Monthly Archives: November 2022

11.27

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He said something like this: “All these leaders are asking me what our blockchain strategy is. They tell me that everyone’s saying it’s the future, the platform that’s going to obsolete everything else. I need to have a good answer for them. I’ll be honest, when they explain why it’s wonderful I just don’t get it. You guys got to go figure it out for us.”

In addition, “we failed to accurately predict how this would all play out and the impact it would have on our business. As a result, we find ourselves here.”

That an anti-“disinformation” group is actually working to spread, not counter, disinformation is troubling enough. More troubling still is that the group was recently given tax-exempt status.

It’s the iron law of internet access: if you don’t like your carrier, you’re probably stuck with them — and when they know you’re stuck, you end up paying more.

The Markup also found the pixel code on a tax preparation site operated by a financial advice and software company called Ramsey Solutions, which uses a version of TaxSlayer’s service. That pixel gathered even more personal data from a tax return summary page, including information on income and refund amounts. This information was not sent immediately upon visiting the page but only when visitors clicked drop-down headings to see more details of their report. 

But there’s another reason it stands out: the key change from G major to G# major that occurs at around 2 minutes and 52 seconds. If you’re not familiar with the concept, the simplest way to think of a musical key is a collection of notes around which a piece of music revolves. The beginning of “Man in the Mirror” is in the key of G major, which is built from the notes below.

“She cooks high volume like she would cook for her family. Everybody loves Michelle’s food,” said Karen Andro, case manager and continuum care specialist for Housing Initiatives and a longtime advocate for people experiencing homelessness.

Elon Musk wants every Twitter employee sending weekly updates about their work via email now. Per an internal memo to employees that I obtained, every Friday all Twitter employees are required to send an email update on their work with the subject line structure: “Weekly Update, name, dept, and date.”

colbert:

EcoHealth Alliance, a long-term partner of Wuhan Institute of Virology, sought funds from a US defence agency in 2018 to insert a ‘furin cleavage site’ into bat coronaviruses. There is no evidence such work obtained Western funding.

Following the agreement, the Biden administration granted Chevron a license that would allow the California-based oil company to return to its Venezuelan oil fields in joint ventures with Venezuela’s national oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA. The new license, granted by the Treasury Department, would permit Chevron to pump Venezuelan oil for the first time in years.

11.20

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Still, the implications of a disrupted microbiome are poorly understood, even on Earth, said David Pearce, a bioscience researcher at Northumbria University and author of a 2022 paperexploring how a trip to Mars might affect microbes in the gut — which makes the range of related illnesses and diseases in space difficult to predict. And direct research is limited because only around 600 people have ever been to space. Those who have taken the trip don’t typically stay long, as the average length of a trip to the International Space Station is about six months. And some researchers aren’t yet convinced there’s enough evidence suggesting the human microbiome will change much in space at all.

From the entrepreneurial perspective, one can also find far larger parallels in history. The dot-com bust of 2000 wiped out almost 80% of the NASDAQ and trillions (with a ‘t’) in market value evaporated in months. Whatever amount of hate crypto is about to get from the commentariat, it will be nothing compared to the non-stop haterade about tech during the first real tech downturn. The eventual Internet boom(s) followed all the same, of course

Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI are being sued for allegedly violating copyright law by reproducing open-source code using AI. But the suit could have a huge impact on the wider world of artificial intelligence.

As much as $400 billion in COVID-19 unemployment relief dollars were likely lost to waste and fraudsters. Lawmakers want answers.

All this came to an end during one of the darkest chapters of California’s history, when Fountaingrove was seized by the government as part of the state’s discriminatory Alien Land Laws, which were instituted in 1913, expanded in the 1920s and forbade Asian nationals from owning land or businesses. The childless Nagasawa, who never married, attempted to keep the estate in the family by willing it to his grand-nephew Kosuke Ijichi, born on the estate and thus an American citizen, and his Japanese-born father Tomoki Ijichi. But upon Nagasawa’s death in 1934, Kosuke was not of age and the trustee took control of the estate and quickly sold off the land.

What rises and falls in status through the FTX story?

Videos from the Stanford academic freedom conference

The past year, rent soared more than 20 percent, and the median home price rose almost as much over the same period (before home prices dropped thanks to interest-rate hikes). The airport has new direct flights to Vail, Colorado, and Texas’s first Soho House opened there last year. Elon Musk has built a $1.1 billion “gigafactory” nearby, turning “Tesla” into shorthand among some to describe the city’s bougification. “There’s nothing weird about Austin,” said one Soho House patron, who recently flew home to California for an abortion. “Lululemon is everywhere.”

