Banker, princess, warlord: the many lives of Asma Assad How a girl from west London became the unlikely winner of Syria’s war

“Joe Rogan is a symptom of changing media systems, not the root cause.”

TAMPA, Fla. – U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces conducted dozens of precision airstrikes targeting known ISIS camps and operatives in central Syria, Dec. 8. The operation struck over 75 targets using multiple U.S. Air Force assets, including B-52s, F-15s, and A-10s.

Lastly, Levy smartly asks how long Cook sees himself remaining in the role. His answer sounds almost weary. While he gives no hints of imminent plans, it’s clearly on his mind. You have to start wondering when the next obvious point would be. Steve Jobs run as CEO (including his time as ‘iCEO’) was 14 years. Cook is just over 13 years now in that role, he’ll surpass Jobs next year, which is sort of wild.He’ll hit 15 years as CEO in 2026 and then hit 30 years at Apple in 2028.

“[Chinese customers] will probably take delivery of a few 737s, and maybe some 787s that are currently on order or may have been built already But I think that China, increasingly, for a number of reasons, doesn’t necessarily need all the Boeing planes that it might have thought it would need.” 

“and companies’ increasing use of financial instruments not easily characterised as either equity or debt”.

Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.

“It’s not a conspiracy theory if people really are out to get you.” sums up part of my reaction to this, but only part. There exists some amount of conflation between what private actors are doing, what state actors have de facto or de jure commanded that they do, and which particular state and political actors have their fingers on the keyboard. These create a complex system; the threads are not entirely divorced from each other.

Just 20 months ago I was amazed to see something that felt GPT-3 class run on that same machine. The quality of models that are accessible on consumer hardware has improved dramatically in the past two years. My laptop is a 64GB MacBook Pro M2, which I got in January 2023—two months after the initial release of ChatGPT. All of my experiments running LLMs on a laptop have used this same machine.

All of us agree the original Russiagate conspiracy continues even today. The Russia hoax was created by Hillary Clinton aide Jake Sullivan, who carries on with his lies today as President Joe Biden’s national security advisor. Christopher Steele, the British spy hired by Clinton to create the dodgy dossier, and his Fusion GPS co-conspirator Glenn Simpson are still doing the same work for similar clients. Andrew Weissmann, Peter Strzok, John Brennan, and more still peddle their lies. Elements of the original conspiracy were woven into Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 American election, then bogus Trump impeachments, January 6th prosecutions, anti-Trump lawfare, and Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Mar-a-lago raid.

Of these bonds the only surviving one is a 1,200 guilder bond sold on December 10, 1624, to a wealthy woman in Amsterdam called Elsken Jorisdochter. In return for her money, the water board promised Jorisdochter, her descendants or anyone who owned the bearer bond 2.5 per cent interest in perpetuity. Remarkably, this bond is still alive and pays €13.61 of interest a year. Yesterday, the current owner — the New York Stock Exchange — collected £299.42 of owed interest for the bond’s 400th birthday, which FT Alphaville was able to attend.

Every year, researchers from American University measure the percentage of parts originating in the United States or Canada in every car sold in the U.S. The result, the school’s Made in America Auto Index, is an excellent tool for exploring how interconnected the global auto industry has become. Telsa took the top two spots last year and the top four in a list filled with ties in 2024.  

We see a “waterbed effect” where squeezing prices in one area causes costs to bubble up elsewhere. When we eliminate the ability to charge for network services directly, the costs don’t disappear – they transform into other types of charges, fees, or inefficiencies that are harder to track and regulate.

“These small towns just really come through,” said Jeffris, sitting on a piano bench on the Opera House’s stage. “It’s really terrible what we’ve done, generally as a nation, in tearing down things. I’m a great believer in preservation and for improving the quality of life. Financially, for the community, it’s better.”. The list of projects touched by Jeffris Foundation includes some of the most well-known historic structures in the state. They include Villa Louis, the estate constructed in the 1840s by Hercules Dousman in Prairie du Chien; the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Seth Peterson Cottage on Mirror Lake; and the nearby Al. Ringling Theatre in Baraboo.

Health Data, Technology, and Interoperability: Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement

Turn-of-the-century high society is a hard place to get comfortable in. Few Sargent sitters seem completely at home there, though not so distressed as to up and leave. Few seem at home in their own clothes, even. The jewels pull, the gowns prickle and squeeze. Everyone seems to be breaking in a brand-new costume. Their only way out, since they refuse to walk out, is to acknowledge the charade and no longer try quite so hard to impress. Which is why the most comfortable-seeming Sargent figures are those like the actress Ellen Terry, who is dressed in the literal costume of Lady Macbeth, or the two children in “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose,” who are still young enough that any article of clothing is a kind of costume, or Ena Wertheimer in “A Vele Gonfie” (1904), whose billowing cloak Sargent told her to hold up with a broomstick, “simulating the volume and motion of her original entrance.” You can see the stick toward the lower right side of the painting, and Ena sees it, too, since this time her gaze points down and over instead of up and out. She has nothing she feels a need to hide, which isn’t the same as freedom but is in the vicinity.

The effort to tank Hegseth’s nomination is one of the most coordinated smear campaigns I’ve ever seen in DC.

If Pete Hegseth hasn’t kept a letter for almost 30 years, the biggest story today would be about West Point.

All stories feature Elena, a 42-year-old marketing executive whose healthcare providers participate in AcmeConnect, a Health Information Network (HIN)

My experience here has been extremely positive. We’re very fast in decision-making, more so than in some of the other cultures in Asia Pacific that may be more hierarchical or resist change, so that it will take longer to provide the kinds of services we would like to. But Hong Kong, because of its compactness, its agile mentality, and receptiveness to working with people from different cultures, has worked very well for us.

