was ordered to pay $600,000 and enter a three-year organizational probation period.

There are several persuading factors. Not least the current climate when it comes to selling a flat. FT analysis of recent Land Registry data showed prices for a flat have underperformed the rest of the market in every region, and in the capital have barely changed since 2019. All the more reason to keep a bigger slice of the pie.

We present a novel method called “generative regulatory measurement” that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to interpret statutes and administrative documents. We demonstrate its effectiveness in analyzing municipal zoning codes, achieving 96% accuracy in binary classification tasks and a 0.92 correlation in predicting minimum lot sizes. Applying this method to U.S. zoning regulations, we establish five facts about American zoning: (1) Housing production disproportionately happens in unincorporated areas without municipal zoning codes. (2) Density in the form of multifamily apartments and small lot single family homes is broadly limited. (3) Zoning follows a monocentric pattern with regional variations, with suburban regulations particularly strict in the Northeast. (4) Housing regulations can be clustered into two main principal components, the first of which corresponds to housing complexity and can be interpreted as extracting value in high demand environments. (5) The second principal component associates with exclusionary zoning.

 The US has tens of thousands of local governments which each produce lengthy municipal codes, and so simply understanding the nature and scope of housing regulations, let alone figuring out which ones are really important and bind supply, is a big hurdle.

Until the turn of the millennium, the workflow for record releases was simple enough. Once the multitrack was mixed, the 2-track master was turned into a piece of vinyl, a cassette tape or, starting in 1982, a compact disc, and those original tapes—by and large— then went into storage. Around 2000, with the advent of 5.1-surround releases, then in 2005 with the debut of the Guitar Hero video game, things started to get complicated. When rights holders went to the vaults to transfer, remix and repurpose some of their catalog tracks for these new platforms, they discovered that some tapes were deteriorating while others were unplayable. Not all assets had been stored under optimum conditions. Some recordings had been made on machines that were now obsolete, in formats that could no longer be easily played. And some recordings were missing.

Currently, Apple Card has around $17 billion in outstanding balances across 12 million users. JPMorgan hopes to pay “less than the full face value” of those balances, according to today’s report:

The networked tribalization of government bureaucracy (suppressing dissent and political opposition). Best analyzed as part of a larger pattern of behavior across multiple agencies + political rhetoric.

This is a massive assertion from a U.S. senator and Hillary Clinton just called for criminal charges against misinformation purveyors. Let’s make sure you are careful with your information Ms. Warren.

Let us remember that, in some sense, modern democracy as we know it today, is the child of a revolution that was formed under the principle that there cannot be taxation without representation. the main task of this house, for what it was intended, is to establish a national budget to define what the state does with taxpayers’ money.

The second reason why i am presenting myself here today is because i am coming to propose a budget project that is diametrically different from what we are used to.

Not only different but the most radically different in this century… and i have learned firsthand that the deeper the change, the greater the effort must be to fight for it.

So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025. Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today. If we do this work well, it will increase our teammates’ ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers (and the business), decrease bureaucracy, and strengthen our organizations’ ability to make customers’ lives better and easier every day. We will do this thoughtfully, and our PxT team will work closely with our leaders to evolve our organizations to accomplish these goals over the next few months. [By the way, I’ve created a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy or unnecessary process that’s crept in and we can root out…to be clear, companies need process to run effectively, and process does not equal bureaucracy, but unnecessary and excessive process or rules should be called out and extinguished. I will read these emails and action them accordingly.]

Music, in short, has become both too easy to produce and too easy to consume. It would be easy for anyone under 30 to dismiss Beato’s argument as that of a middle-aged man reflexively insisting that things were better in his day, when we knew the value of an album. But even the youngest generation of music-lovers must, at times, feel a certain dissatisfaction amid this endless abundance. To them — and to all of us — Beato says this: “Vote with your attention” by trying to listen to music deliberately, without distraction. Personally, I recommend listening to not just full albums but complete discographies, which at the very least cultivates a certain discernment. And to cross the musical landscape ahead of us, we’ll need all the discernment we can get.

After 1??,0??3??8?? days “not a single person has been connected to the internet using the $42.45 billion.”

