Monthly Archives: April 2022

4.24

Posted on by

Lancet paper: The reinfection rate in the UK, encompassing alpha and delta waves, was ~0.7% in adults and ~0.2% in children. It is astonishing that politicians and public health officials push mandates that ignore immunity after covid recovery.

The meltdown over Chomsky’s innocuous comments is an indication of a broader, profoundly creepy culture of enforced consensus on this issue. There’s immense bipartisan agreement in favor of helping Ukraine resist the Russian advance, both among politicians and within the media, and yet even this near-unanimity is not enough for many people, who seemingly want literal unanimity. Nonpartisan media is festooned with pro-Ukraine coverage, and yet the rare bit of skepticism that squeaks through provokes outrage. On social media, dissenters are regularly called traitors and fifth columnists. “You’re either with us or you’re with the enemy” is the dominant creed, right now. I haven’t seen an insistence on groupthink like this since the post-9/11 world. And what’s particularly dark for me is that people who define themselves by championing dissent and free speech – this whole constellation of anti-social-justice-hegemony dissident opinion publications and personalities – have been no less likely to demand that everyone get onboard with the dominant narrative. (And a lot of people who regularly mock Instagram-bio politics have put up Ukrainian flags in theirs.)

Even though it was on their ranch, they had never been allowed down inside the missile silo. Sometimes they saw convoys of Humvees and a wide-load semi traveling on their dirt roads toward the launch site, and once Ed had glimpsed part of the Minuteman III as it was being lowered into the ground, with its black-and-white painted warhead and rocket engine. But the exact comings and goings of the missile on their land remained classified. The 80-foot bunker was mostly a place of their imagination.

Kamikaze Drones in Russia’s War Against Ukraine Point to Future “Killer Robots”

Netflix Estimates More Than 100 Million Non-Paying Households Use Shared Passwords

She didn’t decline to comment!

If you read AWS discussions on Hacker News or other developer communities you will find that the issue of billing keeps popping up. AWS billing is a lot like taxes in USA – it depends on so many things and you can never be sure how much you will be paying when the month is over. Furthermore, AWS billing is uncapped, which has significant potential for trouble.

Four decades later, polyester rules the textile world. It accounts for more than half of global fiber consumption, about twice that of second-place cotton. Output stands at nearly 58 million tons a year, more than 10 times what it was in the early ’80s. And nobody complains about polyester’s look and feel. If there’s a problem today, it’s that people like polyester too much. It’s everywhere, even at the bottom of the ocean.

America’s largest labor union is the National Education Association (NEA), organized in 1906 with a congressional charter “to elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching; and to promote the cause of education in the United States.”

One hundred and sixteen years later, the average individual U.S. teacher salary is $60,909, just below the median household income of $67,521 for the country in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Inadequate teacher pay has long been a staple of NEA rhetoric and advocacy, as seen in this April 29, 2019, statement by then-NEA President Lily Ekelsen Garcia:

“Across the nation educator pay continues to erode, expanding the large pay gap between what teachers earn and what similarly educated and experienced professionals in other fields earn.

“Educators don’t do this work to get rich, they do this work because they believe in students. But their pay is not commensurate with the dedication and expertise they bring to the profession.”

one can of Coca Cola will get you three cabbages, or five eggs, or five rolls of toilet paper, or two AA batteries, while a Pepsi will get you nothing.

The initiative’s mission is to defend shareholders and employees of public companies from “woke” policies and to ensure corporate accountability, the outlet said.

4.17

Posted on by

It’s worth noting that only about 10% of employed Americans worked remotely in March because of COVID, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over half of workers, 50.9%, reported being already required to return in-person full-time, according to Workhuman’s April Human Workplace Index, a monthly survey of 1,000 full-time U.S. workers.