One very important change was quickly made: the name Vulcan was dropped as there was an operating system by that name made by Harris Computers in Florida. The name dBASE II was suggested, and there was no objection. Around the same time as the name change, Ratliff felt that it was time to abandon accommodations made for teletypes within the interface, and he moved the interface to being completely oriented toward screens. The retail price of dBASE II was $700 (around $2000 in 2023).

Timemap history: old maps online

President Biden commuted the sentence of Rita Crundwell, the woman who embezzled over $53 million from a small Illinois town and spent it on luxury goods, real estate, and a horse breeding business.

“The first sign an empire is failing is when its people question the institutions the empire was built on. The structure of government, the churches, the schools. They reject God because the emperors believe they are God. And the people become so rich, everyone believes they are an emperor as well. And too good to do the jobs that built the empire in the first place. So they outsource those jobs. And they open their borders to allow people desperate to do all the other jobs the other people are too rich to do. Then comes the guilt for all this wealth. But still the empire thrives. And now everyone questions their wealth. Then they question themselves. And then they reject everything that built the empire to begin with. They destroy their own symbols, attack themselves like a cancer, attack the people who protect the empire, attack you for protecting it. Then the wolves come. And all the people who lived like emperors will know the suffering they blamed themselves for creating. And they will be slaughtered. And a new empire will rise from its ashes. Then the cycle begins again.”

Further, we are supposed to believe that only twice as many FBI informants were in DC (26) on Jan 6 as there were in Whitmer fednapping (at least 12)

Born Gwynne Rowley in Illinois in 1963, Shotwell grew up in Libertyville, a suburb of Chicago, where she was a straight-A student and cheerleader. During her teens, her mother dragged her to a Society of Women Engineers conference — an event that changed her opinion on engineers as “nerds, social outcasts, nose pickers”, she said in a 2012 interview with the alumni magazine for Northwestern University, where she studied mechanical engineering and applied mathematics.

Her first professional role was at Chrysler, before joining The Aerospace Corporation and then rocket company Microcosm. In 2002, an ex-colleague introduced her to Musk, who offered her a job the same day. She joined as the seventh employee of SpaceX — one co-worker remembers her having the nickname “007” — hoping to galvanise space exploration out of a period of “stagnation” and “constipated” bureaucracy.

Syrians are still both shocked & mesmerized by the events of this month. How can a 54 year-old rule have such an abrupt closing chapter? This account was created to help shed light on the key events that led to Dec 8 & the departure of Assad. Key insiders have come forward to help piece together what happened. This excellent thread is by a Syrian fellow who knows what’s going on and does not derive his information solely from idiotic journalists.

After two years away from sportscar racing, Mercedes had returned with a masterfully engineered new machine. One of its drivers at Le Mans that year, John Fitch, later described the 300 SLR as “a ferocious racing car” with “a staggering complexity of parts.” Its body was made of ultralight magnesium alloy; Motor Sport reported that its fuel-injected 3-liter engine emitted an “unholy scream.” One month earlier, Fangio and the 25-year-old English driver Stirling Moss had powered theirs to a one-two finish at the Mille Miglia. In the hands of elite drivers like these, it seemed almost unbeatable.

America’s cows are now extraordinarily productive. In 2024, just 9.3 million cows will produce 226 billion pounds of milk (about 100 million tons) – enough milk to provide ten percent of 333 million insatiable Americans’ diets, and export for good measure.

Nobody’s ever done an audit of AT&T’s fraud, waste, and abuse because AT&T’s a trusted domestic surveillance partner effectively immune from meaningful government accountability. AT&T’s about to get a major chunk of the $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies included in the 2021 infrastructure bill.

Welcome to the age of average.

The visit left me in a pensive mood. As I got ready to continue my walk, I turned around one last time and looked at the little stone church. It appeared forlorn amid the windswept fields of East England. Once, there must have been a small but tight-knit rural community here, and the church was woven into its social fabric.

I’ve reported from inside Syria since 2011 and I live in the MidEast. So, let me explain in this thread what the implications could be for Syria and wider region in case the Syrian regime falls:

What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2025?
A Festive Countdown. At the start of each year, on January 1st, a new crop of works enter the public domain and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose. Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain — and here we focus on three of the most prominent. Newly entering the public domain in 2025 will be:

“I complained to anyone who would listen about how archaic the technology was in my day and complain about how dreadful the data was,” he said.

Also can you imagine if your social media posts on Facebook would be the mechanism by which it was determined if you could or could not have a bank account!?

What could possess a respectable Victorian surgeon from York to spend much of his life travelling to remote and challenging parts of the world to study volcanoes and climb mountains? For Tempest Anderson, pioneering new techniques of ophthalmic surgery and inventing photographic equipment was not enough. He decided that his ‘limited leisure’ time could not be filled with reading, writing or socialising, he sought to occupy himself with something more exciting: volcanology. For him, it was a branch of science that did not have too much literature and had the ‘advantage of offering exercise in the open air’: he saw the sides of volcanoes not as dangerous but ‘picturesq

On December 3, 2024, Federal District Judge Amos Mazzant issued a sweeping, nationwide injunction against the enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). The CTA mandates more than 32 million small business disclose intrusive and confidential information to the federal law enforcement. The injunction comes less than one month before the January 1, 2025 reporting deadline after which businesses that failed to file a report, or whose reports contained errors or omissions, would be liable to civil and criminal penalties including fines of up to $500 per day.

Don’t ask agencies to identify every regulation they’d eliminate—a process that would take years and would get bogged down in bureaucratic procedures and legal challenges. Instead require them to justify the rules they’d keep. As things stand now, regulations will stay on the books unless someone acts to remove them, but a sunset rule would have them expire automatically unless agencies choose to keep them.

What is Software Anyways? Where Does it Exist?