Prices for cryptocurrencies have undergone multiple boom-bust cycles, together with ongoing entry by retail investors. To investigate the drivers of crypto adoption, we assemble a novel database (made available with this paper) on retail use of crypto exchange apps at daily frequency for 95 countries over 2015–22. We show that a rising Bitcoin price is followed by the entry of new users. About 40% of these new users are men under 35, commonly identified as the most “risk-seeking” segment of the population. To establish a causal effect of prices on adoption, we exploit two exogenous shocks: the crackdown of Chinese authorities on crypto mining in mid- 2021 and the social unrest in Kazakhstan in early 2022. During both episodes price changes have a significant effect on the entry of new users. Results from a PVAR model corroborate these findings. Overall, back of the envelope calculations suggest that around three-quarters of users have lost money on their Bitcoin investments.

Inspired by Douyin’s success, these Chinese sellers think livestreaming is the future of shopping.

This isn’t just a compelling and humorous corporate drama. We could be watching a revolution within the tech industry unfold in real time before our eyes. 

11.13

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Cemetery records, newspaper articles and ground-penetrating radar now indicate more than 3,700 souls rest at Lebanon – many of them tightly situated, leaving geophysicist Bill Steinhart, who has surveyed most of the cemetery, to say, “If they’re not touching, they’re nearly touching.”

The city of Salem said Monday it would take a full work week at a cost of $4,200 to provide the public records that back up a city statement explaining its silence on the departure of a top police official suspected of misconduct

We have a similar body of evidence laying before us on the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

But outside the Beltway bubble of politicians and journalists, democracy feels like a far more distant, esoteric concept than the daily struggle to feed a family and to be able to afford to commute to work. From Pennsylvania to Arizona, the return to normality after the Covid-19 nightmare that Biden promised remains elusive to many as the economic after effects of the once-in-a century health emergency linger.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday announced that law enforcement seized $3.36 billion of bitcoin from a man who “unlawfully obtained” over 50,000 bitcoin from darkweb market Silk Road over a decade ago.

Few people have been more effective advocates of engineering biology than Drew Endy. As an early pioneer in the field of synthetic biology, he helped to launch the undergraduate majors in biological engineering at both MIT—which was the first of its kind in the country—and Stanford. His trainees have founded some of the leading companies in the discipline. Clearly, some of his ideas have taken root. However, the concept of the biologization of industry—which I view as one of the most compelling visions for the future of the Bioeconomy—seems to have remained dormant. Here is the core premise:

As an FBI translator’s report for Rennie explained, Villota was complaining that he’d paid someone $1.5 million to bribe public officials and that he seemed to have nothing to show for it.

That’s mostly because it’s literally on the Mexican border, with its main drag ending in a pedestrian bridge vaulting over the border fence. A bridge that’s constantly busy with Mexicans coming into El Paso to shop for clothes, mabye find a little work, visit relatives, or splurge on a mall day, and Americans going into Juarez, for the same reasons, and also to fix up their bodies at prices that won’t send them into debt.

“Never use a token you created as collateral?.?.?.?Don’t borrow if you run a crypto business. Don’t use capital ‘efficiently’. Have a large reserve,” Zhao tweeted.

Anyway it is still early and confusing but that seems to be the story of FTX. Coindesk reported on Alameda’s FTT exposure, and then Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the founder of Binance Holdings Ltd., the largest crypto exchange, raised eyebrows by tweeting that Binance would sell its FTT holdings “due to recent revelations.” People worried that this would tank the price of FTT and put pressure on FTX, so they started withdrawing money from FTX. FT didn’t have the money, and Bankman-Fried started calling around asking for a loan or a bailout. Eventually he called CZ himself, and they announced a non-binding letter of intent for Binance to acquire F°TX and make customers whole. Bankman-Fried’s fortune basically vanished, as did his ” emperor aura.” Venture capital investors in FTX – which last raised money at a $32 billion valuation – are probably getting zeroed, the price of FTT collapsed, and now regulators are investigating.

None of this changes the fact that Biden will be 81 years old on Election Day in 2024 or that 56% of those who voted Tuesday don’t have a favorable opinion of him or that 74% of those same voters are “dissatisfied” or “angry” about “the way things are going in the United States.” 

Now, former-President Donald Trump is more unpopular than Biden, with 58% of voters saying they have an unfavorable view of him. So Biden still has a decent chance of beating Trump.

