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.

A new interim report describes the obstruction and secrecy around the mpox proposal as a case study in how the institute “oversees and accounts for the monitoring of potentially dangerous gain-of-function research of concern.” The revelations land amid global concerns about whether coronavirus gain-of-function research — research that might generate pathogens with increased pathogenicity or transmissibility — may have contributed to the worst pandemic in a century.

A documentary on the Mandalay Bay shooting.

NY Times journalist Natasha Frost has now been named as the person who downloaded about 900 pages of content from an Australian Jewish chat thread and shared it w/ an anti-Israel activist who doxxed everyone in the group.

this week’s judgement made it a lot more tangible. 50% of search in the USA happens on channels where Google has a contract to make it the default: 28% on Apple devices, 19.4% on Android (the OEMs and telcos decide the default on Android, not Google) and 2.3% on other browsers (i.e. Mozilla) – and then another 20% happens in user-downloaded Chrome on PCs. (Amusingly, the contract means that Google pays Apple even for searches done in Chrome on Apple devices.)

Surveillance Watch is an interactive map revealing the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations.

I look at the fine print and gasp…170 sheets per roll. These days, a regular Charmin Ultra Soft roll, if you can find one, has 56 sheets. Even the roll they market as “Double” doesn’t have 170 sheets — it has 154. And the 1992 rolls are hardly the largest — the back of the package includes a note from parent company Procter & Gamble explaining these rolls have fewer sheets than a previous version.

Technician recruiting is increasingly hampered by competition from other industries and obsolete educational programs.

Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these Brides Of The State (BOTS) support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72-24%, providing the Party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections. Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50-45, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic. Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.

In this conversation, Sal, Mark, and Bryan McGrath discuss the ongoing attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea by the Houthis, who are clients of Iran. They also talk about the performance of the US Navy in protecting commercial shipping, the investments made in the Navy, and improvements and challenges in the US Navy.

The study by Srishti Agrawal, Adit Seth and Rahul Goel found that the most notable rise in cycling in India had occurred among rural girls – increasing more than two times from 4.5% in 2007 to 11% in 2017 – reducing the gender gap in the activity.

The city has pledged $9.1 million for the grocery store project over the last four years: $4.6 million to purchase the space in 2021, $3.5 million for tenant and grocery store improvements in 2023 and an additional $1 million in tenant improvements in May 2024. City officials hope to recover as much of the May 2024 $1 million tenant improvement costs as possible through future payments from developers Rule Enterprises and Movin’ Out, according to an April 10 letterto all alders from Rolfs.

My next, and it turns out last, major visit to the Living Computer Museum (outside of a few drive-bys) came in 2018, when I spoke at an event being held there. This gifted me with a chance to see how things had changed in 5 years, and how they had.

Many of the constituent parts of our government, economy and culture are broken. But this is not an accident; it is by design. This article discusses the breakdown in just one key segment that is illustrated by the contrast between the trial of war criminals when we were at war and immediately afterwards, and the current system of systematic and indefinite delay.

The old ideal of California as the apex of the American dream has been shattered. Since the 1970s, middle-class incomes, once ebullient, have stagnated. The state may be home to the most billionaires in the nation, but it also suffers the widest gap between middle and upper-middle income earners. It also faces a deep budget deficit, tepid job growth and the nation’s highest unemployment. The state is home to 30 percent of the nation’s homeless population, with some now living in caves.

Perhaps the most significant line was one that was ad-libbed: “Those protesters out in the street, they’ve got a point.”

Over the past few years, TV makers have seen rising financial success from TV operating systems that can show viewers ads and analyze their responses. Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasingly, if not primarily, seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking. How did we get here? And what implications does an ad- and data-obsessed industry have for the future of TVs and the people watching them?

August 15, 2022 marked the one-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul. How did the Second Family honor the fallen? They went on vacation in Hawaii. Cost to the taxpayer for @SecretService lodging? Over $756,000.

It’s all about the reach and influence of specific demographics. Plus influencers don’t ask real questions — they just want content without friction. Despite its self-importance, old media is on a declining audience scale and influence curve. No surprise that politicians are finally getting the memo, long after fashion, culture, and tech brands got on the bandwagon.

the disconnect with main street America is just as big. I even heard elites talking about Russian interference in previous elections (as if that weren’t debunked many times) and how the Russians blew up NS2.

Senior White House economic advisor Jared Bernstein pointed to tax lobbyists as the reason the “carried interest loophole” was not included in a group of tax hikes Democrats intend to pass.

When her Republican challenger observed that almost all occupations are safer today than a generation ago, Tammy put up a video claiming Eric Hovde said farmers don’t work hard. It’s a flat-out lie. Now Sen. Baldwin is up with a spot saying Hovde hates single mothers. Eric Hovde must be reviewing anything he may have said about puppy dogs. The Hovde campaign responded Thursday 08-15-24 with a scolding from the candidate’s wife, Sharon

Just four years ago, Epic launched Cosmos, its data and research software with 270 million de-identified patient records; last year, doctors drafted the first AI-generated messages to patients. But as health professionals retire and health systems struggle to hire and retain sufficient staff, Hain sees an opportunity for Epic to answer those sorts of questions while “building a series of guardrails and managing expectations.” 