6 lessons I learned working at an art gallery:
On agency, doing value-aligned work, and making your job fun

I am fairly confident of where the United Healthcare assassin escaped to. He escaped on an electric Citibike, according to police. I happen to continuously scrape Citibike data every minute, so I can see where individual bikes go. The only northbound Citibike to leave within 10 minutes of the shooting from any dock near the hotel went to Madison Ave & E 82nd St.

Evan:

This chart collection explores National Health Expenditure (NHE) data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). These data offer insights into changes in health spending over time in the U.S. as well as the driving forces behind spending growth. The data specifically show how healthcare spending changed in 2022 after deviating from historical trends in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A related interactive toolcontains more of the latest NHE data.

Excellent discussion w @RealDonaldTrump. I congratulated him on his election victory & we expressed our shared commitment to continue enhancing CY-US strategic partnership. We will work together to further reinforce our relations for the benefit of our countries & the region

I hunted for old annual (reports) when researching Buffett’s Early Investments (amzn.to/3B2SdgF). There are a few resources I’d point to:

1. There is a database called Mergent Archives that many libraries (such as the New York Public Library) have. It allows you to search for company annual reports and Moody’s Manuals and download them to a USB. This was the foundation for much of my book and is the easiest resource to use.

When Calvin and Hobbes hit the nation’s funny pages in late 1985, it took everybody by surprise. A literate comic strip? By a guy who can draw? About a kid who acts like a real kid? And it’s funny? And it’s from a major syndicate!? The cognoscenti of the graphic narrative form thought they’d died and gone to comic strip heaven.

But its true. Against heavy odds, one man with a lot of determination and a fierce sense of his craft may have single-handedly given the strips a new lease on their artistic life. It’s been a struggle, but Bill Watterson, like his creation, is the real thing at last.

In the end, I decided to close on a globally distributed database – CockroachDB. It’s Postgres wire-protocol compatible, and inherits some of the more interesting features discussed above – large horizontal scaling, strong consistency – and has some interesting features of its own.

Diátaxis is intended to help documentation better serve users in their cycle of interaction with a product.

The impact could be significant for commercial aviation—and Boeing in particular. Before its repeated self-inflicted wounds began with the 2018/19 737 MAX crisis, which continues today, Boeing was by far the largest US exporter. Deliveries of its 7-Series airplanes outside the US helped balance the trade deficit the US usually has

Boeing began Monday installing “workplace occupancy sensors” in the main Everett office towers that use motion detectors and cameras mounted in ceiling tiles above workstations, conference rooms and common areas.

Mapping the Podcast Ecosystem with the Structured Podcast Research Corpus

He held his breath. Here was the truth: the Lord had given him the word; and behold, there the word was written, there it rang out, a word that could be repeated and transformed for ever: “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

Examples of premature generalisation are everywhere. As a security and cryptography engineer, I see the same mindset in tools like PGP or JWTs (JOSE): overly-complex and easy to screw up footguns because they try to cover too many use-cases in a single tool. The reaction has been the development of special-purpose tools like Age or minisign, that follow the Unix philosophy of “do one thing well”. 

3) Lastly, @dehenau_ points out that it’s still really hard to get bank financing for any construction biz that isn’t one of the massive players. People often ask him why he doesn’t build homes. He would like to, but getting the loans to make that happen is nearly impossible

I present evidence that firms serve as tax-free consumption vehicles. Drawing on a unique combination of data from an electronic invoicing program in Portugal (e-Fatura), I show that individuals who control firms shift 36% of their monthly personal expenditures to firms and 31% of their household expenditures. The effects are driven by owner-managers of small closely held firms through expenditure categories on the border between business and final consumption but are widespread among business managers across the whole income distribution. My results suggest that the government revenue losses due to consumption through the firm amount to 1% of GDP. Reallocating the tax savings and personal expenditures hidden within firms to the reported household income of business managers increases the Gini by one percentage point and the top 1% income share by half a percentage point.

Glamour is more than a synonym for fashionor celebrity, although these things can certainly be glamorous. So can a holiday resort, a city, or a career. The military can be glamorous, as can technology, science, or the religious life. It all depends on the audience. Glamour is a form of communication that, like humor, we recognize by its characteristic effect. Something is glamorous when it inspires a sense of projection and longing: if only . . . Whatever its incarnation, glamour offers a promise of escape and transformation. It focuses deep, often unarticulated longings on an image or idea that makes them feel attainable. Both the longings – for wealth, happiness, security, comfort, recognition, adventure, love, tranquility, freedom, or respect – and the objects that represent them vary from person to person, culture to culture, era to era. In the twentieth-century, ‘the future’ was a glamorous concept.

Why I like my Model Y

In his second book, ‘Cambridge – Time & Space’, photographer Martin Bond has carefully chosen a picture for every day of the year selected from the period before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Photographs that capture the months before lockdown are interspersed with desolate images of deserted streets and candid moments as a city and its people searched for perspective during the chaos of a rapidly unfolding situation.

Merkel, a one-person case for constitutional term limits, is entitled to look out for herself. “I was the most damaging European leader since 1945,” was never going to be the gist of her book. To her credit, she doesn’t even use her best excuse: that a generic German chancellor of the period would have done the same things — on energy, on defence, if not on asylum — such was the then national consensus. The people I’m keener to hear from are her fans. Why did western liberals fall for Merkel? Because she was a woman? No, they disliked Margaret Thatcher, and mistrust Giorgia Meloni. Because she was of the left? No, her party is centre-right, even if the exchange rate between German politics and the Anglosphere kind isn’t so neat. Because she let in a million refugees, then? She was hailed as the “Queen of Europe” well before that. 

A truly suspended moment with actress Marion Cotillard and cellist Yo-Yo Ma on the poem “Le Pont” by Victor Hugo

The Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel directing the South African soprano Pretty Yende and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, in this pitch-perfect rendition of Amazing Grace at Notre Dame today.

