Monthly Archives: December 2022

12.25

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Merry Christmas

Israel’s decades-long peace with Jordan is unraveling, a development that threatens to upset a fragile regional stability that is being challenged by countries like Iran, Russia, and China, a think tank report warns.

Offenders committed at least 420 acts of hostility against 397 separate churches in the United States between January 2018 and September 2022. These cases include everything from arson and gun-related violence to vandalism and bomb threats, the copiously documented, 84-page report specifies.

The picture is widely viewed as a work of art. More importantly to its creator, however, it was also a feat of electrical engineering. The longtime Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor used it to illustrate a lecture, famously titled “How to make applesauce,” in which he explained the pioneering flash technology that helped him take the shot.

“People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority,” Mr. Toyoda said to reporters during a visit to Thailand. “That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.”

The Ukrainian army has released an instructional video explaining how Russian soldiers should surrender to a drone:

Port Authority Inspector General John Gay said: “This sophisticated, internationally coordinated conspiracy allegedly targeted hard-working taxi drivers trying to earn an honest living. The Port Authority has zero tolerance for bad actors violating the law at our facilities. We thank Damian Williams and the Southern District for their partnership as we continue our relentless commitment to detecting and disrupting illegal behavior at our facilities across the region.”

Many of those newly liberated works were forgotten, partly due to their great age, but also because no one knew who they belonged to (Congress abolished the requirement to register copyrights in 1976), so no one could revive or reissue them while they were still in the popular imagination, depriving them of new leases on life.

Tired of the tactics, a pair of energy industry groups have filed a lawsuit, alleging the Biden administration has failed to comply with federal mandates regarding how often auctions of land for oil and gas drilling are held.

“Foreign government-controlled laboratories should not be eligible to receive U.S. taxpayer dollars while they disregard our policies, dodge congressional oversight, or act against our national interest,” seven watchdog organizations led by the White Coat Waste Project wrote in a letter sent Friday to lawmakers on the House and Senate appropriations committees.

One of the problems with perverting the federal bureaucracy, as the Democrats have done, is that pretty much everyone loses faith in the integrity of government. At this point, there is no reason to assume that government numbers are accurate and unfudged. We have been lied to, too many times.

Gus Gran says it took them five hours to get only three miles back home.

After that Saturday night trip, I started asking my passengers how much they’d paid and comparing it to what I’d earned. The results were all over the map. I had two trips where I got more than 80 percent of the total fare, including tips. I had a couple of others where I earned less than 30 percent.

Not long ago, CIA veterans tell me, the information above the “tearline” of a U.S. government intelligence cable would include the station of origin and any other CIA offices copied on the report. I spent much of today looking at exactly similar documents, seemingly written by the same people, except the “offices” copied at the top of their reports weren’t other agency stations, but Twitter’s Silicon Valley colleagues: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, even Wikipedia. It turns out these are the new principal intelligence outposts of the American empire. A subplot is these companies seem not to have had much choice in being made key parts of a global surveillance and information control apparatus, although evidence suggests their Quislingian executives were mostly all thrilled to be absorbed. Details on those “Other Government Agencies” soon, probably tomorrow.

The Essay: 2022 gave us many reasons to be encouraged about our future 5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … Rule of the Robotsauthor Martin Ford on the impact of artificial intelligence

“Always be positive”; Rejoice!

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My father has always emphasized positivity. I have learned much from both parents in this respect.



And, so it was while chatting over lunch recently that a long time friend mentioned that my posts have become cynical.

Maybe?

Perhaps my news flow needs a re-think.



Philippians 4:4-7:

Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice.

5 Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand.

6 Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.

7 And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.



While traveling a few months ago, the proprietor of a superb and affordable restaurant asked where we were from? I replied “United States”



We then spoke of his farm, family, the long time “tavern” where a seemingly endless mezze was on offer for €20.00 per person and the joys of friendship over a terrific meal. Ah, the delight of fresh food and a bit of wine, finished off with a delicious date cake.







Later, he turned to me and asked if I had heard of the World Economic Forum? I replied yes.

“You know they are screwing us”, he said while continuing to mention currency and debt manipulation combined with globalist policies – “sticking it to the little guy”.

I thought a bit and replied there are always challenges and opportunities.

Yet, we live in a time of incredible opportunity. It is easier than ever to create something, work with people anywhere and learn, constantly. Admittedly, there are plenty of challenges, but we must balance that with the new new thing.

