In a few weeks, the U.S. military went from being in control of Afghanistan to staging a frantic evacuation of troops and civilians from an isolated, vulnerable airport in the middle of Taliban-occupied Kabul. What went wrong?

Schlörwagen: The bizarre German car that was super-aerodynamic but very impractical, 1939

Apple commends groups like the Citizen Lab and Amnesty Tech for their groundbreaking work to identify cybersurveillance abuses and help protect victims. To further strengthen efforts like these, Apple will be contributing $10 million, as well as any damages from the lawsuit, to organizations pursuing cybersurveillance research and advocacy.

Dezeen Awards 2021 architecture project category winners revealed

Have we been thinking about the pandemic wrong? The effect of population structure on transmission

It’s well known that the Green Revolution dramatically increased crop yields. In a new paper, Gollin, Hansen and Wingender use a general equilibrium model to show that the effects were even more far reaching. For a given acre, the Green Revolution raised the yields of some crops by 44% between 1965 and 2010. But the total effect was even larger because higher yields incentivized farmers to substitute away from lower-yield crops into higher yield crops. Moreover, higher yields meant that less farm labor was required which shifted populations into manufacturing. When one takes into account all of these knock-on effects the authors find substantial effects on GDP. Indeed, the authors estimate that if the Green Revolution never happened GDP per capita in the developing world would be half of its current level.

Requiring consent pretty much eliminates street and most documentary photography as a genre. For some people that would be an absolutely fair price to pay. For many others, myself included, that would be a very unfortunate world to live in. I fell in love with street photography because of its vital place in our culture, reflecting our fragile reality back to ourselves. For that purpose, I allow photography the possibility of sometimes making someone slightly uncomfortable.

If Allison’s thesis was correct, then tensions between the two powers should have grown commensurate with growing Chinese capabilities, rather than risen and fallen according to actions.

In Garfield Heights, Ohio sits one of the most toxic shopping centers constructed in the United States. After nearly 2 years of construction, City View Center opened in 2006 as a power center, containing big-box stores such as Walmart, Giant Eagle, Circuit City, PetSmart, Jo-Ann Fabrics, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Bed Bath & Beyond, Office Max and Marshalls. Issues arose due to the center being built atop a landfill. One tenant after another moved out over the years due to health concerns and structural issues, and the center was eventually abandoned. So how exactly did all of this arise, and why was the center built here anyway?

The Canadian group Quebec Maple Syrup Producers recently announced it was releasing about 50 million pounds of its strategic maple syrup reserves — about half of the total stockpile. Quebec produces nearly 70% of the world’s maple syrup, with the US being its biggest client for the sweet stuff. However, this year producers weren’t able to keep up with worldwide demand, which jumped 21%, according to Bloomberg.

California port truckers ‘drowning’ in supply chain inefficiencies.

On May 28, 2015, the archaeologists excavating in Pylos, southwestern Greece, discovered a Bronze Age tomb with a skeleton surrounded by rich artifacts, suggesting it belonged to an important man.

The head of the South African Medical Association told the BBC that the cases found so far in South Africa – where only about 24% of the population is fully vaccinated – were not severe, but said investigations into the variant were still at a very early stage. “The patients are mostly complaining about a sore body and tiredness, extreme tiredness and we see it in the younger generation, it’s not the older people… We’re not talking about patients that might go straight to a hospital and be admitted,” Dr Angelique Coetzee said.

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

Peloton Blocks Users From Using #LetsGoBrandon Hashtag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Porch Cameras and Facebook Groups Are Turning Streets into Surveillance States

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monopolies Slowly Destroying the Pentagon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crypto Cities

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

Generator-maker Generac set to buy smart thermostat startup Ecobee

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

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

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

Rumble setting up US headquarters in Florida.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Your Car Will Become Even More Like an iPhone

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

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

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

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

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

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