Of all these hype cycles, I suspect that the “AI” hype has more staying power than the rest, if for no other reason than it provides a hedge against the downside of previous hype cycles. Not sure to do with the exabytes of Big Data you’re sitting on? Have LLMs parse it all then convincingly lie to you about what it means.

The horrifying death of the CIA’s Beirut station chief at the hands of Hezbollah

For nearly two years, SpaceX has voiced its concerns with the FAA’s inability to keep pace with the commercial spaceflight industry. It is clear that the Agency lacks the resources to timely review licensing materials, but also focuses its limited resources on areas unrelated to public safety. These distractions continue to directly threaten national priorities and undercut American industry’s ability to innovate.

“We’re not going to spend city resources engaging with white, single-family homeowners,” Bernard said. “They already have access to agency. Let’s spend our resources bringing other folks to the table who don’t have that access.”

Kugelman, let go from an online-marketing role at eBay, blanketed Manhattan streetlight poles with 150 fliers over nearly three months this spring. “RECENTLY LAID OFF,” they blared. “LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB.” The 30-year-old posted them outside the offices of Google, Facebook and other tech companies, hoping hiring managers would spot them among the “lost cat” signs. A QR code on the flier sent people to his LinkedIn profile.

Backstory: I spent ten years working in de-facto operations and technical roles at startups. Sourcetable draws from that experience of needing better data tooling inside spreadsheets, and constantly hacking ad hoc solutions to fill the gap. Andrew (CTO / co-founder) previously had a deep learning company and was initially drawn to the idea that Sourcetable could be an operating system for the web. We’re both Aussie expats in the Bay Area, which is how we met. Internally, we think of Sourcetable as an application platform, with AI applications being a useful and interesting place to focus.

The United States health system ranked dead last in an international comparison of 10 peer nations, according to a new report by the Commonwealth Fund.

1. On Venture Capital

• VCs think they operate in power law environment but they don’t lol
• Technowatermelons often don’t make money from portco real sales
• Instead, they profit by MARKETING; hyping up ideas, raising money in successive rounds, and cashing out as new investors join. In other words, passing the bag to a greater fool
• Therefore, they are packaging and selling hope, rather than relying on actual revenue (side note: also explains why every VC and their aunt is on Twitter/LinkedIn)
• Low IR environment facilitated this watermelon growth, given there were minimal penalties for playing speculative games (Fed the farmer didn’t harvest the watermelon crop)

Since Biden only started getting bad “in January” (Nuzzi reports in July once it’s clear he’s being switched out) then I guess it wasn’t such a crime to run him in the primaries and shut out competition from RFK etc. This story passed for tough, independent reporting at the time it came out but it was actually quite helpful to the official party mid-summer narrative of a rather recent and troubling decline

Taste is eating software. Taste is the new weapon. Whether in design, branding, or user experience, taste now defines how a product is perceived and felt as well as how it is adopted, i.e. distributed(whether it’s software or hardware or both). Technology has become deeply intertwined with culture. People now engage with technology as part of their lives, no matter their location, career, or status. The markets being served now are cultural markets, where utility plus taste forms the foundation.

GPS—9,344 mobile devices at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison, WI today. 487 appear to be staff.

High Resolution image of the Night Watch.

Porsche has revealed a strange (and possibly brilliant) idea for a six-stroke combustion engine. If you don’t know the fundamentals of an internal combustion engine, we’ll try to keep this simple. If you do know how engines work … we’ll still try and keep it simple

More importantly, Musk is in favor in Texas, and its tax incentives and fewer corporate regulations could be attractive. Lastly, having all his major companies in the same state could make operations simpler.

Before the year is out, a fast fare mobile app will be available. The plan for next year is to be able to use credit cards, Apple Pay or Google Wallet directly at the bus reader. How to use the ticket or fare card on the bus

Two months after the start of the virus injections, the shrunken tumour was no longer invading the skin or underlying muscle and was surgically excised. The excised tumour showed strong lymphocytic infiltration, with an increase in CD20-positive B cells, CD8-positive T cells and macrophages.

Over 14 essays, Demsas makes the case that solutions to the housing crisis will have to come from states, not cities. Bloomberg CityLab spoke to Demsas about how local democracy is set up to stymie development, and how fewer democratic bottlenecks could help fix the problem. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

If SF’s homeless population, crime, empty offices, retail and downtown, budget shortfalls, anti-business climate, migrant policies, and failing schools are what you want for your family, vote @KamalaHarris.

We recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the FAA, the government agency responsible for licensing Starship flight tests. This is a more than two-month delay to the previously communicated date of mid-September. This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis. The four open environmental issues are illustrative of the difficulties launch companies face in the current regulatory environment for launch and reentry licensing.

I’m mad, too.

Among the digital technologies the company is looking at to increase its animation output is artificial intelligence. The company’s chief executive Kenichiro Yoshida told FT, “It’s not going to be easy to balance?.?.?. and it will be a continuous search for how we can use technology while protecting the rights of the creators.”

Now that we’ve covered the basic organization and separation of North, South, Northeast and Southeast Minneapolis, let’s take a deeper look at the streets and avenues. The map below shows all the streets with directional suffixes in Minneapolis in red, revealing some clear patterns. In general, many (but not all) streets are numbered. For the numbered streets, the origin for numbering is the Mississippi river around Downtown Minneapolis.

While the robotaxi was stopped, the cyclist passed in front of it and appeared to dismount, according to the documents. “The cyclist then reached out a hand and made contact with the front passenger side of the stationary Waymo AV (autonomous vehicle), backed the bicycle up slightly, dropped the bicycle, then fell to the ground,” the documents said.

Why do Americans pay eight times more for hearing aids than the British? Hearing aids are big business, and a cartel controls the industry through mergers, patents, and control of audiologists.

What if I told you that participation in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program is completely voluntary and starting in 2021, 37% of police departments stopped reporting crime data to the FBI, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York…

The filings by Judge Troupis describe how Al Gore could have won the Presidency had the Gore campaign utilized alternate electors in 2000, as it would have allowed time to complete the recount. Legal scholars and U.S. Supreme Court Justices have identified that terminal mistake by the Gore legal team. It would have been legal malpractice to have made the same mistake in Wisconsin in 2020.  Moreover, as the formerly secret papers detail, the Wisconsin Trump/Pence legal team provided advance notice to the Biden/Harris attorneys and the Wisconsin Attorney General that they intended to have the alternate electors meet. Neither Biden/Harris or Attorney General Kaul registered any objection. 

This is the chart that you need before talking with a pediatrician.

Now, I’d like to take you through exactly how we produced the story and analyzed the evidence. This is precisely the case that I made in the original piece, that the establishment media is more interested in denial and obfuscation, even when the evidence points the other way.

Climategate emails show that erasure of the prior warmth was coordinated by #ClimateScam professionals in several countries.

Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

Under Kamala’s plan, if you have an asset that the government says has appreciated by $1 million in value, you’ll owe $250,000 in taxes – even if you don’t want to sell it, and even if you can’t sell it.

In the world of cloud computing, the costs can quickly add up, especially when using serverless architectures. However, with a little effort, you can set up a virtual machine (VM) on Hetzner for just $4 a month, allowing you to bypass the “serverless tax.” and have full control over your server. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through setting up a VM on Hetzner, installing Caddy for SSL, configuring Cloudflare for DNS, and deploying a web app using Github.

But E Ink displays also have slow screen refresh rates, limited support for color (on models that support any color at all), and generally aren’t very useful for high-motion graphics like videos or games. So while there are a handful of companies producing E Ink smartphones and tablets, they tend to be niche devices. And now we’re seeing a growing number of companies offering products with reflective LCD displays or similar technology that offer some of the paper-like qualities of E Ink, but which are more suitable for animation and video.

Ever since Milwaukee spent $60 million to build a high-tech pitching lab at their Arizona spring training facility, the Brewers have struck out more batters than any team but Houston and rank fifth in the majors in ERA (3.85).

You can feel how uncomfortable Reid Hoffman is here as he fidgets in his chair, punctuating his word salad response with “uh, um, uh.” He’s struggling hard to answer whether Democratic voters are okay with not having a say in their nominee. But let’s be fair—that question is unanswerable without a free, fair, and open primary where millions of voters actually get to make their voices heard. One guy’s opinion on how voters feel? Irrelevant.

The Justice Department alleges the giant health insurer cheated Medicare out of more than $2 billion by reviewing patients’ records to find additional diagnoses, adding revenue while ignoring overcharges that might reduce bills. The company “buried its head in the sand and did nothing but keep the money,” DOJ said in a court filing.

