Monthly Archives: June 2022

6.26

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Khodorkovsky is ambivalent about Alexei Navalny, the charismatic Putin critic who was recently moved to a maximum-security prison. “We have absolutely no differences as far as this war is concerned or the need for regime change. But we disagree quite a lot on the future of Russia, which is normal.” Khodorkovsky argues that Navalny sees himself as a future tsar. “I think believing in a good tsar is a very dangerous idea for Russia today” — because any tsar-like figure needs an external enemy to govern. Instead the next government of Russia “should be put together by the regions, because the regions, unlike the tsar, don’t have any vested interest in foreign aggression.”

It takes mountains of money and many years to even get through the process of permitting and approval to being a project in the US. Furthermore, while these policies intend to protect the environment, they actually don’t. They simply slow down the process and increase costs.

This reality should be a concrete warning to Western countries, who have scaled down military industrial capacity and sacrificed scale and effectiveness for efficiency. This strategy relies on flawed assumptions about the future of war, and has been influenced by both the bureaucratic culture in Western governments and the legacy of low-intensity conflicts. Currently, the West may not have the industrial capacity to fight a large-scale war. If the US government is planning to once again become the arsenal of democracy, then the existing capabilities of the US military-industrial base and the core assumptions that have driven its development need to be re-examined.

Europe on brink of gas crisis as Russia squeezes market

Central banks try to block attempts by poor countries to use digital currency to upend monetary norms.

For example, in my own apartment building, I once asked the front desk if I could leave my dry cleaning with them, so a cleaner could pick it up while I was traveling. They said no. It was too much of a liability. When I told the story to an Irish friend, he chuckled and mockingly replied: “That would never happen in my country.”

This same lack of imagination makes it difficult to understand the primacy of foreign policy in understanding the world on a day-to-day basis. If you lack imagination, you will tend to assume that the current configurations of countries, alliances, and so on are simply going to last.

The second principle of our long-term development is a reliance on entrepreneurial freedom. Every private initiative aimed at benefiting Russia should receive maximum support and space for implementation. (Putin)

Try searching for a product on your smartphone and you’ll see that what was once a small teal barfeaturing one “sponsored link” is now a hard-to-decipher, multi-scroll slog, filled with paid-product carousels; multiple paid-link ads; the dreaded, algorithmically generated “People also ask” box; another paid carousel; a sponsored “buying guide”; and a Maps widget showing stores selling products near your location. Once you’ve scrolled through that, multiple screen lengths below, you’ll find the unpaid search results. Like much of the internet in 2022, it feels monetized to death, soulless, and exhausting.

The US Department of Agriculture estimates that wheat fields statewide will average roughly 39 bushels per acre this year, down sharply from 52 bushels per acre last year. But many farms in the western half of the state will produce far less than that.

In August last year, a friend of Mo’s named Shiu Ka-chun received a letter from her, which he shared excerpts from on social media. Mo said she had been teaching English to other prisoners and that her Christian faith was helping her. She thanked Cardinal Joseph Zen, the 90-year-old retired bishop of Hong Kong, for visiting. “I may be stumbling but not falling,” she wrote. In January this year, Zen gave her Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazovto read. Two months ago, to the shock of many, Zen himself was arrested under the national security law, though not remanded into custody. (He is still in Hong Kong.) Apart from the odd letter, Mo and many other former prominent politicians have ceased talking to the press. In rare cases where activists have been released on bail, they have had to agree to forgo public commentary altogether. Mo was denied bail partly due to WhatsApp messages she sent to international reporters.

Those deliverables might not add up to a big fat bank account. But they create a healthy culture. So the Long Tail does have a role for us—but it should be built on our wisdom and generosity, not our business plans.

6.19

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But inherent in the focus-on-upgrade customers is this: your target customer ages over time.

Now, an important disclaimer. This post does not represent a doxxing of anyone. It will not include any private information about any of the indexed Good White Men. I will link only to the publicly-available social media accounts and publication pages of the offenders and include photographs culled from professional sources. I insist that you not do anything to facilitate the harassment or doxxing of these Good White Men in response to their inclusion here, and if you engage with them on social media I hope that you will be respectful.

Musk said he has voted for Democrats “because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.”

With 6 kilowatts of solar capacity and 30 kilowatt-hours of battery storage, the system can typically meet the center’s power needs. Occasionally, members cut the lights and fans during the day to save electricity for an evening dance class. Still, Robles says it’s better than running expensive, polluting diesel generators or depending on the island’s electric grid — which, despite years of post-hurricane repairs, remains prone to routine outages, sweeping blackouts and frequent voltage surges that fry people’s appliances. In early April, the entire island lost grid power for three days after an aging electric breaker caught fire on the southern coast.

Sixty-eight congressional Republicans voted against the latest round of Ukraine funding. Sure, it was partly an anti-Biden play—but much more is going on.