According to the USPS, IV3’s use of NCOA data may violate the terms of their license. In a statement, the agency told WIRED that the NCOALink database can only be used for updating mailing lists, adding that “the alleged use of NCOALink services by the entity identified in your article is under review.”

This is now — at least — the fifth journalist raided by Biden’s FBI for reasons that remain unclear. Arnu’s beat may not be typical, but his work appears normal as far as the process of journalism goes. Simply because Arnu isn’t a member of the mainstream press, does not mean he should not be granted freedoms protected by the First Amendment.

FOUR HUNDRED private jets arrived in Egypt during COP27 as climate delegates are accused of ‘hypocrisy’

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, I found myself talking on the phone with a very nice woman who was telling me, as seriously as possible, why New York City is the best city for witches. On every criterion used to judge metropolitan witch friendliness, she pointed out, New York had scored incredibly high. “It’s kind of the melting pot for witchcraft,” Sharon Sullivan told me. Sullivan is the managing editor for Lawn Love, a website that connects people to local landscaping businesses. I was talking to her because I had responded to a press release (“2022’s Best Cities for Witches”) emailed to me by Lawn Love earlier that day. I had to ask: Why was a lawn services company creating quasi-scientific studies about witches?

In fact, as Jeremy Shapiro convincingly argues, we should expect US pressure for Europeans to take care of a much larger share of the costs of supporting Ukraine to grow very soon. And we’re talking here about the best of all worlds for Europeans without a Trump type of president back in the White House any time soon which would mean that all bets on security guarantees for Europe are off.

Assets: Securities Held Outright: U.S. Treasury Securities: All: Wednesday Level

According to the analysis by satellite data monitoring firm SpaceKnow, the two “dark ships,” each measuring around 95 to 130 meters long, passed within several miles of the Nord Stream 2 leak sites. “We have detected some dark ships, meaning vessels that were of a significant size, that were passing through that area of interest,” says Jerry Javornicky, the CEO and cofounder of SpaceKnow. “They had their beacons off, meaning there was no information about their movement, and they were trying to keep their location information and general information hidden from the world,” Javornicky adds.

This is how it worked: FTX would create a synthetic token that tracked the price of Bitcoin but with leverage. So, if Bitcoin went up by 10 percent, the FTX token would go up by 20 percent. Of course, if Bitcoin prices fell, the losses would double. These tokens were not real Bitcoin but a creation of FTX, their own tokens. The company used their gains to raise cash by using their own tokens as collateral for loans. Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Softbank, Lightspeed, Temasek, Blackrock and others invested over a billion in the company which at one time was valued at $32 billion. FTX and Alameda Research’s intermingled ownership should have raised eyebrows, but history shows greed trumps diligence.

11.6

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In spite of its long and successful history, TCP is a poor trans- port protocol for modern datacenters. Every significant ele- ment of TCP, from its stream orientation to its requirement of in-order packet delivery, is wrong for the datacenter. It is time to recognize that TCP’s problems are too fundamen- tal and interrelated to be fixed; the only way to harness the full performance potential of modern networks is to introduce a new transport protocol into the datacenter. Homa demon- strates that it is possible to create a transport protocol that avoids all of TCP’s problems. Although Homa is not API- compatible with TCP, it should be possible to bring it into widespread usage by integrating it with RPC frameworks.

If the Fed runs sus­tained losses, it won’t have to turn to Con­gress, hat in hand. In­stead, it will sim­ply cre­ate an IOU on its bal­ance sheet called a de­ferred as­set. When the Fed runs a sur­plus again in fu­ture years, it would first pay off the IOU be­fore send­ing sur­pluses to the Trea­sury.

Is the Santa Monica Observer “notorious for publishing false news”? It defends itself here. The L.A. Times accusation isn’t “baseless” — it’s based a report by an entity known as NewsGuard, which purports to rate newspapers according to how well they separate news from politics.

If NewsGuard rated the Santa Monica Observer poorly, that’s supposed to be a reason why there’s something wrong with Musk gesturing at it? But Musk’s pointing at it was for the purpose of pushing back Hillary Clinton for jamming the Pelosi story into a Democratic Party political narrative!

Is the Santa Monica Observer “notorious for publishing false news”? It defends itself here. The L.A. Times accusation isn’t “baseless” — it’s based a report by an entity known as NewsGuard, which purports to rate newspapers according to how well they separate news from politics. If NewsGuard rated the Santa Monica Observer poorly, that’s supposed to be a reason why there’s something wrong with Musk gesturing at it? But Musk’s pointing at it was for the purpose of pushing back Hillary Clinton for jamming the Pelosi story into a Democratic Party political narrative!