Paying Krebs a visit these days isn’t easy. A recent trip to his home meant leaving behind all smartphones and internet-connected devices, to prevent any kind of digital trail that hackers could pick up. Visitors must navigate through winding Virginia farm country roads using a paper road map. No cameras are allowed.

Yet Ortberg also has “the biggest opportunity,” said Gautam Mukunda, a lecturer at the Yale School of Management. “Because the man who saves Boeing is going to be a legend of American business.”

There was no big CEO smile or swagger as Ortberg addressed the dire situation during the Nov. 20 internal all-hands presentation, delivered to a small in-person group at the Boeing Field jet delivery center and webcast companywide. 

Dressed in a dark Boeing fleece and khakis, Ortberg offered somber realism as he urged everyone in the company to pull together to lift Boeing out of the pit it’s in.

The energy required by AI services can only be fulfilled with Nuclear Plants. The energy requirement of running AI at scale is so huge that Microsoft, Amazon and Google all of them are now buying large amounts of energy from Nuclear plants as reported by New York Times.

The examples revealed here represent only a small portion of what experts say is a pattern of contractors overcharging DoD for a wide range of parts and weapons systems, a practice that reduces military readiness and drives up spending. A recent investigation by 60 Minutes highlighted rampant price gouging in the arms industry, including one case in which Boeing overcharged taxpayers by more than half a billion dollars for missiles used in the Patriot missile defense system.

And manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway. Will just get pilots killed.

It is tempting to want to see the positives of technology disruption as distinct from the disruptive nature of the person or organization causing disruption. As we all know it is pretty easy to be disruptive in meetings, the workplace, or online without being a force for a disruptive innovation. That causes us to wonder if it is possible to lead such change without being disruptive. In practice being disruptive is probably a necessary part of bringing a disruptive change to the world. It is not pleasant for either the incumbent or the protagonist, but it might be a necessary part of getting something done.

For many scientists, election to the Royal Society is the pinnacle of their scientific career. It establishes that their achievements are recognised as exceptional, and the title FRS brings immediate respect from colleagues. Of course, things do not always work out as they should. Some Fellows may turn out to have published fraudulent work, or go insane and start promoting crackpot ideas. Although there are procedures that allow a fellow to be expelled from the Royal Society, I have been told this has not happened for over 150 years. It seems that election as a Fellow of the Royal Society, like loss of virginity, is something that can’t readily be reversed.

One of my early wins was optimizing Uber’s app startup time by 30% a few years ago (app startup is a key metrics for all Android app). I achieved this by using an automated tool I developed to identify slow sections of the code. The tool could then prove (or disprove) that certain code sections weren’t needed “soon” (a complicated question that would need a few pages to answer) and could be moved to run asynchronously.

While this might indeed happen, it is not necessarily true, and understanding why it might or might not be true is helpful for understanding the economic pressures China faces. The basic assumption underlying the claim by Goldman analysts is that U.S. tariffs would force a contraction in China’s trade surplus. This is the part that isn’t necessarily true. This claim assumes that tariffs on Chinese goods would cause a reduction in U.S. imports from China, which, all other things being equal, would in turn force a reduction in China’s total exports and therefore in its trade surplus.

As defense analyst David Alman outlined in a prize-winning essay for the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, the United States simply can’t win a warship race with China. The United States effectively gave up on commercial shipbuilding during the Reagan administration in the name of free trade. In the decades that followed, generous state subsidies helped China dominate commercial shipbuilding, and Beijing’s requirement that the sector be dual-use resulted in an industry that can shift to production and ship repair for the military during a conflict, much as U.S. shipyards did during World War II. The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence estimates that China now has 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. China built almost half the world’s new ships in 2022, whereas U.S. shipyards produced just 0.13 percent.

During the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, Dr. Cheney discovered that “rarely anyone who had been thoroughly alkalinized with bicarbonate of soda contracted the disease, and those who did contract it, if alkalinized early, would invariably have mild attacks.”. While nearly everyone else would quickly succumb to illness, Dr Cheney reported that those who applied his baking soda regimen were not affected.

The former chancellor’s autobiography, Freedom, is unlikely to lend her a Churchillian place in modern German history

Every institutional revolution requires supportive troops on the inside, even if they are only a minority.

Wow, our government employees market is now projecting a new low of just 60k cuts For context, there are a record 23.4 million government employees When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he reduced the workforce by more than 80%

4. Appendix might protect against infection Some research suggests the appendix, which has an uncertain function and is often removed if it becomes inflamed, might be a reservoir for beneficial bacteria.

The rage of the entitled overclass. The elites won’t take Trump’s victory lying down.

The disconnect between policymakers’ housing aspirations and market realities continues widening, with October’s housing starts and permits dropping to recession-level figures despite widespread calls for increased construction.

There is no podcast with a more devoted and loyal DNC partisan audience than PodSaveAmerica. Yet almost every comment is scathing in their contempt for these people.

SWIFT averaged 5 hours to complete each layer of its fabrication process, while the fastest modern fabs take 19 hours per processing layer, and the industry average is 36 hours. Although today’s integrated circuits are built with many more layers, on larger wafers the size of small pizzas, and the processing is more complex, those factors do not altogether close the gap. Harding’s automated manufacturing line was really, truly, swift.

But nobody seems to have thought it odd to avenge the insult so much later, with a war that was to cost thousands of British lives, mainly through disease, and gain nothing. It was the public rejoicing on the declaration of this war that prompted Walpole’s other famous wisecrack: ‘They now ring the bells, but they will soon wring their hands.’