A hot-headed coder is accused of exposing the agency’s hacking arsenal. Did he betray his country because he was pissed off at his colleagues?

This article has been amended since publication to clarify the ACLU’s position was in a tweet rather than their statement

“No one emptied the bank accounts,” he says. “The fact that no one has screwed it up in 500 years is impressive, and I will work hard not to screw it up in my generation.”

The audio analyses of the gunfire that likely killed Abu Akleh point to one person shooting from an estimated distance that nearly matches the span between the journalists and the IDF convoy. Based on video The Post filmed in Jenin, Abu Akleh and other journalists identified as press would likely have been visible from the IDF convoy’s position, which was roughly 182 meters (597 feet) away. At least one soldier in the convoy was using a telescopic scope, the IDF said later in a news release. A live stream on TikTok filmed seven minutes before the shooting shows a relatively calm scene with people milling about. Distant single gunshots are heard on occasion but there are no signs of a firefight.

There’s a lot of work to be done across the imaging industry to boost support for true HDR stills. We need editing tools to let us fine-tune Raws into HDR stills, just as we’re used to doing when produce our own JPEGs. But above all, we need wider support and cross-compatibility so that we can share and view 10-bit files without having to connect our camera to the display. Until this is resolved, the ability to shoot 10-bit stills is of disappointingly limited use.

6.12

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Arcades, Churches and Laundromats: A Trucker’s Haven on the Precipice of Change

Political donations from the sector surged to more than $26 million during 2021 and the first three months of this year. That influx of cash is outpacing spending by internet giants, drug makers and the defense industry — providing a fresh pool of financing for candidates heading into November’s congressional elections.

Before dropping out, Resnick had already done internships at McLaren, the Formula One race car company, chaperoned in England by his parents; then at Elon Musk’s Tesla; and at the Silicon Valley office of the world’s leading commercial drone-maker, DJI Technology of China — now his main competitor.

Meanwhile, Apple has stepped into advertising in a bigger way, filling the data void it created. Apple has a measurement platform called the SKAdNetwork, which apps use to pull some data from iPhones to track ad performance. Apple also is developing its own ad products, particularly in search advertising. Apple helps app developers place ads when consumers browse the App Store, showing ads in results similar to how Google and Amazon return ads in their search properties. Apple’s critics have even accused the company of leveraging privacy concerns to benefit its own advertising ambitions. Apple does not reveal how big its ad business is, but a recent report from Toni Sacconaghi, a Bernstein analyst, estimated Apple’ ad revenue grew from $300 million in 2017 to $4 billion in 2021. That’s only 2% of Apple’s total yearly revenue, which mostly comes from device sales and services.

Yet amid a malaise that afflicts much of the city, entrepreneurial energy remains evident. Central Avenue’s sidewalks crowd with the brightly colored booths of street vendors, selling a broad range of food, clothes, and other products—more like Mexico City or Mumbai than the South L.A. of the past. Some new apartments are rising to replace the decrepit ones, and the street-level liveliness seems more Washington Heights than car-centric Los Angeles. Despite its troubles, Central Avenue does not exhibit the deathly sense of abandonment of places like the South Side of Chicago or other inner-city communities, where the spirit of enterprise has all but disappeared.

“We still have potential,” insists 63-year-old Rick Caruso, a billionaire running what once seemed a quixotic campaign for mayor. On June 7, Caruso will be a candidate in the city’s open mayoral primary, facing off against, among others, the race’s early frontrunner, long-time congresswoman Karen Bass. (The top two finishers will meet in a run-off general election in November if no candidate wins a majority of the vote.) Without any press, but for me, Caruso spent a recent morning at the Beehive, a new Southside business incubator located amid the detritus of the city’s industrial past. The youthful activity of the startups seemed to energize him. “I want to get on the phone and get investors to come back here—but they won’t if they see instability, the homeless camps, and the crime. That has to change.”

Though he has discarded his designer suit, Caruso cannot help but appear natty with his coiffed hair and monogrammed white shirt. The grandson of Italian immigrants, and son of an entrepreneur who founded Dollar Rent a Car, he started his real estate business here in 1987 and made a fortune worth more than $4 billion by developing shopping complexes, most notably the Grove, adjacent to the iconic Farmer’s Market. A key Caruso theme is restoring the promise that made L.A. the premier urban growth center of the last century, during which the city’s population grew from barely 100,000 in 1900 to nearly 4 million. Now, Los Angeles’s populationis in decline and its appeal has faded. The city peaked at a population of 3,983,000 in 2019, and fell 134,000 to 3,849,000 by 2021, with a 41,000 loss in the last year.

They argued that an upgrade to the crew alerting system would have triggered additional pilot training on simulators and Boeing would then have had no reason to minimize and hide MCAS as it did to avoid extra pilot training. If MCAS had been subject to such scrutiny during certification, the report suggests FAA engineers could well have flagged its design flaws. “The additional training would have likely removed the incentive for Boeing to limit disclosure of the MCAS system, thus making its existence part of the pilot training process and possibly identifying and removing MCAS’s dependence on a single angle-of-attack indicator,” the report states.

