Monthly Archives: August 2022

8.28

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How did our medieval ancestors use dove faeces, fox lungs, salted owl or eel grease in medical treatments? A Wellcome funded project at Cambridge University Library is about to find out

Lumber size standards came into being almost a century ago to meet the need for a common understanding between the mill and markets that were separated by increasing distances of rail or water transportation. Early concepts called for rough lumber to be of full nominal size, often in the dry condition. After World War I, the increasing demand for construction lumber led to the first national size standard in 1924. This was revised in 1926, 1928, 1939, and 1953, while still another revision is proposed for adoption in 1964

Fellow Democrats in the State Legislature have now sent him a bill that would allow the nation’s broadest experiment with supervised drug-injection sites, in the hope of reducing a deluge of opioid overdoses. Local governments that serve more than 11 million residents — including San Francisco and Los Angeles — could authorize centers that offer clean needles and have staff who can intervene quickly when an overdose occurs.

My subscribers will receive the book in installments. And I will continue to do lots of other articles too—so this is a plus for them. What they call a lagniappein New Orleans. I hope and expect to pick up more paid subscribers, so I benefit too.

Before they cautioned Buttigieg against going too hard, Biden’s aides had been planning his own big speech at the end of July, in Wisconsin — until aides to Gov. Tony Evers, who’s in a tight reelection fight, urged him not to come so they could avoid being together. White House aides had decided to go through with it anyway, until they realized that the necessary security measures would force them to cancel the local favorite Oshkosh Air Show. Now that big Biden speech is being planned for shortly after Labor Day. Aides are preparing a hard-hitting kick off for midterm campaigning, with the President touting tangible, long-talked-about wins like lowering prescription drug costs and gun restrictions while hammering Republicans for being extremists who are in the pocket of special interests. The hole Biden is hoping to crawl out of is deep, and it’s dark. Around the time when the Wisconsin speech would have happened, top Democratic operatives were quietly passing around numbers that left them depressed but not surprised.Biden’s disapproval rating was higher than his approval rating in Delaware — the state he represented for 36 years in the Senate, where they named the main rest stop and the train station for him years before he was elected president.

US private equity group Blackstone is vying to buy Pink Floyd’s back catalogue, a big bet on music rights that could value the band’s songs at almost half a billion dollars

Cotsworth had figured this out and in 1907, formed the International Fixed Calendar League, an organization to gain support for the idea of a fixed calendar internationally. Here’s what his calendar looked like:

The safe bet is that undecided voters will swing toward the opposition party in the closing days of the campaign. In this likely scenario, Biden’s dismal approval rating will bring down the Democratic congressional majorities. That, after all, is how the world works. And yet the world hasn’t been working as expected for the last six years. The most unpopular candidate in the history of the Gallup poll became the first U.S. president with no experience in government or the military. That president became the first chief executive to lose reelection in 28 years. We have had a once-in-a-century pandemic, the largest single-year jump in violent crime ever recorded, the breakdown of the southern border, the worst inflation in 40 years, the first cross-border invasion in Europe since 1945, and a Supreme Court decision that reversed a half-century-old precedent. Things are weird. And if I am right about the new politics of bifurcation, things are about to get weirder.

That’s not how tech works. But I think that’s code that they’ll be cutting their tech team in a pretty aggressive way. Their software development team has 1,000 people, which is mind-boggling for a real estate brokerage. I think they’re on track to spend around $360 million on tech this year. So there’s a huge cost there.

In most cases, if you find a price unfair, you wouldn’t agree to it, so if someone does agree, that’s evidence that they find it fair, which is evidence that it is fair. Furthermore, even if it wasn’t fair to begin with, the agreement makes it morally privileged, since the two people both have the right to decide on what terms they conduct an exchange. (Assuming this exchange isn’t immoral for some other reason – e.g., maybe there’s no fair price for assassination.) But almost none of the people who talk about fair prices would like this; they think a huge range of voluntary transactions involve unfair prices

The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, and the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order. While ancient gods could have their share of travails and difficulties, they remained in that special class of gods. But Jesus was the first ancient deity who suffered the punishment of the slave, the lowest ranking member of the human race. And the sect that succeeded him generalized such glorification of suffering: dying as an inferior is more magnificent than living as the mighty. The Romans were befuddled to see members of that sect use for symbol the cross –the punishment for slaves. It had to be some type of joke in their eyes.