Makary is not obviously an accelerationist. Most of all, he likes to avoid groupthink and give matters a further look. While such a view is hard to disagree with, it makes me nervous in a bureaucratic context. In reality, “groupthink” is how many things get approved as quickly as they do. Just how many public health debates are we supposed to be reopening here? Should that be the priority of the FDA? Or should speeding up clinical trials and lowering their cost be the emphasis? When he thinks about FDA matters, is he willing to have questions of incentives arise first in his thoughts? If so, that would be a break from his writing career so far.

What were the best books you read this year?

Norway’s entrepreneurs are now indeed disappearing from society. In the past two years alone, a staggering 100 of Norway’s top 400 taxpayers, representing about 50% of that group’s wealth, have fled the country to protect their businesses.

The Rasputin of the MAGA movement has big plans for the new world order under Donald Trump—mass deportations, checking China, working with Elon and dismantling McConnell’s Senate—and if it requires a little “smash mouth” to get it done, so be it. In the meantime, he’ll be tuned in to MSNBC, watching the Democratic civil war unfold. More.

One essential point is worth making here. There was no legal or regulatory angle left for the government or regulators to kill the project. It was 100% a political kill—one that was executed through intimidation of captive banking institutions. That was the hardest part of this story for me personally. Not that we had failed, but that America, this country I immigrated to and became a proud citizen of because of its rule of law and value system, behaved in such a way for political reasons. It was a very tough pill to swallow.

The next DNC chair should make two things clear: No super pac money in democratic primaries and not a dime of corporate pac money for the DNC. That is a basic first step to ensure our party represents working and middle class Americans.

Back in the transitional era when the press wasn’t fully aligned with the state, they occasionally printed the truth. Here is what happened to Qwest’s Joseph Nacchio when he resisted NSA surveillance.

Obama came up again and again as one of the major reasons they became disillusioned with the Dems.

Everything David said is true. For example, here is the public letter sent to Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe threatening them with regulatory “scrutiny” to stop them from working with Libra.

BREAKING: The Federal Reserve just reported a $19.9 BILLION operating loss in Q3 2024 up from $16.9 billion in Q2. This marks the 8th consecutive quarter of operating losses for the central bank.

Getting different views helps root out obvious mismatches. It can also do the opposite and discover strengths that are unseen by others. It helps reduce one person bias, and though not perfect, is better than one person deciding on their own

As I nipped at my drink in the English winter rain, I thought about the ‘German Christmas Market’ thing. It’s clearly not enough to simply emulate this German custom or adapt it to existing local traditions. England could have Christmas markets that sold mince pies and other Chrismassy goods. Even the addition of mulled wine and grilled sausages (which I wholeheartedly approve of) wouldn’t have to be branded as explicitly German. After all, many Christmas traditions in the UK have German roots but nobody thinks of them that way.

Using the full text of the Federal Register, the official publication of the US government, we develop a similarity score that compares the regulatory exposure of pairs of companies. A higher score means that the two firms comply with similar regulations by the same regulatory agencies. Existing similarity measures such as industry boundaries, geographic proximity, and product markets account for only one-quarter of the variation in regulatory similarity. Nevertheless, firms with high regulatory similarity comove along key dimensions such as overhead costs, profitability, and investment. Using a supervised machine-learning algorithm, we decompose the similarity into 12 topics and find that it is driven by regulatory issues related to fiscal policy and labor. Each firm has a unique set of peers for each topic, and they all lobby the government on similar topics. Combined, our results uncover economically important links between companies centered around regulatory issues.

The ACA has failed this woman, and in 2024, the Government will pay $125 billion in subsidies to insurance companies.

This winter, two strong climate drivers churning in the Pacific Ocean give more confidence to the low-snowfall forecast.

“We just passed 400 launches on Falcon, and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years,” Shotwell said at the Baron Investment Conference in New York City. “We want to fly it a lot.”

The latest evidence? Apple spent billionsdeveloping cutting-edge electric vehicle battery technology with Chinese automaker BYD, only to watch its innovations become the cornerstone of BYD’s rise to global electric vehicle dominance. Apple walked away with nothing. China walked away with everything.

Apple Offers $100 Million to Undo Indonesia iPhone 16 Ban

Chapelle is referring to the scene when Hillary Clinton accused Trump of using a loophole to avoid paying taxes. Asked by the moderator whether this was true, Trump replied that of course it was. “I absolutely used it and so did Warren Buffet and George Soros and many of the other people that Hillary is getting money from,” he went on before delivering the killer line: “She complains that Donald Trump is taking advantage of the tax code, so why didn’t you change it when you were senator? The reason is because all your friends take the same advantage that I do.” The fact that Clarkson was attracted to buying a farm because it came with the benefit of avoiding inheritance tax will also, I suspect, be of little interest to most people in Britain who do not like this government. The fact that he said he bought a farm to go shooting and avoid inheritance tax will, in fact, be seen as welcome honesty.

Forbes Marketplace had seemingly also provided SEO-minded review services to CNN and USA Today, as detailed by Lofgren. Lofgren’s term for this business, “Parasite SEO,” took hold in corners critical of the trend.

When China issued bonds last week, however, they traded at only 0.007-0.029% above the rate (3Y/5Y), and were oversubscribed by 19.9x.As one Chinese commentator put it (via Eric Yeung), “we replaced the Federal Reserve.”Not quite, but you can see a Novus ordo seclorum taking shape.

Ford’s 2024 Q3 Earnings Presentation delivers the details: The year-to-date losses on Ford’s EV business (what the company calls “Ford Model e”) totaled $3.7 billion. Profits from Ford’s “Model Blue” division, which sells traditional internal combustion vehicles, also happened to be $3.7 billion.

Very worthwhile thread about the Matt Gaetz investigation. Almost of this is publicly documented and verifiable, but also deliberately obscured in favor of the simple-minded narrative. Nothing arouses people, or blinds them, more than a DC sex scandal:

The new Jaguar ad also, as Elon Musk and others noticed, doesn’t feature a car.