First of, he writes that it was “of course a system where the US made the rules and complied with them when it suited the US“. He gives the example of the WTO which “was very much an American creation but when it suited US domestic politics”, and now that it doesn’t anymore “the US effectively destroyed it by refusing to nominate the ‘arbitrators’ who are essential to its functioning”. He also says that “the rules-based system didn’t stop American involvement in Vietnam, or invasion of either Iraq or Afghanistan”. He encourages “anybody who doubts that the US itself obeys the ‘rules’ very selectively” to read The Arrogance of Power, by Senator William Fulbright (the longest-serving chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee).

The FP’s @JuliaTheIntern asks members of the press at the DNC what they think about the fact that Kamala has not given an interview.

Deadline understands that the fast-food firm has been working with a number of major production companies, including some of the studios, to create family-friendly shows, particularly in the unscripted space. It is also in talks to license and acquire content.

asking SCOTUS to review how Special Counsel Jack Smith, working hand in glove with former DC Chief Judge Beryl Howell, forced Twitter to produce Trump’s entire Twitter file and also impose a nondisclosure order prohibiting Twitter/X from notifying Trump about the search warrant.

There are investments you can’t make from a structured, nine-to-five, narrowly teleological environment. You have to let your life go fallow sometimes, like a crop rotation giving the land time to bring forth new fertility. This is actually a consequence of a fairly general theorem about how to find treasure in complex search spaces: The best search strategies for complex problems like life generally don’t seek out particular homogeneous objectives, but interesting novelty. The search space is too complicated and unknown for linear objective-chasing to work. Biological evolution, in practice, works through a diversity of niches which it explores in parallel to find unpredictable advances.

The PAF is a critically important national dataset. It’s not personal data – it’s a database that lists literally every physical postal address in the country, and it’s a very useful thing to have access to.

Athletes who swam in the Seine during the Olympic Games in Paris had higher rates of gastroenteritis than those in games past, a U.S. Olympic official told MedPage Today.

Where is the rightful outrage from environmentalists? Thousands of tons of crude oil will now pour into the Red Sea. This is a clear sign of the collapse of American credibility and deterrence. Letting the Iranian proxy Houthis shut off a major maritime seaway is an epic fail. America can and must do better! Leadership matters

So proud to have the Future President of the United States back in San Francisco where it all started.

Leaked government memo confirms whistleblowers were targeted by Border Agency after exposing federal DNA Collection law was not followed for immigration violations. Homeland Security whistleblowers claim American deaths “were preventable.”

The Chips Act, enacted two years ago Friday, is the nation’s most audacious foray into industrial policy since World War II. It’s essentially a bet that four companies — Intel Corp., Micron Technology Inc., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics Co. — can bring sophisticated chip production back to the US. In a sign of the ambition, one explicit goal is making a fifth of the world’s most advanced processors by 2030, up from roughly zero today.

Judge orders CDC to stop deleting emails of departing staff, calling it ‘likely unlawful’

OpenStreetMap has grown exponentially or quadratically over the last twenty years depending on the metric you’re interested in. My involvement has waxed and waned like soul mates oscillating between rapture and, inevitably, wanting the best for each other in our post-relationship new lives.

Soros’s Open Society Foundations is a sprawling grantmaking network that disburses over $1 billion to left-wing causes as its founder bankrolls the Democratic Party. Democratic lawmakers are often later forced to distance themselves from their policy wish list items. But this comes only after pressure boils over into the public eye. Even liberal cities dealing with skyrocketing crime eventually want civil society restored.

“I have wondered if some in management roles today that were here when we lost Challenger and Columbia remember that in both of those tragedies, there were those that were not comfortable proceeding,” Milt Heflin, a retired NASA flight director who spent 47 years at the agency, wrote in an email to Ars. “Today, those memories are still around.”

Dreyer said his “brain was mush” and he was having hallucinations about freighters and a steel wall. He figured he would need a few more days to reach Milwaukee, but there was a forecast of 9-foot (2.7-meter) waves.

AT&T has been told to stop running ads that claim the carrier is already offering cellular coverage from space. AT&T intends to offer Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) and has a deal with AST SpaceMobile, a Starlink competitor that plans a smartphone service from low-Earth-orbit satellites. But AST SpaceMobile’s first batch of five satellites isn’t scheduled to launch until September.

You can get started with Proton Docs using a free Proton account, which gives you 5GB of cloud storage space for all your files. An upgrade to one of the paid plans, which start at $4.99 a month, give you more space and benefits across other Proton products (including extra email addresses and email filters).

Former President Donald Trump is known for his off-script moments. But his signature freewheeling banter also masks important consistency. He is, actually, predictable. Listening to his recent on-the-campaign-trail speeches reveals some patterns:

Worse yet for the Dems, many of the minority voters they expected would produce their “new Democratic majority” — a term coined by Teixeira in the 1990s before reality set in — are not only unmoved, but are positively repelled, by woke issues like trans rights, abortion, defunding the police and more.