Richard Qian didn’t know what to expect when he heard that WM Motor, a Shanghai-based EV maker popular for its low prices, filed for bankruptcy in October 2023. He tried to drive his compact EX5 SUV as he normally would, but discovered that he could no longer log into WM Motor’s smartphone app, which remotely controlled the car lock and air conditioner. He also couldn’t see his car’s mileage and charging status on the dashboard. 

Epic is known for their fun/quirky software names (Radiant/Beaker/Cupid/Beans/ etc). Looking through things, I noticed a few names on the Epic trademarks page (epic.com/epic/page/trad…) that I didn’t recognize. Anyone know what they are?

I think it’s clearer to call it “early scaling” rather than rate of scaling (fast scaling). Fast scaling isn’t the issue, when you scale is.

The growth engine needs to be in that efficiency range where we’re. actually not losing money to acquire customers,” Ellis says.

This subtle difference in the ordering of legal enforcement is the major cause of the stagnation of aircraft design and manufacturing.

Mr Ceviker is helping revive Turkey’s viticulture. Though wine has been produced in Anatolia for millennia, the country’s modern vineyards and wineries produce mostly French varieties imported in the past century. But Mr Ceviker works with old vines that have survived for far longer, many abandoned when the Greeks and Armenians, vintners of the Ottoman empire, were forced out. Many of the Muslim farmers who took over now sell their produce for dried fruit or pekmez, an unfermented grape syrup, rather than alcohol. Mr Ceviker has persuaded some to sell their grapes to him at higher prices and has bought several vineyards outright. He takes his crop to different micro-wineries using traditional methods. “With each vintage, we experiment,” he says.

The Supreme Court’s ruling made clear that not only are Presidents immune from prosecution for many official acts, but such acts cannot be used as evidence at trial. This requires extensive pretrial proceedings to ensure official acts are not admitted into evidence.

How the heck did Dane County let this guy walk? And at any other time in US history, he’s deported.

Citizen DJ is officially open to the public and all sounds on this website are completely free-to-use for your remixing needs. Read a behind-the-scenes retrospective post on this experimental project and residency.

Before modern air travel and first-class suites, the grandest thing in luxury air travel was the German Zeppelin airship. The Hindenburg was designed to ferry passengers across the Atlantic in serenity, with the dirigible floating smoothly through the clouds. The airship was considered the longest class of flying machine and the largest airship by envelope volume.

In this latest interview in the Open Questions series,Charles “Chas” Freeman assesses the history of China-US relations and where they might go from here amid their “adversarial antagonism” stage and as the US presidential election looms. Freeman interpreted for then-president Richard Nixon during his historic 1972 Beijing trip to meet Mao Zedong. He has served in the US Foreign Service and state and defence departments and was US ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf war.

It means database partitioning — of worlds. Parallel worlds each running the same static template database source, but evolving different runtime databases. But these were just called “servers” — like, Meridian 59 had bunches of them, and they had numbers instead of the common practice of names that is in use today.

A new study by the University of St.Gallen (HSG) in collaboration with scientists from the University of Zurich and the University of Notre Dame reveals that the attractiveness of female founders also plays an important role.

Freedom of navigation is in the US Navy’s DNA – now is a bad time for the world’s most powerful navy to abandon that key principle. 

San Francisco must REFUND the Police not continue to DEFUND the Police. Our Police need to be empowered now — not this new terrible decision to end pretext stops. Our SFPD and Sheriffs and BART Police are the absolute key to a safe and clean San Francisco every day. SFPD must be returned to >2000 officers within 18 months from <1400 where it has been allowed to fall, and the police force must be fully empowered to enforce ALL laws.

Exxon still expects fossil fuels to make up the majority of energy market in 25 years

Possibly THE most prominent pedo hunter is @LizCrokin . Here is story of her efforts to dig up dirt on The Donald…

By pulling the plug on Constellation, Obama had unleashed the power of markets and competition. While many associate competition with dog-eat-dog and survival of the fittest tropes, competition is a healthy and productive force.

“So, what the FDA has done… [is] unquestionably beyond its authority.”