The ability to encode arbitrarily complex knowledge structures and link them to information assets indicates a major role for topic maps in the realm of knowledge management: Topic maps can be used to represent the interrelation of roles, products, procedures, etc. that constitute corporate memory, and link them to the corresponding documentation.

“The ultralow-cost carriers built a better mousetrap than us for customers that only cared about price,” United Chief Executive Scott Kirby acknowledged earlier this year. But that’s no longer the case: “We just are winning. It is structural. It is permanent.”. …“It achieves the absence of discomfort,” he said. 

One of the most compelling 2 hours I’ve spent listening to a world leader. I had greatly misunderstood Javier Milei. His holistic perspective on economics, philosophy, society, history, and spirituality is profoundly inspiring.

One of Bessent’s strongest attributes/strengths is having seen his own father lose it all

I like to tweet this every six months or so. Just to creep people out. And so younger people can learn a little history.

A new paper by the NBER on the McKinley tariffs of the late 1890s claims that the US economy did not benefit from the tariffs, mainly because they “may have reduced labor productivity in manufacturing.”

That’s easier said than done. During development of the Vision Pro, executives aspired for the device to eventually become an Apple Watch-sized hit — something that now seems unlikely. But perhaps a broader line of Vision wearable products (including things like smart glasses, augmented reality spectacles and iPhone-connected head-worn displays) could become a $25 billion business.

How is it helping users to suggest a location that is different to what they search for?

An innovation-forward culture may feel like a huge acceleration today, but it’s actually a return to the moral norm of Americans being and feeling comfortable, competent, and confident taking charge of their tools and toolmaking.

The radical notion of mixing and matching culinary traditions spread. By 2003, the quietly brilliant chef Tyson Cole, of Austin’s Uchi, was wowing customers with dishes you’d never see at old-school Japanese sushi bars. Less than a decade later, in 2012, the Houston restaurant scene got the star it deserved when irrepressible, bear-hugging chef Chris Shepherd opened Underbelly, where he merged cuisines from around the world. Side by side on one menu you could find Korean-style braised goat and Appalachian vinegar pie.

Slightly more than 1 in every 5 men ages 65 to 74 live alone, according to 2022 Census Bureau data. That rises to nearly 1 in 4 for those 75 or older. In 2000, only 1 in 6 older men lived by themselves. It’s difficult to find information about this group – which is dwarfed by the number of women who live alone – because it hasn’t been studied in depth. But psychologists and psychiatrists say they can be quite vulnerable. Research shows that men tend to have fewer friends than women and be less inclined to make new friends. Often, they’re reluctant to ask for help. Add in the decline of civic institutions where men used to congregate – think of the Elks or the Shriners – and older men’s reduced ability to participate in athletic activities, and the result is a lack of stimulation and the loss of a sense of belonging. Of all age groups in the United States, men over age 75 have the highest suicide rate, by far.

We are a remote company. Everything is going well. No plans to be in person, but I’d say we can do a better job at communicating. Any tips or articles to read?

This is why I’m so fascinated by the early Christians. They played the doomed COOPERATE-BOT strategy and took over the world.

On Haul, Amazon’s new rival to Temu and Shein, nothing costs more than $20 and items typically arrive in one to two weeks — not days — as they ship from overseas directly to US customers.

Luddite attitudes to new technology and an obsession with old industries are imperilling German prosperity

What an odd thing for her to say.

There has been a residency cap since 1997

Three, they all share a reputation from the mainstream media, bicoastal elite, or administrative state guardians as a little “out there” or even “crazy” and “nuts”, whether RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, or Pete Hegseth. So, their opponents rightly fear they are immune from mainstream media disparagements, the usually leftwing generated hoaxes, and beltway tsk-tsk scorn.

CEO of Palantir, $PLTR, Alex Karp: “You are sitting at your elite school pretending that because you watched TikTok twice and got an A+ on some crazy paper, because your professor couldn’t get a job anywhere else, that you actually understand the world.”

The DNC needs an organizer who gets people. Not someone who sends fish heads in the mail

Here is the full talk from @Gwynne_Shotwell at the Baron Capitol conference from yesterday!

“If our whole power projection platform is aircraft carriers, and if 15 hypersonic missiles can take out our ten aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of a conflict, what does that look like?” he said on The Shawn Ryan Show, hosted by the former United States navy seal and CIA contractor. Similar questions are being asked about the UK’s two £6.2 billion aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, commissioned into the Royal Navy in 2017 and 2019 respectively.

REPORT | June 18, 2024
Management Advisory: Review of DoD Funds Provided to the People’s Republic of China and Associated Affiliates for Research Activities or Any Foreign Countries for the Enhancement of Pathogens of Pandemic Potential (Report No. DODIG?2024?099)
Audit

While they waited for city agencies to inspect and approve their lodging, among other bureaucratic hurdles, they felt migrants “were getting fast-tracked to shelters, they were getting cash, they were getting debit cards.”

Harvey Epstein for New York City Council

With Air France now avoiding the southern Red Sea, flights are now routing north over the ocean, then west through Oman and Saudi Arabia.

Berlin’s aviation tax regime, combined with ambitious sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) regulations and competition from Chinese carriers, has engendered fear among airline employees in Germany. On Oct. 30, trade union Verdi and representatives from Lufthansa signed a petition calling for a swift…

The new document underscores that in addition to serving a legion of startups and fledgling businesses, SVB was a go-to bank for tech industry giants, including some that have kept their relationships with the bank confidential.

Have you ever known someone whose technical brilliance was overshadowed by personal failings? This is the story of Hans Reiser, a software developer driven to create a superior Linux filesystem, but whose difficult personality got in the way.