Ok, so here’s the point: Despite all the big talk and incredible claims, when push came to shove, the Army had nothing/NOTHING to use as a basis for planning. Lord knows we threw enough time and money at the problem, but in the end, Schwarzkopf just had to pray that we had enough combat power when our troops rolled across the line. He would have given anything up to half his kingdom for the QJM at that moment. He had a lot of opinions to choose from, but nothing solidly based on history. And frankly, I don’t think the situation has changed in the intervening 30 years. Now that the chips are down, people aren’t likely to care WEI/WUVs were developed by the opinions of various branch influence groups. But a model with an historical basis would be worth its weight in gold.


In a story that shows how hard it is to deter a billionaire ravenous for public money, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and The Washington Post fame appears to have prevailed upon buddies in the Senate to keep alive a childhood dream of not only going to the moon, but getting the public to pay for it. A Bezos company officially lost this moon contract three times in less than a year, but the fourth time’s a charm: thanks to congress, his Jason Voorhees-like determination may be rewarded with a contract worth $6 billion or more. On March 28th, Joe Biden released his fiscal year 2023 budget, which despite eyebrow-raising changes — in particular, a 10% increase in defense spending — generated few headlines. One of the few items the press did cover was this passage:

“Zeitenwende is real, but the country is the same,” said Thomas Bagger, a senior German diplomat who will be the next ambassador to Poland. “Not everyone likes it.”

In fact, TSMC was able to raise rates by the most in over three years. The Taiwanese company doesn’t release prices, but we can approximate it from the data it does provide. For the March quarter, it brought in $4,650 for every 12-inch wafer it churned out for customers. That’s 10% higher than the prior quarter.

Though several militia members explicitly opposed kidnapping the governor, Chapel and Robeson helped hatch a ludicrous plot to snatch Whitmer from her vacation home and take her away for trial. FBI operatives took the participants, who prattled idiotically about stealing a Blackhawk helicopter, for drives near Whitmer’s vacation home, which supposedly proved they were going to nab the governor and unleash havoc. It was all a setup. Shortly before that excursion, an FBI agent texted instructions to Chapel: “Mission is to kill the governor specifically.” There were as many FBI informants and undercover agents as there were purported plotters in this case.

He pivots to the present and China’s latest Covid surge. “By the way,” he says, “our people are sleeping in sleeping bags by the hundreds in the Shanghai FedEx facility, to keep the economy of the world going as we speak.” Mr. Smith wants to make clear that none of this was easy. Congress’s last Covid relief stimulus “created an enormous amount of withdrawal of labor from the market,” and that had a direct impact: “People make the supply chain this arcane subject. Hell, it was a lack of people to off-load trucks, and of people to drive the trucks.” There wasn’t “a big problem going through those ports out there. They weren’t even working three shifts. It’s simple: you couldn’t move it once it got ashore.”

4.10

Posted on by

It’s really an odd game, these interviews. The rules are mostly there for you to see before you play, with books detailing the process, online sites dedicated to the questions asked, and many avenues to practice. Interestingly, some companies also tell you about the rules and what to expect, even going as far as recommending specific subject areas to study (or, helpfully, that they won’t be asking any dynamic programming questions). Some of the companies even recommend specific sites to practice on.

The 1950 census records were released by the U.S. National Archives on April 1, 2022. This website provides full access to the 1950 census images, including population schedules, enumeration district maps, and enumeration district descriptions.

How do consumers currently view hybrids, EVs, and gasoline vehicles;, and what does their purchase intent for each vehicle category look like?

In Yarvin’s worldview, what keeps American democracy running today is not elections but illusions projected by a set of institutions, including the press and universities, that work in tandem with the federal bureaucracy in a complex he calls the Cathedral. “The mystery of the Cathedral,” Yarvin writes, “is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.”

U.S. cities still bear scars of the Federal Housing Administration’s segregation policies of the 1930s. I can’t speak on the lived experiences of other U.S. cities, like Cleveland, Los Angeles, or Chicago, where communities like mine were also color-coded, but I’m a daily witness to the ways redlining continues to divide my city.