Susan Wild, the Democratic Pennsylvania congresswoman in one of the country’s tightest House races, has privately and repeatedly trashed working-class conservative voters in her district as bigots who “drank the Trump Kool-Aid.” But in public, the Pennsylvania Democrat has drastically moderated her positions on hot-button issues as she seeks reelection in her battleground district.

The Harris campaign has been editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads that make it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News and other major publishers are on her side, Axios has found.

The worry is about the state of our country and the DNC’s all-out, anti-democratic lawfare campaign.

Which is why the magnetic poetry version of the life of Luckey that does the story justice goes more like this: Before the recent preference cascade enabling high-profile tech moguls to violate the taboo against supporting Donald Trump, there was first the lonely figure of Palmer Luckey, the homeschooled, Jules Verne-obsessed, amateur scientist with no money, whose faith in the power of technology was so strong that he worked jobs sweeping ship yards, scrubbing decks, fixing engines, repairing phones, and training to sing as a gondolier for tourists, all in order to spend his nights in a gutted 19-foot camper trailer trying to manufacture dream worlds out of breadboards and lens equipment and accelerometers and magnetometers and a soldering iron—which he did, bringing virtual reality to the masses, burning a hole in his retina with a laser, and losing it all to Zuckerberg over a meme, only to reemerge from his defrocking by Big Tech as a vengeance-seeking icon of counterelite Americana, the aspiring rebuilder of the arsenal of democracy, the black mullet-, chin beard-, Hawaiian shirt-, cargo short-, sandal-clad possible savior of America.

NEW: The New York Times has suddenly discovered that Hunter Biden never registered under FARA, despite taking millions from Russia, China, Ukraine, and Romania to lobby the U.S. government.

This is the best example of how we have all been manipulated by MSM and the Dems. I also finally saw the whole video a fee months ago and that was actually my hoky fuck moment. Trump condemned the Nazi’s. He was referring to something ttly different with ‘good people on both sides’. I believe it was taking down the statues.

That explains why no one including secret service was able to “find” the bomb. It was planted later, to be conveniently found, along with the RNC bomb, within a 15 minute time frame that perfectly coincided with unfolding Ray Epps orchestrated breach of Capitol

When asked in 2020, she was unequivocal: “there’s no question, I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Seems an unlikely change!

Study co-led by Mass General Brigham found that one in four patients with severe brain injury who appeared unresponsive responded to instructions covertly. Understanding this phenomenon can help guide decisions about life-sustaining treatment, goals of care, and clinical management, according to the authors.

Police have been scouring the narrow streets for unauthorised units poking out over the terraces of the village’s homes. There were reports of 22 illegally installed units spotted on various rooftops and terraces between January and May, and a further 15 since June as temperatures soared.

A vast majority of the instructions sent to banks do not move through the modern day REST APIs that we are used to, they move through file.

A new version of the London Underground map designed by a University of Essex lecturer has gone viral.

“The best and most secure way to conduct elections? Paper ballots.”

In 1948, Taruffi devised a twin-torpedo four-wheeler, the Tarf I Bisiluro, with a 492-cc Gilera four-cylinder as one of its possible powerplants. Running in the 500-cc class, Taruffi and the Tarf I set six world speed records for various distances and standing-start or flying conditions. A swap to 1500-cc power garnered two more speed/distance records in that class.

We have received further demands for censorship and for the personal account information of our users, impacting not just Brazilians but residents of the United States and Argentina.  We share those here in the interests of essential transparency.

Just look at it. The implications are so … well … shocking that they don’t seem to quite sink in. This report was funded in 2019 and delivered in 2024, 150% of the time it took for the USA to defeat Imperial Japan in the Pacific.

The Democratic Party of RFK and JFK was the party of civil liberties and free speech. VP Harris‘s is the party of censorship, lockdowns, and medical coercion.

We have long maintained that the two smoking guns of the January 6 Fedsurrection are the curious case of Ray Epps, on the one hand, and the RNC/DNC pipe bomb hoax, on the other. Our extensive reporting on the case of Epps enjoyed a natural assist from the fact that the now-iconic video of Epps urging the crowd to go “into the Capitol” and the subsequent chants from the crowd of “Fed, Fed, Fed” were seemingly tailor-made to go viral. While our ground-breaking reporting on January 6 had been no less comprehensive and no less damning, for the longest time it lacked a corresponding video clip to help carry this historic scandal into mainstream attention.

tour inside @blueorigin’s New Glenn Production Facility at Cape Canaveral,

When Your Customers Disappear

In addition to Luckey, Cramer invited defense giant Lockheed Martin to participate in the Summit. Lockheed has purchased a large booth and will feature a Ground Control Station and model of its RQ 170 Sentinel. Lockheed will also provide breakout speakers.

In this work, we computationally mined the global microbiome (63,410 metagenomes and 87,920 microbial genomes) and discovered nearly 1 million new antibiotic molecules in microbial dark matter, several of which were effective in preclinical mouse models. This is the largest antibiotic discovery exploration ever described. We believe our approach marks a significant advancement in uncovering these essential molecules from the vast biodiversity of the global microbiome.