One of the best parts of antitrust trials is how much information comes into the public domain about corporations that usually keep details about their industry private. The Kroger-Albertsons supermarket merger case is no different. One interesting nugget is that supermarket executives see rural markets as particularly easy to monopolize, because there is often just one store. They even have a name, “no-comp[etition] or low-comp[etition] zones,” according to one executive on the stand.

Ghost jobs are wreaking havoc on tech workers

Somehow missed Particle’s response to Epic.

The Munich crisis in 1938 triggered air-raid precautions, including the distribution of gas masks and sandbags. Actual war in September 1939 brought rationing, recruitment and requisitioning. Ministries required buildings and the military needed billets. Everyone wanted both the old with brains and the young with brawn. 

People in Berlin like to complain about the perpetual gray weather and they’re completely right. Seasonal affective disorder is very real, and it might be a good idea to look into Vitamin D and light therapy lamps. One note: a lot of people buy cool-colored light bulbs or a SAD lamp and use it like a regular light. To get the real effects of these lamps, you need to get a real one and use it very close to your face for a long time! I went with the complete nerd option: Luminette lamp glasses, which I use right as I wake up. 

Kamala Harris – $1 BILLION
Donald Trump – $388 million.

What seems increasingly clear in modern campaigns is that paid ads, door knocks, sound bites, la etc. are increasingly less effective than content, long form, direct to consumer, personal social, memes, etc.

My first months here, I realize now, led me astray. I knew no Japanese when I arrived in August of 1983. Unable to read the signs in train stations, few of which were in English then, I took a slow local train from Narita to Ueno, where an American friend was to meet me.

Embrace Uncertainty: Boyd teaches that growth and innovation come from navigating uncertainty, not avoiding it. Welcome the unknown as a space for new opportunities.

Moreover, they make decisions as a committee, based on the internal politics of the FOMC and the external pressure of the press. The difference between a step up from 1.25% to 1.5% is much bigger proportionally than from 4.5% to 4.75%, but they talk about them similarly. There is no more “science” here than there was during COVID.

The Pennsylvania Senate race is not over. More soon.

With an unimaginable to-do list, Trump plans to tear into issues both foreign and domestic. Erik explores the possible applications and outcomes in a world that is currently acting with weak, or vapid leadership.

Hilarious. Woman is depressed because Kamala lost, but she is unable to walk in the park near her because of all the homeless people.They will never make the connection.

The United States is about to become a vastly superior place to do business. We are already the safest and most militarily capable country in the world making us an extremely attractive place to live and raise a family in an increasingly dangerous world.

The Kamala Inc. Fire Sale.

Jeppesen is, remarked one senior Boeing official to TAC recently, one of “the few places in the company that write good software.”

What you can’t see in this video is the hoard of hungry pelicans crashing all around me as dozens of baitfish swam between my waterlogged legs. Glad I’m not a fish.

Boeing desperately needs a replacement for the 737, but billions of dollars of losses, new debt since 2019, and other problems make pursuing a new design impossible right now. Mulally undoubtedly has views on this score, too.

The SuperTicket is playing with fire. I would highly recommend that someone in the transition team get Gary Hart on board, who is one of the last living links to the Church Committee, and could thus advise as to what it is actually like to frontally engage the covert and intelligence operations groups in a hostile fashion

“I am a humble Scottish merchant trading in the China Seas. My family has followed this profession for almost 200 years,” he wrote. “When we are bearing the sticky heat of China’s Pearl River Delta or the tropical rainforests of equatorial Borneo, we dream about the cool, soft mist of the green Galloway hills where we were bred.”

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. 

The classic story of Epic is “don’t take on debt”, so it’s interesting to see the handful of companies quietly listing their investments in Epic.

It’s truly impossible to comprehend the scale of solar power deployment in China these days. When I saw how much solar power China had installed in the first 9 months of the year, I thought I must be reading something wrong. I checked a few times. But, indeed, China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) reports that a shocking 160 gigawatts (GW) of new solar power capacity were added in the first three quarters of the year. 160 GW.

Over the past decade, my work helping teams deliver competitive PWAs gave me a front-row seat to a disturbing trend. The rate of failure to deliver minimally usable experiences on phones seemed to be increasing over time, despite the accelerating costs associated with the client-side JS-based stacks that teams were reaching for. Worse and costlier is a bad combo, and the opposite of what competing ecosystems did.

This map shows that first section of the trip. I’m taking the “Lake Shore Limited”, an overnight train. Will arrive in Chicago in around 20 hours, and amazingly, that’s the only time I’ll have to change trains!

An HTML pre-proces­sor for web ty­pog­ra­phy (fonts). Typeset pro­vides ty­po­graphic fea­tures used tra­di­tion­ally in ?ne print­ing which re­main un­avail­able to browser lay­out en­gines. Typeset’s pro­cess­ing brings the fol­low­ing to your web­pages:

Indeed, the irony is that it is not Trump but the more radical Democrats who openly discuss constitutional changes that would fundamentally alter the U.S. political system to their own advantage. To give one example of many, in an article published two years ago in the New York Times, two liberal professors at, respectively, Harvard and Yale, Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, urged Democrats not to try to ‘reclaim’ the ‘broken’ Constitution but to ‘radically alter the basic rules of the game’.

The turbine-turned-tiny house is also an experiment in material reuse that could become more critical as wind turbines across the globe reach the end of their life cycles.

Porsche CFO Meschke assesses that China is effectively lost to European automakers in both the short and medium term. “We simply can’t assume anymore that the market there will return to what it once was for European manufacturers. China has transformed toward electrification, and unfortunately, Europeans no longer play a significant role there.”