As the head of General Electric, he fired people in vast numbers and turned the manufacturing behemoth into a financial house of cards. Why was he so revered?

“Complete economic dependence based on the principle of hope leaves us open to political blackmail.”

We have more money to spend than there’s ever been, but our problems are getting worse. My takeaway is that to fix things, we need to have policy conversations we never get to have. There’s only the one option and that’s whatever the governor and his party put forward.

Case in point: NBC News’ Dasha Burns. On Oct. 7, Burns conducted an on-camera interview with Fetterman. Because Fetterman has “auditory processing issues” as a result of the stroke, according to his campaign, he had to use a closed-captioning system to understand Burns’ questions. After the interview aired, Burns told NBC’s Lester Holt on air that Fetterman didn’t appear to understand her pre-interview banter. Burns was just doing her job by reporting on the fitness of a public official, but her assessment also seemed to lend credibility to the line of attack coming from Fetterman’s Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, who has claimed that Fetterman is suffering from cognitive decline and covering it up. Simply for stating the facts as she had observed them, Burns was seen to be supporting the “wrong” candidate.

It’s a delicate way of saying this: Both Debra Katz and Lisa Banks are donors to members of the Oversight Committee, including Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), whose investigation into the Washington Commanders is in turn providing their firm with a lot of business. Similarly, Democrats on the committee have a cozy relationship with SKDK, which runs communications campaigns for Democratic politicians and left-wing organizations—and which is providing those services for the former Commanders employees.

A clip from CSPAN’s archives shows her being questioned about her lack of a diverse staff by then Sen. Orrin Hatch. He noted that in her 13 years as a lower court judge, she had never hired a black law clerk, secretary, or intern. Over that time, she had 57 employees as a judge. Her response to the sympathetic Republican was, “I have tried, and I’m going to try harder, and if you confirm me for this job, my attractiveness to black candidates is going to improve.”

The most effective issue for Republicans in this midterm is a result of Democratic elites failing to understand what their diverse base of working-class voters wants.

Elon stands to benefit whether or not he can actually improve Twitter’s underlying business. Owning Twitter ensures marketing benefits to Elon’s other businesses. And Twitter’s core product is a top of funnel for Elon to build other consumer products over time. Elon may look to China as an example, where the largest social platforms not only keep people in touch with friends and entertain them with videos, but also enable payments, food delivery, travel bookings, and hundreds of billions in ecommerce transactions.

For the sake of their financial future, young people should leave Toronto and Vancouver

It gets worse. Almond growers invariably douse their crop in quantities of glyphosate — known to be lethal to bees. According to Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity, sending bees to pollinate the California almond industry is “like sending the bees to war. Many don’t come back.” In California, bees are dying in record numbers due to habitat loss and exposure to the pesticides of the industrialised almond industry. Animal Rebellion? When vegans drink almond milk, they are complicit in Animal Extinction.

Major direct and indirect Arabella donors include globalist billionaire George Soros and progressive eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, according to Politico. A significant chunk of the group’s cash also comes from overseas. Hansjörg Wyss, an 87 year old far-left Swiss billionaire who does not appear to be an American citizen, has given over $135 million to the fund, The New York Times reported. Nicole Gill, the co-founder of Accountable Tech, was previously a director at the Wyss-financed The Hub Project.

“I’ve seen many a business with the greatest of ideas not make it, and yet others with the simplest of ideas thrive,” he said. “I believe that God is the one who grants success, and with it the responsibility to be a good manager.”

When Pappas took office in 2018, inflation was 2.4% and gasoline was under $2 a gallon. Today, inflation is 8.2% and the Democrats are shamelessly tapping into our emergency oil supply to keep gasoline under $4 a gallon. In the last two years alone, Pappas has voted for $5.5 trillion in new spending, hiking the cost of everything from gas to groceries and robbing $600 every month from families like yours and mine.

Notes on yet another NYT election season visit to Wisconsin

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Regarding Jonathan Mahler’s article….

A west coast friend asked years ago about Wisconsin and the rise of Scott Walker.

Another friend deep in the political game told me that one must understand The Milwaukee pension scandal, which lead to Mr. Walker’s election as County Executive.

$1.57m for four state senators (WEAC 2010)

Kathy Cramer’s book The Politics of Resentment is worth a read as well.