“It’s a shame because Massachusetts is forcing us to do that,” Rose said. “They’re going to lose their revenue, you know, money every year they’re going to get for excise tax, [and] sales tax when somebody tries to register it.”

But the vacancy rate for downtown Chicago has reached 30 percent, not due to Covid, but to the Black Lives Matter riots and subsequent smash and grab sprees of theft. This puts increased strain on taxpayers.

Trump critics say his full-on embrace of crypto is overshadowed by critical comments of it in the past, and that his admin can’t be trusted to prioritize crypto. These same critics (pro-Harris camp) say nevermind the aggressive anti-crypto actions of the current administration that Harris is vice president of, when she’s in office, things could be different!

Mr. Chairman, many questions remain, yet several theories have been examined, and several questions have already been answered. I am prayerful that our Task Force can move forward effectively and professionally, guided by our shared love for America and our determination to seek full truth. Please know, as we continue our investigation into the attempted assassination of our former President, you can rely upon me as a solemn investigator of fact. It is with that spirit that I submit this confidential preliminary investigative report.

For the 9/10 drugs they announced here’s when generics go on sale due to patents. Not shown are the company’s own newer alternatives (like pens).

Widowed wife of slain Trump supporter Corey Comperatore has retained an attorney to get answers and accountability for major security failures at Butler, PA rally:

The Flywheel effect is a concept developed in the book Good to Great. No matter how dramatic the end result, good-to-great transformations never happen in one fell swoop. In building a great company or social sector enterprise, there is no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.

We looked at data from three of the largest audiobook platforms—Audible, Apple Books, and Spotify—and found a total of 847,685 audiobooks currently available on these platforms.

Eckerman is an ecologist with an interest in biodiversity, as well as in species’ natural histories, behaviors, life cycles, and places in the food chain. Moths are so diverse, he says, that it’s not uncommon to find one that hasn’t been named or described in the scientific literature. No entomologist studies “moths”; out of necessity, they specialize. Travis County has about 1,400 recorded species, the state of Texas more than 4,000. And those are just the ones we know about. Insects are the most diverse group of animals on the planet, and there are likely more undiscovered insect species than known ones—as many as 10 to 20 million species worldwide still left to discover, Rice University biologist Scott Egan told Texas Monthlyearlier this year.

Harris’ and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s social media accounts also directly contradict the VP’s claims by showing that the pair filled out women’s basketball brackets in 2021.

The federal government announces a program to issue block grants for states to purchase and operate shuttered grocery stores. The USDA also seizes closed-down production facilities.

This is a brilliant explanation by physicist @hsu_steve of the enormous mistake the US made with its semiconductor sanctions on China, basically sanctioning its own firms and creating a huge market opportunity for Chinese companies.

Noise complaints are just the latest challenge for Amazon’s drone program that’s been struggling to get off the ground since the company started testing deliveries in 2022. A mix of regulatory hurdles, missed deadlines and layoffs last year, coinciding with widespread cost-cutting efforts by CEO Andy Jassy, has halted progress of the ambitious service, which was conceived of by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos more than a decade ago.

findings support the democratic favor channel and challenge the idea that the institutional qualities of democracy per se lead to desirable outcomes.

According to the International Crisis Group, a think-tank, the Clan del Golfo, a gang that controls the entrance to the jungle on the Colombian side, nets over $4bn a year. Much of it is thought to come from human trafficking.

So why is software so terrible? Why do high-end gaming PCs struggle to browse the web at 60 frames per second? Why does a simple calculator need a splash screen? Why does your phone’s battery still die so quickly? And why does each update make the problem worse?And why do we all use huge frameworks that no one understands? Why do our projects take minutes to compile? Why do we have to restart our language servers every twenty minutes? And why does everyone think this is fine? We made it terrible.

Desperately looking for the country of origin I see ‘Netherlands’. The tomatoes look as desperate as I do. They traveled a long way, from the Netherlands to a Croatian island and I am sure the producers spent a lot of effort to grow them, but they look pale and boring, worn out like I do after travelling all day. The smell is horrible.

There is no “company success” unless civilization itself continues to progress.

The five-minute video shows a conversation between a person identified as Dr. Stacy De-Lin, Planned Parenthood New York City Medical Director for Abortion Services, and an undercover reporter with the Center for Medical Progress (CMP). During their conversation, De-Lin seems to acknowledge that Planned Parenthood would sell the livers of aborted babies.

Higher prices today can mean greater efforts at price discrimination, including over time.  That too can mean lower prices (compared to the counterfactual) at later points in time, or sometimes today as well.

Why does this matter? On one level, it’s an indicator of the unsustainability of many generative AI applications. Even with $150m in funding — which is a decent amount of capital — Character.ai likely couldn’t keep the lights on for very long, thus necessitating its absorption by a larger company. 

some wild stats in judge’s ruling: Google’s internal numbers showed that they’d lose up to 80% of searches on Apple devices, a revenue hit of $30B, if they surrendered default search position

The analysis sheds light on a legal and common way deep-pocketed groups lobby lawmakers in the state of California that is home to Hollywood, musical powerhouses, renowned theme parks and high-grossing sports teams. While many lawmakers accept invites to such events as a way to build relationships with important constituents or highlight major players in their districts, the gifts also raise ethics questions about the privileges enjoyed by public servants.