Perhaps the biggest impact from the Boudin recall — both politically and practically — is the loss of the most popular scapegoat for frustrations over crime in San Francisco. Removing an easy target of blame could lead to more scrutiny of the San Francisco Police Department, which “solves fewer crimes despite larger staffing per city resident and costs per area patrolled” compared with other California jurisdictions, according to a March report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Boudin repeatedly argued during the campaign that district attorneys can only bring charges when police make arrests. The San Francisco Police Department’s arrest rates have been decreasing for years.

“Were the alliance similarly tested, nato armed forces could find that they, too, have many of the problems Russia has had in Ukraine. It follows that the alliance should not take a dismissive attitude towards Russia”

These patent licenses need transparency. The NIH doled out $32 billion in government grants last year alone, understanding how those grants benefit patent holders, including the NIH itself, is a critical next step in untangling the complicated nexus between pharmacy companies, research institutions, and the federal workforce. 

6.5

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A disaster and a metaphor. What is presented by the government as “controlled” goes wildly out of control.

In a hilly city like Hong Kong, as Cheung points out, the class hierarchy can be literal: “the higher the altitude, the more expensive the apartments”. Both Lim and Cheung struggled with finding affordable housing in the city. The real issue is not how much land there is in Hong Kong but who owns it: the city’s real estate, as well as key sectors such as transportation and telecommunications, are controlled by a handful of family-owned conglomerates. The oligarchical system originated under British rule. Now Beijing relies on the tycoons to advance its agendas, and in turn provides policy conditions favourable to their businesses.

Near-term risk reduction through weapon procurement will provide a significant cost advantage to U.S. and allied forces. An Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyer costs approximately $2 billion to build, not including its weapons or operating costs.12 It could be damaged, disabled, or sunk by a range of Chinese antiship cruise missiles or ballistic missiles. Conversely, a Chinese Type 52 or Type 55 destroyer could be disabled or sunk by a U.S. Long-Range Antiship Missile (LRASM) or a Naval Strike Missile costing approximately $2 million. The math for mines and torpedoes is of the same order of magnitude. While delivering these weapons requires costly assets, surface vessels are among the most cost-ineffective options.13

The time on pilot Norman Schwartz’s Rolex read just before midnight. He had slowed to just above stall speed, and was flying as low as possible over the pitch black forests of northern China, north of the Korean border at the Yalu River. On board his C-47 were CIA officers John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau. Their mission that night: pick up Li Chun Ying, a CIA agent. The CIA was then recruiting agents from anti-Communist guerilla forces, and training them in the use of small arms, radio operations, and demolition, and then sending them into the field to sow as much mayhem as they could.

In the early ’50s, China didn’t have radar-controlled anti-aircraft weapons. This gave covert operations pilots like Schwartz a big advantage because, on a dark night, their planes were largely undetectable. Pilots like Schwartz were accustomed to performing reconnaissance overflights, in addition to dropping propaganda leaflets, using the darkness of night as cover, but this recovery operation was by no means a routine observation mission. 

The C-47 was completely unmarked aside from the tail number, B813. This was a civilian plane. The tail number would identify it, to casual observers, as an everyday airplane, but everyone on board knew exactly who they were working for. Downey and Fecteau were on the CIA payroll, while Schwartz and co-pilot Robert Snoddy were hand-picked out of a crop of civilian pilots recruited to fly for the CIA. The pilots indeed had day jobs, ferrying cargo around Asia for Civil Air Transport (a civilian airline) but sometimes the cargo happened to be anti-Communist guerrilla units or nationalist agents. And you wouldn’t find the landing sites on any commercial aviation map.

The world’s cargo ships, which transport around 90% of global trade, do not always make it to their destination without incident. According to the Safety and Shipping Review by insurance company Allianz, 27 cargo vessels were lost in major incidents during 2021, and 357 during the past decade. They catch fire. They hit rocks, reefs and sand bars. They malfunction. But they don’t always sink. Whenever there’s a chance to rescue a large ship, their owners almost always take it because these vessels can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Italy Is Held Back by 2.6 Million People Who Have Given Up on Work

XEROX PARC’S ENGINEERS ON HOW THEY INVENTED THE FUTURE—AND HOW XEROX LOST IT

Court upholds $573,000 penalty against East Sacramento homeowner who worked on cars in yard

Statistics Norway wants to receive several million daily receipts from food stores, signalling a new era in state data collection. Privacy advocates and the supermarkets themselves are unhappy.


Doug Hitchcox, the staff naturalist at Maine Audubon, gets dozens of emails a day asking him to identify birds: What’s this bird? Can you tell me what this is? “And they’re robins. They’re almost all robins,” he says.