Colossus, the world’s largest AI supercomputer, is being used to train xAI’s Grok family of large language models, with chatbots offered as a feature for X Premium subscribers. xAI is in the process of doubling the size of Colossus to a combined total of 200,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. The supporting facility and state-of-the-art supercomputer was built by xAI and NVIDIA in just 122 days, instead of the typical timeframe for systems of this size that can take many months to years. It took 19 days from the time the first rack rolled onto the floor until training began.

xAI is currently more than doubling its size by adding another 50,000 H100s and 50,000 H200 Nvidia GPUs

HTML Forms have powerful validation mechanisms, but they are heavily underused. In fact, not many people even know much about them. Is this because of some flaw in their design? Let’s explore.

We present a model to convert photos of handwriting into a digital format that reproduces component pen strokes, without the need for specialized equipment.

Answer: the talk claims that “the legacy of the crypto wars was to trade privacy for encryption—and to usher in an age of mass corporate surveillance”. Wow. That sounds bad, and surprising, definitely something worth understanding better. If cryptographic export controls had instead remained in place after 1999, how would that have improved privacy and reduced corporate surveillance?

But seven or eight years later, Fox’s clinic emailed her to say she was being de-rostered—removed from her doctor’s list of patients—and would have to find a new doctor. The doctor didn’t come in very much, and they needed her for other patients. “Don’t you just shift your patients around?” Fox recalls asking. They didn’t, and it was up to her to find someone new. With three kids and a declining number of doctors accepting new patients, that proved easier said than done. Her family joined the 650,000 other Albertans who, according to the Alberta Medical Association, lack access to regular primary care.

The Most Important Car Person You’ve Never Heard Of — Ferdinand Piëch

XiaomiSU7Ultra prototype has set the record as the fastest four-door car in Nürburgring Nordschleife history. FPV.

“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?”

These circumstances did not yet exist in 1692, when Dutch artist A. Boogert created a huge, almost 900-page book on color, Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau. But they were slowly coming into being, thanks to studies by philosopher-scientists like Isaac Newton.

Both sides have been trying to use artificial intelligence to speed up these phone, paper and fax-heavy processes, but there’s concern that if both sides build separate admin bots, it will lead to a robot logjam rather than a human one. “I think we’re headed for a battle of AI versus AI unless we change course,” Sumit Rana, Epic’s president said during the company’s annual meeting while dressed as the Belgian comic book character Tin-Tin.

THIS YEAR IS the 50th anniversary of Scarry’s 1974 Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, which strikes me as a commemoration worthy of ballyhoo, especially now that, as a dad myself, I’ve spent so much time ferrying my own daughter to and from school and birthday parties in various cars that—well, mostly goed. (I’ve owned five automobiles in my life, all of them cheap, one of which smoked and required the driver’s side door to be kept shut with a bungee cord hooked to the opposite armrest, stretched across both driver and passenger. What can I say? I was a young cartoonist on a cartoonist’s budget.)

Colorado Secretary of State posted spreadsheet with voting system passwords

The Distaste for Housing Density

@_CitizenAG has filed a federal lawsuit after discovering Wisconsin’s DOT gave 2 nonprofits DMV data containing the personal info of millions of Americans AND non-citizens for targeted voter registration & outreach efforts

In many cases, we are seeing websites that have served visitors for years lose 95%+ of their traffic from Google and not even rank for their brand name. This is a shadow ban where something in Google’s system has effectively blocked that website from existing. Google refuses to acknowledge it is happening or speak about it. Meanwhile, search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing rank Kevin’s page in the #1 and #3 spot, as they should.

This is the story of Ed Roberts, the man who created the personal computer, launched the careers of Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak, and decided—at the height of his success—to walk away. It is based on archival video interviews with Roberts, Gates, Steve Wozniak, and many of the other key figures involved. I also draw on written accounts by Forrest Mims, Paul Allen, and others who were there; contemporary publications, such as Dr. Dobbs Journaland Popular Electronics; and books like Fire in the Valleyand Endless Loop: A History of Basic. 

There is a good chance that a system in which the Europeans essentially defend themselves and the United States plays, at most, a peripheral role in European affairs would be more stable than the one we are now living with.

This is one of those documents that could be easily overlooked – in truth is is a nuclear bomb. I am familiar with some of this investigation that has been underway for a few years now. It is not pretty. But there is only one truth & it’s way past time for every American to know.

As for the bondholders, in the 2023 debt swap they negotiated a better collateral package, higher contractual interest payments and strict covenants. With those elements, as well as hedges, other side trades and falling interest rates, they will do just fine. But Apollo and the others should rue that they did not demand equity warrants. That would have let them share at least some of the spoils of the improbable turnaround engineered by Garcia.  

Oracle’s latest EHR is equipped with cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities that will make it easier to navigate and set up, the company said. There are no menus or drop-down screens, and doctors can pull up the information they need by asking questions with their voices. Ideally, this will allow doctors to spend less time searching through records and more time caring for patients, Oracle said.  “It’s not just a scribe. It’s not an assistant. It’s almost like having your own resident,” Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, told CNBC in an interview. 

CBS doesn’t own the airwaves, we do, the people of the United States own the airwaves. CBS is licensed to use the airwaves, but only to advance the public benefit.

Beyond the previously untold story of China’s early exploration of the hydrogen bomb theory, the article also explores in detail the so-called “100 days in Shanghai”—a milestone of China’s hydrogen bomb development—and describes the efforts that led to a series of three nuclear tests that happened in 1966 and 1967 and that are often called “the trilogy” of the H-bomb development in China.

It took bravery and courage for IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and Special Agent Joseph Ziegler to blow the whistle on the politicization and misconduct in the federal criminal investigation of Hunter Biden. Their lawfully protected disclosures to Congress have resulted in unrelenting personal and professional attacks by the

Farley told The Wall Street Journal that the growth of the Chinese auto sector poses an existential threat to his company, and that “executing to a Chinese standard is now going to be the most important priority.”
Source: https://research.gavekal.com/article/prejudice-and-china/

Use tags to organize your notes and set reminders:

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?