Hamtramck’s first woman mayor told our journalist she is “absolutely positive” she was ballot harvested out of office. Karen Majewski lost her election bid in 2021 after serving the city of Hamtramck for 18 years, first as a city council president, and then 16 years as mayor. A true Hamtramck insider, Majewski shepherded her city through major ethnic, racial, and religious shifts only to see the town’s progressive open door policy result in her ouster.

A Message to X Users

This Is How Much It Costs to Bring the Michelin Guide to Houston

These are the main building blocks of how I built a scraping pipeline forpricewatcher in order to keep track of how supermarkets change their prices.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is one of my favorite datasets because it has anything and everything. If it could conceivably exist on a map, it probably exists in OpenStreetMap. Whether it’s military bases, lakes, hedges, or power lines, it can all be mapped in OSM. But the scope of this data can be daunting. The entire planet file takes up a whopping 1,931 GB uncompressed.¹ As such, using this data can require a lot of RAM and a lot of time. Luckily, there are many open source tools freely available to help make sense of this large dataset. In my experience creating projects with OSM, I’ve used many of these tools to create interesting visualizations and to answer questions about the world we live in.

Often, the issue was not with the copier but with unintentionally destructive behavior by the users.  That, too, was considered fixable.  Orr declares that the technicians’

Now let’s normalize this by comparing $RIVN and $LCID to $TSLA when they had similar Revenue back in the day*:

They will use those drones to create pop-up blockades (air/land/sea) for commercial traffic stretching hundreds—thousands of miles.

During a fireside chat yesterday, SpaceX President & COO Gwynne Shotwell confirmed that Starlink can provide everybody in rural and semi-rural U.S. with high-speed broadband internet connectivity for a very small fraction of the price of laying down a fiber optic cable.

Signs of the approaching storm were already visible the day after the murders, when Britain’s new Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visited Southport to lay the obligatory wreath and was met by vocal hostility from locals. This time the public wasn’t willing to go along with the British state’s choreographed rites of candlelit vigils and the hollow “anti-hate” messaging from state-sponsored community leaders mechanically deployed in the aftermath of now-increasingly frequent atrocities.

Given that the problems are, on some level, built into the structure of the NPS, “I think it needs a complete radical reform,” says Jarvis, the former director. The National Park Service Centennial Act from 2015 lays some groundwork to level the playing field with concessionaires, he says: It gives the agency broad authority to award new contracts without specifying how they should be structured, unlike earlier laws. Almost a decade later, the park service is still working on regulations to implement the law. But in theory, it could take greater control of its own assets and shift the balance of power back to the land it’s bound to protect. For change like that to happen, there needs to be pressure from political leadership, Jarvis says—and therefore, ultimately, from the American people. After all, the parks are supposed to be for them, and Jarvis says, “They should be pissed off.”

NASA is planning to significantly delay the launch of the Crew 9 mission to the International Space Station due to ongoing concerns about the Starliner spacecraft currently attached to the station.

Pilot labor leaders from around the world have sent Airbus CEO @GuillaumeFaury a letter that makes clear: technology alone can never replace the indispensable role of two pilots on the flight deck.

I would argue that ultimately, the same will be true for Google. What will eventually end the reign of Google Search isn’t the rise of Bing or some other would-be competitor in internet search, it’s going to be something tangential that makes internet search just matter less. Maybe it has something to do with AI (though I’d be skeptical that something like SearchGPT is the, um, answer). Or perhaps it’s something no one is really thinking about right now. I don’t know. I’m just pretty certain that this case will have little to do with that end.

The third bomb’s plutonium core went on to have a history of its own. After the surrender it was sent to Los Alamos for use in experiments to determine how much material was needed to produce a critical mass under different circumstances. On August 21, 1945, less than a week after Japan notified the US that it would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, physicist Harry Daghlian was performing an experiment when he accidentally dropped a piece of “tamper” material, used to reflect neutrons back into the core, and triggered a critical mass. Daghlian used his bare hands to pull the mass apart to stop the chain reaction, and absorbed a fatal dose of radiation. He died three weeks later. A military security guard in the room with him, Private Robert Hemmerly, was also irradiated but survived, only to die of cancer 33 years later.

Confused? That’s because these filings from Harris are irregular. If Kamala Harris had used her own candidate ID number, like every other candidate in modern history, this wouldn’t have been so complicated, but then it would have been difficult to make the case that she’s entitled to Biden’s war chest. Undoubtedly, these filings are trying to circumvent those pesky campaign finance laws.

Another example of how US competitiveness, security, and resilience is becoming completely reliant on out of the box thinking and “moonshots” (SpaceX, Anduril, OpenAI, MCCPDC, etc.) by rogue billionaires.

Ortberg’s long list of things to do reflects a failure of leadership by Calhoun.