8.21

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My favorite Sun Tzu quote might be: “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.” First, it suggests I can win at life by doing three of my favorite things:

making no effort
enjoying a water feature
relaxing

Liverpool was the first stop on Grant’s two-and-a-half-year trip around the world. After eight years in the White House, with no ancestral home to return to, Grant and his wife, Julia, decided to indulge their wanderlust and take a long-desired tour overseas. The trip also solved the immediate problem of what Grant, a spry man of fifty-five, should do after leaving the White House. He didn’t have a plantation to run like Andrew Jackson, nor did he want to design buildings or found a university like Thomas Jefferson. He’d turned down the chance to run for a third term. By leaving the country, Grant also believed he would be giving President Rutherford B. Hayes, who’d barely squeaked into the White House, a chance to govern without reporters constantly running to his predecessor for comment.

The Augustinian friars of Medieval Britain pledged themselves to a life of poverty, but their friaries offered a pretty high standard of communal living. The monks dwelled in buildings with sophisticated stone and glass work, studied in libraries, and dined on the products of bountiful gardens. When nature called, they enjoyed dedicated latrines and hand-washing facilities, complete with running water systems that were rare even among the era’s wealthiest households. But new research on human remains from a friary buried below the University of Cambridge shows that the monks suffered greatly from a gastrointestinal affliction—worms.

After a few years of sailing on French ships, the market closes up for him because technically he’s not supposed to be on French ships without having the formal permission of the Russian authorities. This is, again, one of the ways in which the issues of empire, belonging, citizenship, and labor markets come together in Conrad’s life, in the way that they do in people’s lives today. He ends up not being able to find work. He also is running out of money and is hit with an attack of what we can only call now clinical depression. It culminates in a suicide attempt in Marseilles, an episode that a lot of biographers don’t say a lot about because they’re interested in talking about other things

In April, prosecutors failed to win a single conviction in one of the government’s biggest domestic terror investigations in decades. A jury acquitted two men—Brandon Caserta and Daniel Harris—on every count after defense attorneys successfully argued their clients were entrapped by the FBI..

Why Read The Bible In Hebrew? Let’s talk about one of the most influentialt stories *ever* for thinking about the nature of human progress—the Tower of Babel. What exactly did Babel’s builders do wrong? A thread (for non-Hebrew readers too!)

8.14

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“It shocked the crowed when it happened, from the angle the pilot got out of that plane at, with the ejection seats at that time it would have shot him almost straight down into the ground. Then when they saw the seat come out and shoot straight up by the rockets changing the thrust vectors, boy that made a huge difference. Western engineers didn’t even know that the Soviets had such technology, and they got to work very quickly to have that on our own seats.

But then I started studying the publishing industry. Why, of all possible book worlds, had we ended up with ours? Once I posed that question, I could see that Danielle Steel was a cosmic accident whose story revealed the hidden logic of contemporary publishing, what I call the conglomerate era for reasons I will explain in a moment. This is to say, at first my interest was professional. How long could it stay that way, though, given the life she’s led and the books she’s written? The more I learned about her, the more obsessed I became. Soon she was the only topic I wanted to talk or tweet about. I went out with friends and harangued them for hours: Claude-Eric, Supergirls, the Vacaville wedding; the vault into superstardom; novels with titles such as Message From Nam, The Klone and I, and Toxic Bachelors. Eventually we’d arrive at the difficult present.

The facts of the hypocrisy are these: What they’re preaching. They have rightly warned against the virulent danger of Trump’s election lie and are working with a few Republicans to expose that danger in the January 6 hearings. What they’re practicing. They are simultaneously engaged in a strategy to pump up Trump-backing, election-denying candidates in key primary races with the aim of winning moderate voters in November.