Getting fined by San Francisco for not removing crack head graffiti on our office door is the most on brand slow ventures thing ever. I love it… and guess what, we aren’t gonna pay it just to see what happens… 😉

Free public api: What really sets this site apart from all other API lists is that each API endpoint is tested once every 24 hours by our friendly robots to make sure it works. When our robots find an API that no longer works because it was taken down or moved behind a paywall, it will start ranking poorly and eventually be removed from the site.

U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Cohen says Canadians are consuming too much American news, which he believes is “unhealthy” because of American legacy media’s polarizing and partisan nature.

It is a stock element in narratives of 1950s computing to distinguish between programmers and coders, the latter considered a “lowly technician” doing the routine job of converting flowcharts or pseudo-instructions into coded machine instructions (for example, see Campbell-Kelly et al.⁴ and Ensmenger⁷). This division of labor between coders and programmers is often overlaid with social distinctions of education and gender.⁷ Researching the early uses of the words “programming” and “coding,”⁵however, we were confronted with the near absence of evidence for this coder/programmer distinction in practice. While the activities of coding and programming can be more or less clearly distinguished, the activities did not map onto different jobs, but rather were performed by the same person(s). It thus seemed that the distinction between the coder and the programmer pertains not to the reality but to the mythology of early computing. It emerged in the wake of automatic programming in the 1950s, creating a discourse that has been influential until today.

We’re on a quest to find the most beautiful word in the English language. We’ll show you two words; choose the one you like the most.

The experiences of staff in the Philippines’ outsourcing industry are a preview of the challenges and choices coming soon to white-collar workers around the globe

Shake Shack, the Big Apple-based competitor to In-N-Out known for smash burgers, crinkle-cut fries and milkshakes, announced that six California storefronts, including the only Oakland location, would close by the end of next month. Ownership cited underperformance as the primary factor for the closures, according to Nation’s Restaurant News. Most locations will close around Los Angeles; the other three outposts to shutter are in Columbus, Ohio, and Houston, Texas.

The principals are evidently quite proud of the bureaucracy they have built. For my part, I have been doing research for 40 years in both industry and academia, and I have never seen anything as shambolic as this.  Since  I do not plan to spend the rest of my professional career playing these sorts of games, I decided enough was enough.

A deep-cover CIA officer spent years underground trying to infiltrate Al Qaeda. But an investigation into his life, work, and death reveals mystery, moral quagmires, and the secret toll of the War on Terror

Asking for 350 million friends.

Independence.

The most important silicon in 2013’s iPhone 5S, the A7 System-on-Chip (SoC) was made, not by Intel, but by Korean rival Samsung. The SoC contains the processor that runs user apps – the ‘application processor’ – and lots of other silicon powering graphics and much more. The SoC is almost always the most complex chip in a modern smartphone. 

Web design museum

What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?

Ford Motor told employees in an internal communication that it had taken “a fresh look” at its DEI policies and practices over the past year.

Fascinating and well reported story, but I’m still baffled by the idea that any competent military or intelligence organization would use Telegram for secret comms. The vast majority of its traffic is sitting in plaintext on its servers. I’d be stunned if the NSA isn’t in them.

PRC trade surplus is ~$100B per month now. That used to be recycled into US Treasuries, but China has stopped buying them. Where is this money going now? Is some of recent Mag7 performance due to offshore buying linked to China?

“As long as they can stand up and shuffle they will get through. Then when the plane takes off, we see the misbehaviour. “We don’t want to begrudge people having a drink. But we don’t allow people to drink-drive, yet we keep putting them up in aircraft at 33,000 feet,” he said.

In at least three instances in July and August, Oakland police sought to tow a Tesla into evidence to obtain — via a second court order — its stored video. Officers cited the cars’ “Sentry Mode” feature, a system of cameras and sensors that records noise and movement around the vehicle when it is empty and locked, storing it in a USB drive in the glove box.

As I write this, we’ve just heard news that Oprah is planning to do a big broadcast special about AI and society. Despite the fact that it hasn’t aired, and I haven’t seen it or talked to anyone who’s seen it, we can reliably predict many of the shortcomings that this show will have. And it didn’t even take an AI chatbot to come up with this list.

All laws must be fully enforced. Police must be fully funded. The DA’s office must prosecute to the fullest level of the law.