“According to Safety and Mission Assurance officials at NASA and DCMA officials at Michoud, Boeing’s quality control issues are largely caused by its workforce having insufficient aerospace production experience.”

…Weiss just made the case against the Justice Department and himself in protecting Hunter Biden from the most damaging charges of being an unregistered foreign agent. The latest filing includes another presumptive FARA violation involving Romanians and influencing U.S. policy.

Additional footage was just released of abortion leaders at Planned Parenthood giggling about MUTILATING fetal bodies to cover up criminal LATE-TERM abortions.

and to this very moment we have heard no explanation from Biden as to why he withdrew, and not a single “journalist” has had the cajones to ask Biden, Harris, Obama, Pelosi, Schumer or Jeffries a SINGLE QUESTION about all of this. This is the biggest political story of any of our lifetimes, and the major media is wholly and utterly incurious about it.

The evidence I can find does show that Frankfurt has the highest crime rate in Germany, although perhaps much of that standing comes from the presence of the financial district and the city being such a transport and convention hub, rather than from the immigrants per se. In any case, if you wish to understand the popularity of AfD — which now seems to be Germany’s #2 political party — I suggest you take a walk around Frankfurt.  I didn’t even go near the train station.

Notes on voting machines.

The U.S. Army has a 25% recruitment deficit. Ask yourself why.

“According to a 2023 University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) report, beef production can be climate-neutral or even better if management practices are optimized to minimize emissions and maximize abilities to store carbon.

Harris’s campaign Web site, meanwhile, does not even have a policy section, or an articulation of beliefs. There’s just a button to donate, some merch and yard signs, and a biography that describes her as “the daughter of parents who brought her to civil rights marches in a stroller.”

During the USS Eisenhower carrier strike group’s twice-extended nine-month deployment to the Red Sea, U.S. forces fired over 135 Tomahawk land attack missiles, weapons that cost upwards of $2 million apiece, at Houthi targets in Yemen. The ships also launched 155 standard missiles of various kinds, which cost between $2 million and $4 million per missile, to destroy the drones.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has quietly hired a celebrity photographer — who boasts Mark Zuckerberg, George W. Bush and Barack Obama as previous clients — to burnish his man-about-the-state image. Charles Ommanney, a former photojournalist and war photographer who traveled with Newsom to China last fall as a freelancer, was on hand Thursday to capture Newsom in aviator sunglasses, jeans and work gloves, picking up detritus left over from a recently-cleared homeless encampment in Los Angeles County. Late last month, he photographed the governor surveying the damage of the Borel Fire in Kern County.

On July 22, POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account. Over the course of the past few weeks, the person — who used an AOL email account and identified themselves only as “Robert” — relayed what appeared to be internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official. A research dossier the campaign had apparently done on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, which was dated Feb. 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them and granted anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as a preliminary version of Vance’s vetting file.

Blunt truth telling by Prof. Decosimo. People may avert their gaze, pretend not to know, change the subject, but it does not change the reality.

Forest Service orders Arrowhead bottled water company to shut down California pipeline

AI systems, when trained on historical data, can inherit and amplify human biases, particularly from flawed past hiring practices. This can result in the unfair exclusion of candidates based on irrelevant factors, undermining the potential of otherwise qualified individuals. Combining AI with human oversight can ensure balanced and just decision-making.

The Biden-Harris Admin also launched a novel new IRS crackdown on tips, getting the IRS inside the door at bars & restaurants to directly monitor tips at the cash register, “at point-of-sale.” She also backed the $1.7T spending legislation expecting taxpayers to report their $600 phone app transactions to the IRS without she and the Senate reading the bill (later dropped as untenable). Kamala Harris, who now claims to be against taxing tips, was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which expanded the IRS so it could go after people not paying taxes on tips.

The strange and total lack of curiosity around:

Is it not abnormal for a person to serve as U.S. Senator for 36 years, then to go on to be Vice President for 8 years, and still have time left to serve as President, and even to run for reelection as President when he is 81, and then to drop the nomination after excluding competitors and winning it in the primaries, handing the nomination to a person who never won any votes in any bid for the presidency? Is it not abnormal for a President to oversee the criminal prosecution of his predecessor, his rival, and then, after dropping out, to seek to rearrange the Supreme Court to enhance the likelihood that his rival will suffer real criminal punishment?

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a collection of personal emails between J.D. Vance and a law school friend of his.  The two were politically far apart, but for many years shared a close and respectful friendship in which they discussed the things that they agreed and disagreed about.  Then the friend, Sofia Nelson, who identifies as a “gender queer radical pragmatist” broke off the friendship over Vance’s support for an Arkansas bill banning gender reassignment for minors.  Here’s what Vance said that was apparently too much for Sofia’s “radical pragmatist’ sensibilities:

“the separation line between being ambitious or being wrong was very thin”

Both OEMs’ views have key flaws.

This kind of Systemic collapse is endemic to human history, to greater or lesser degrees.

according to a senior law enforcement official…

A hacker has stolen a wealth of data from health giant Bausch Health, has attempted to extort the company, and has told associates they think the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) will buy back the data, 404 Media has found. 