Many early ancestors of computers were controlled by punch cards. The ancestor of these machines, in turn, was the Jacqard loom, which automated the production of elaborately woven textiles. It was the first machine to use punch cards as an automated instruction sequence.

For Teslas built since mid-2017, “every time you drive, it records the whole track of where you drive, the GPS coordinates and certain other metrics for every mile driven,” says Green, a Tesla owner who has reverse engineered the company’s Autopilot data collection. “They say that they are anonymizing the trigger results,” but, he says, “you could probably match everything to a single person if you wanted to.”

The Wolf moves fast because they can avoid the encumbering necessities of a group of people building at scale. This avoidance of most processes related and exceptional engineering ability allows them to move at a speed that makes them unusually productive. It’s this productivity that the rest of the team can… smell. This scent of pure productivity allows them further to skirt documentation, meetings, and annual reviews.

The U.S. government is bankrolling favored businesses at the expense of taxpayers and other businesses. Again. By continually involving itself in the market, government is impeding economic growth and the potential of industries to reach their full potential. That must change. Congress recently passed the CHIPS Act, which is a $280 billion spending boondoggle that will provide funding of $52.2 billion to computer chip manufacturers. To sweeten the pot, Congress is also offering a 25% tax credit for semiconductor fabrication, which could cost an estimated $24 billion over five years. And these subsidies could support production in other regions, such as China and Europe.

Today I read an astounding exposé by Felix Krause, in which he discovered the Facebook and Instagram iOS apps inject JavaScript into all web pages that are viewed in their webviews. You should read and process this. Facebook has a sterling reputation to uphold, so I’m sure they wouldn’t do anything horrible here. But more nefarious apps could steal passwords or perform other types of attacks. The more I think about it, the more I cannot believe webviews with unfettered JavaScript access to third-party websites ever became a legitimate, accepted technology. It’s bad for users, and it’s bad for websites. But fortunately, I think something can be done about all this.

Law enforcement sources say Delcid also has several juvenile arrests, including for an alleged attempted murder charge — but no convictions. Earlier this year, he pleaded guilty to felony charges of domestic violence and residential burglary after beating up and attacking his girlfriend, according to court documents obtained by Fox News Digital. He was sentenced to six months in county jail and four years of felony probation.

If the best the current U.S. and Chinese governments can manage is statecraft as usual—which is what we’ve seen this past week—then we should expect history as usual.

It’s not ego, it’s economics. Smaller light-duty trucks were regulated out of existence by tighter fuel standards. Because regulations were made looser on larger vehicles, the easiest way for automakers to meet the standard is to build a bigger truck.

During the investigation, it was determined that a Cisco employee’s credentials were compromised after an attacker gained control of a personal Google account where credentials saved in the victim’s browser were being synchronized.

This is sadly the story of our entire HC system—poor incentive structures layered on top of each other in an increasingly wobbly manner rendering the whole system unfit for purpose and on the verge of collapse. I should note here that this also targets one of the few industries where the US is still the undisputed global leader—can we really afford to do that? Especially when pharmaceuticals are less than a fifth of US HC spend, and the real drivers of out-of-control healthcare spending are guilds like the AMA and local monopolies (hospital systems that have consolidated heavily and are the largest employers in many congressional districts and even states, giving them both outsize negotiating power against insurers and lobbying clout in Congress).

“China Price” China EVs < $30K accounted for 74% of deliveries in July.

Why Germany won’t get tough on Beijing — even if it invades Taiwan

“SpaceX I would say is the more operational of those and certainly one of the back-up launches we are looking at.”

It’s not fixed in amber.

The facts are that the overwhelming majority of the new money – came right out of our bank accounts. Using the Federal Reserve as its intermediary, the U.S. government reached into the bank accounts of the nation, took out trillions of dollars, and then sent those dollars back out to the nation in redistributed form. Indeed, this was the largest, fastest redistribution of wealth in U.S. history, and to this day, almost all of the people whose wealth got redistributed – still don’t realize that it happened

Recently, when pompompurin visited ShitExpress to send a token of appreciation to Troia, the hacker realized the website was vulnerable to SQL Injection.