Zuckbucks were used to achieve targeted disenfranchisement, with rural Louisianans treated less favorably than fellow citizens in cities.

David Mamet talks to Joe Rogan about why we need the Bible.

The Paypal founder then also makes a mockery of all those who say that bitcoin is not an inflation hedge with just one chart – the chart showing how anyone who had a sense of the inflationary tsunami that is coming, made a killing in early 2020 when the could have bought bitcoin at a far lower price.

It is not illegal per se for Chinese firms to hire Taiwanese engineers. Taiwanese law, however, prohibits Chinese investment in some parts of the semiconductor supply chain including chip design and requires reviews for other areas such as chip packaging, making it very difficult for Chinese chip firms to operate on the island legally.

4.3

Posted on by

That’s a whole lot of effort to suppress a story that seems to be … true? The New York Times reported March 16 that the emails are part of the evidence in a federal investigation now before a grand jury.

Exxon is mining bitcoin in North Dakota as part of its plan to slash emissions

Finally the upshot: it is feasible for a computer to do what I did as a concierge Google searcher. The answer to many of these questions was clearly on the Web, though not always highly ranked by Google. This is simply a question of crawling and indexing different corpora.

Why in the world has this idiotic trend of abstracting everything away by layers upon layers of complexity gained such a strong foothold in the industry? Has everyone except the “unix greybeards” gone mad!?

Kaspersky published a statement on the FCC public notice, expressing disappointment in the FCC’s decision. Speaking of the 2017 BOD, the statement reads, “As there has been no public evidence to otherwise justify those actions since 2017, and the FCC announcement specifically refers to the Department of Homeland Security’s 2017 determination as the basis for today’s decision, Kaspersky believes today’s expansion of such prohibition on entities that receive FCC telecommunication-related subsidies is similarly unsubstantiated and is a response to the geopolitical climate rather than a comprehensive evaluation of the integrity of Kaspersky’s products and services.”

The Weird, Wonderful History of Fairground Photography

The court concluded that drone photography was covered by the First Amendment: In the analogous context of filmmaking, the Fifth Circuit has noted that “the First Amendment protects the act of making film, as ‘there is no fixed First Amendment line between the act of creating speech and the speech itself.'” Furthermore, courts have never recognized a “distinction between the process of creating a form of pure speech (such as writing or painting) and the product of these processes (the essay or the artwork) in terms of the First Amendment protection afforded.

Here, Plaintiffs have established that Chapter 423 restricts their use of drones to record the news, necessarily constraining their ability to disseminate the news. It is uncontested that budgetary and other constraints may make drones the only option for recording certain events. Defendants assert that other options—namely expensive helicopters—can fill the same role in facilitating news production. Yet they cannot dispute the extreme price and safety differences between these technologies. Furthermore, Pappalardo and the organizational plaintiffs’ members have stated that drones are central to their journalistic pursuits, claims which Defendants do not refute. The court concluded that the restrictions were content-based and thus subject to strict scrutiny:

Yetke and her husband, Richard, 80, have found Holland America Line’s Grand World Voyage—an annual cruise that circumnavigates the globe for up to 128 days—to be the perfect way to escape Chicago’s harsh winters while seeing the world. “You have a room on the ship, and that’s your home,” says Yetke. “The staff feeds you, provides entertainment, and cleans your room twice a day. It all meets our needs at this stage in life, and of course we make friends—because the same people come back year after year.” The Yetke’s have already taken Holland America Line’s Grand World Voyage 12 times, and they’re tentatively booked on the 2023 voyage aboard Holland America’s 1,917 passenger MS Zuiderdam. A big selling point for Yetke on the company’s world cruises: They typically sail round-trip from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “I don’t want to fly halfway around the world to get on a cruise ship,” she says. “Florida is easy.”

The scientists gave the virus new functions—enabling it to spread efficiently among ferrets, which are genetically closer to humans than mice—as a way to gauge its risks to people. Both studies had received NIH funding.