As a courtesy to law enforcement, we are not going to post the entire request. This is the first page of that request.

And no, not “every court” has said special counsel office is lawful. DC appellate court upheld Mueller appointment (of course) but it has never been challenged outside of DC. Cannon concluded the appointment of Smith was unconstitutional because it violated the Appointments Clause without a presidential nomination and Senate approval. She also determined the 4 random statutes Garland cited in his appointment order did not apply.

She has a Bible once treasured by a Green Bay couple. She wants their descendants to have it.

This trend of spinning and manufacturing a parallel reality to serve the Dem agenda, solidified by complicit mainstream media, hit home with the Hunter Biden laptop story, the coordinated vilification of President Trump and his followers, and President Biden’s cognitive decline — depriving voters of a voice in a proper primary. These examples displayed the hubris of the current Dem leadership. You must think the American people are fools to believe the spin on these issues. I despise this elite vs. general population ideology viscerally.

“and that she ought to embrace her hazy ideological categorization because “if she keeps people continually guessing then she can adjust the interpretation of your guess every time she sees you.”

We know that Malley’s security clearances were pulled, and he was placed under investigation by the FBI, but repeated Congressional inquiries have shaken almost no information loose from Team Biden. Is Rob Malley the victim of a witch hunt, or the new Alger Hiss, an Iranian mole embedded in the White House in two Democratic administrations?

New data reveal how companies that farm out IT workers exploit flaws in the visa lottery while other US businesses and talented immigrants lose out.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008-10, China has lost faith in the western economic model and is pursuing its own system. In the process it has become far less open to international criticism. “They dealt with the financial crisis much better than anybody else and I would say that’s when we lost them,” he says. China’s market remains deeply challenging for foreign businesses.

In a headline blaring: “Gov. Shapiro’s Failures Enabled Sexual Harassment,” the National Women’s Defense League said in a statement that the Harris vetting team should “consider the handling of past complaints of sexual harassment inside the Pennsylvania Governor’s office.” The group claims to be a nonpartisan organization dedicated to preventing sexual harassment.

In the world of data, CSV is the cockroach of file formats. It’s simple, resilient, and seemingly impossible to kill off. While flashier formats have come and gone, CSV quietly reigns supreme in the data processing kingdom. But how the hell did this happen? Let’s dive into the fascinating history of this accidental standard.

One week ago, the last time NASA officials spoke to the media, the agency’s program manager for commercial crew, Steve Stich, would not be drawn into discussing what would happen should NASA conclude that Starliner’s thrusters were not reliable enough for the return journey to Earth.

“Vice President Harris was the deciding vote for the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act. She owns those, they would not have passed, it was 50-50 and she broke the tie. Those caused the great inflation.

“So many Democrat voting women, often married, think Trump is untrustworthy because they believe he slept with side chicks. So now they are going to demonstrate how much they hate Trump by voting for the actual side chick, Kamala Harris. It’s honestly amazing,” the message shared by Patrick read.

The British businessman Mike Lynch, who this June was acquitted in the US of a multi-billion pound fraud, has said he believes he was only able to clear his name because of his huge wealth.

“I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.” If we accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?”

Indeed, there is evidence that, following U.S. export controls, China has boosted domestic innovation and self-reliance, and increased purchases from non-U.S. firms that produce similar technology to the U.S.-made ones subject to export controls.” In other words, it’s almost a pure loss for US firms who lose customers, revenue and market capitalization whereas the affected Chinese firms find alternative suppliers and China boosts its domestic innovation and self-reliance.

Notably, not all of DJI’s funding came from the Chinese government. Foolishly, in retrospect, the growth of the Chinese drone industry was, in part, fueled by American venture capital. In 2014 and 2015, Sequoia and Accel made major investments in DJI, collectively exceeding any funding for 3DR, Airware, or any other American drone manufacturers. With CCP subsidies and American capital, DJI would continue to dominate the global market. Naturally, a mass-extinction event for U.S. companies followed. In 2016, 3D Robotics shut downits drone manufacturing business line, and Airware, a leading American enterprise drone manufacturer, closed its doors in 2018.

However, we find no evidence of reshoring or friend-shoring. As a result of these disruptions, affected suppliers have negative abnormal stock returns, wiping out $130 billion in market capitalization, and experience a drop in bank lending, profitability, and employment.

The best photos from the 20th stage of this year’s Tour de France.

Since Barack Obama won election in 2008, health insurance premiums have doubled for single employees. Family plans have skyrocketed to almost $24,000, on average.

“We’re all finding out by tweet,” said one Dem. “None of us understand what’s happening.”

Workers in Washington State are seeking a 40% pay increase in an attempt to claw back concessions previously given to the company by the union. The Local represents over 30,000 members in the region, which includes the plants in Renton and Everett, where the 737 Max and 777 aircraft are assembled.

Second, did you know the US is borrowing more[2] under the “Biden boom” than it did during COVID? Set aside whether a coronavirus should have been treated as a financial crisis.