I leave you with one thought: neither God nor Nature owe the United States of America a democracy. If citizens give away all their freedoms, eventually they will have none. When the powerful have all the options and you have none, you are toast.

Fast fashion grew out of quick response manufacturing (QRM), a production system developed in the United States during the 1980s and ’90s. In the traditional fashion business model, a company will design a collection for many months before producing samples to show to store buyers at an industry tradeshow. Once those store buyers place their orders, the brand will go into production and then deliver the units to these stores six months later. As a result, the lead time from design to delivery can be as long as a year, sometimes more.

8.7

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This is why I have supported the election (and more recently the re-election) of prosecutors who support reform. I have done it transparently, and I have no intention of stopping. The funds I provide enable sensible reform-minded candidates to receive a hearing from the public. Judging by the results, the public likes what it’s hearing.

Argentina’s central bank delivered an outsize 800 basis-point hike to its benchmark interest rate, the largest in three years, as inflation accelerates amid a growing political crisis. The monetary authority increased its benchmark Leliq rate to 60%, it said in a statement on Thursday. The effective annual rate, which accounts for compounded interest, reached 79.8%.

The Federal Trade Commission today took action against online home buying firm Opendoor Labs Inc., for cheating potential home sellers by tricking them into thinking that they could make more money selling their home to Opendoor than on the open market using the traditional sales process. The FTC alleged that Opendoor pitched potential sellers using misleading and deceptive information, and in reality, most people who sold to Opendoor made thousands of dollars less than they would have made selling their homes using the traditional process. Under a proposed administrative order, Opendoor will have to pay $62 million and stop its deceptive tactics.

There’s an interesting and revealing contrast in the ways that Tesla and Edison, respectively, presented themselves and their power of invention. Both men were adept at self-promotion and took advantage of every opportunity to put themselves and their inventions in the public eye. The inventive selves that each presented to the public were very different ones, nevertheless, and are revealing of the range of ways in which innovators could be imagined at the beginnings of modernity.

One of the coolest patterns in history is something called “the multiple.” It’s this spooky phenomenon where someone invents something or makes a new discovery and then, at roughly the same time, someone else invents the same thing or makes the same discovery independent of the first person. Consider:

It remains to be seen how efficiently the U.S. funds will be spent. The disbursement of tens of billions of dollars in the coming years is likely to raise many questions about how those investments are allocated. And it may touch off more jostling among semiconductor companies that spent more than $20 million on lobbying in the first half of this year alone, according to their disclosures. The 10-year ban on investments in more cutting-edge facilities in China has been particularly controversial, with firms arguing that it would make them less competitive globally and ultimately set the United States back in a race against Chinese competitors.

Quadratic voting (or QV) requires more complex calculations than regular rank choice voting, but with the right interface, it is an intuitive and simple-to-use mechanism. Voting using QV is done in two parts.

Designing a chip is a complex process. First comes laying out there the chip, making sure the design works, then preparing all the files required for the foundry, and when they come back from the fabs there is a lot of work involved in getting the chip debugged and working. It has gotten increasingly easy to do that first bit – designing a chip, but the rest of it is still a fairly laborious process, and the big chip companies think they can help others get through all of that.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund is one of the largest liberal dark-money organizations and poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the 2020 election. America Votes, another dark-money group, received most of its funding from the Sixteen Thirty Fund in the 2020 cycle, according to Politico.

That is why the media is now recalibrating. That was most evident in the recent statement of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “I know The New York Times felt it didn’t pursue it originally as much as it wanted to; then it followed up, as I recall.” Friedman does not explain what overrode that journalistic interest in the story or why the “follow up” came a year after the election of Joe Biden.

Sources within Apple, a company notoriously shy of making public statements, have briefed media outletswith news of more advertising opportunities for those eager to promote their wares in the App Store.

The bones of a good story, according to Bartell: “It’s an element of my curiosity, the visuals and finding the right character,” he says. “I love oddities. People who do their own thing or have gone through a lot of adversity.” But sometimes, he admits, the story isn’t there right away.

“naturally occurring affordable housing”