For the protection of whistleblowers and our investigation, we will not be sharing further information with the congressional task force due to the connective tissue between that entity and FBI, USSS, and other entities.

I know I should not be astonished, but the fact is that I am incredibly astonished that virtually every Democrat voter is insanely happy to have literally no say whatsoever as to who their Presidential candidate is.

Very interesting that TikTok is aggressively laundering and rehabilitating Kamala Harris’s image.

Taylor Swift’s Jet Use In 2023.

The FBI used voice analysis to prove that he was telling the truth. EAD Moore knew that, but hid it from Congress.

But US can still have high QoL and prosperity if it doesn’t start WW3 by listening to dumb strategists and warhawks. Obviously stupid Ukraine tricks and pushing Russia into a deep alliance with PRC will be seen in retrospect as a mistake as big as the Iraq War.

The U.S. healthcare system requires substantial out-of-pocket payments by most consumers, which can prevent some from receiving needed medical services. Recent policy proposals seek to address this problem by increasing government health care spending in order to reduce out-of-pocket costs. The social value of these policies rests in part on the extent to which consumers face credit constraints in financing medical spending. We present a novel analysis of whether elderly households face such credit constraints by estimating the effects of wealth variation from home price changes on out-of-pocket medical expenditures. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study and various measures of home price changes, we find no evidence that housing wealth impacts out-of-pocket medical spending. The estimates are universally small and precise, allowing us to rule out even modest-sized effects. Effects are zero across the expenditure distribution, for specific categories of expenditure, and for different types of consumers split by health insurance status and SES. Our results suggest that further subsidizing health care for elderly homeowners, the majority of older Americans, would increase moral hazard costs without increasing access to needed care.

ActBlue money laundering scheme: reports indicate that $20 million from Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss was broken down into over 1.6 million donations across 400,000 donors.

Drone based contested trade with just one minor actor contesting it (Houthis).

The world’s only AI superpowers are engaged in an arms race for swarming drones that is reminiscent of the Cold War, except drone technology will be far more difficult to contain than nuclear weapons. Because software drives the drones’ swarming abilities, it could be relatively easy and cheap for rogue nations and militants to acquire their own fleets of killer robots.

We study how the widespread legalization of sports gambling over the past five years has impacted consumer financial health.

China’s electric vehicle exports declined 13.2% from the previous month in June to 86,000 vehicles, new data showed on Wednesday, signaling growing resistance to the cars as Europe raises trade barriers.

Note that overturning Euclid v. Ambler would not make zoning in the interests of health and safety unconstitutional. Indeed, it wouldn’t make any zoning unconstitutional it would just mean that zoning above and beyond that required for health and safety would require compensation to property owners.

With that in mind, Capitol Weekly recently did a very subjective, very unscientific email poll of our fellow journalists who cover the Capitol or other parts of California government to see who they think are the best press reps to deal with. And yes, we also asked who they think…. hmmm, how to put this nicely? … could be better at their job. We granted everyone anonymity so they could speak freely. Replies came from reporters whose beats span the gamut of government, from city council meetings to chronicling the day-to-day activities of Gov. Gavin Newsom. As one might expect their answers were similarly broad in scope.

It’s the petty, ugly, banalities of an entire subculture of tiresome neurotics who cannot dredge one single beautiful, interesting, or true thing out of their souls that would make you voluntarily pay attention.

A few weeks ago in Paris we got last minute tickets to Palais Garnier, one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world. The show ended up being horrific

If you drive a car made by General Motors and it has an internet connection, your car’s movements and exact location are being collected and shared anonymously with a data broker.

Phones are supported well beyond their average ownership lifetime. In stark contrast, automakers are struggling to work out how long their “smartphones on wheels” can be kept on the road.

An inconspicuous suburb close to Geneva became the first Swiss municipality to banish commercial advertising from its streets, in a policy that creates a blueprint for similar bans in larger cities across the country.

Now sprinkle on long build times and difficulty of testing and it’s no wonder a lot of mobile native devs switch to something else more sane, like the web. Sure, the web has its own issues but it’s minuscule in comparison to that of mobile native dev on average. All this to say – Google and Apple keep making it more and more difficult for developers to ship and maintain quality mobile apps, but they market their releases as the next greatest thing. All the while no real innovation in mobile has happened in close to 10 plus years.

Why would such a fate befall the would-be Polish Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (as he’s dubbed in today’s Poland)? Why on earth would any country deprive itself of potentially becoming the leader in a vital and cutting-edge field of technology? This article looks into these very questions and looks a bit closer at the man behind the machine: Jacek Karpi??ki. 

The problem is that Democrats are so used to having total cloud supremacy — total information control — that they’ve never actually had to make an argument. It is completely demoralizing for them to see high production value videos with Democrats as the butt of the joke. Like a bully getting punched in the nose, these vicious wokes are finally facing committed, capable resistance in the information war. It is their first fair fight.

An African-American two-spirit Hindu Palestinian MtF transgender fat-liberated NEA union kindergarten teacher wearing a rainbow tutu and a Che Guevara halter top told me, “You know, I really don’t think Kamala is qualified to run this country, I’m voting for Trump.”