As ever, while zooming through Advent and just days from Christmas, this is a terrific time to count our endless blessings. We pray for wisdom, smart and well intentioned elected officials, great neighbors and health for all.



So, I pray for a vigorous, healthy and successful 2023 for everyone.



Merry Christmas!





P.S.

What is Advent?

While chatting in a cafe recently, one of the employees inquired about Advent? Another jumped in: “my neighbors gave us an advent calendar, which is fun”.

I replied that it is a time of preparation to celebrate the birth of Christ, our savior on 25 December.

One of the great things about this time of year is the opportunity to “slow down” and observe this preparation. For some, it’s outdoor lights. For others, a very elaborate outdoor pageant. Still others, a time to visit with friends and enjoy parties, social and spiritual events.

The long nights offer those of us in the Northern Hemisphere an opportunity to observe preparation and celebration throughout our neighborhoods.

Ecclesiastes 2: 24 – 26

“A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?”

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12.18

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software mistakenly restricted the size of shims to a maximum thickness of 0.061 in.

But very few startups do this, because their investors won’t let them. That brings me to the other dirty not-so-secret of the startup world: when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company’s assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy.

The classification process is determined inside the Intelligence Branch, all by themselves. The Intelligence Branch has full control over what is considered classified information and what is not. The Intelligence Branch defines what is a “national security interest” and what is not. A great technique for hiding fingerprints of corrupt and illegal activity. The Intelligence Branch does all redactions.

Dow is just one of a fast-growing number of companies, nonprofit groups and countries transforming publicly available data into intelligence for strategic and economic advantage. China has the largest, most focused effort, while U.S. spy agencies, with deeply ingrained habits of operating in the shadows, have been slow to adapt to a world in which much of what is important isn’t secret, according to dozens of officials and many studies.

“Companies moving to inland states are doing a much better job of getting new talent, keeping people, and not having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep someone happy,” Kesteven said. While states previously focused on luring companies to help build a tech hub, they now recognize it’s a multi-pronged strategy that includes attracting human capital, according to the Milken report.

So how have Page and Brin used their newfound freedom? A look inside their worlds reveals two strikingly different empires, each stamped by the interests and inclinations of the man who oversees it. Brin is an inquisitive philanthropist pursuing intellectual curiosities and humanitarian-minded projects; Page has leveraged his vast wealth to retreat from the public eye, ceding day-to-day oversight of his ventures to a small circle of trusted lieutenants. But at their core, the former partners — who still retain control of Alphabet, the $1.2 trillion parent company of Google — share a single overriding similarity: Both rely on a tangled web of corporate entities and family offices that serve to minimize their tax obligations, protect them from liability, and shield their wealth from public view. Their business ventures and personal styles may differ, but their ultimate goal is the same: the freedom to pursue their interests without oversight or restraint. 

Former Twitter employee Ahmad Abouammo was found guilty of spying for the government of Saudi Arabia, according to a report from Bloomberg. The jury handed down its judgment in a San Francisco federal court on Tuesday, where Abouammo was also convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering, and falsifying records.

EatStreet has also been looking for buyers or new investors, but the search has proven unsuccessful.  “Throughout August, September, and October of 2022, EatStreet continued to engage in discussions with a national entity that expressed interest in purchasing or funding EatStreet,” the company wrote, explaining that fulfilling the settlement agreement would be part of any such deal. 

The Overture Maps Foundation, as the new effort is called, is officially hosted by the Linux Foundation, but the program is driven by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Facebook’s parent company Meta, Microsoft and Dutch mapping company TomTom.

But the original Queen of the Skies was the creation of a very different Boeing, a very different Seattle. The company was headquartered here, and it was by far the most important employer in Jet City and the entire region. Not only that, but the 747 entered service amid the Boeing Bust, as the company was cutting jobs after years of rapid growth slammed into low gear. More than 60% of the workforce was laid off, and the company was close to seeking bankruptcy protection.

According to Mudge, Twitter’s information security was essentially nil. In his report, he alleges that many employees installed spyware on work computers at the behest of external organizations. And because Twitter didn’t actively monitor employee devices, it mostly discovered such spyware by accident. This spyware—essentially a malicious program that logs user activity and steals data—could have been used by rival social media firms or foreign governments to access sensitive information on users, including their addresses, phone numbers, physical location of their last login, and financial information. And the spyware’s access to Twitter’s systems, Mudge says, could have been exacerbated by the fact that many employees had disabled security updates, firewalls, and settings that would have prevented unauthorized users from remotely controlling their computers.

The Great Barrington Plan: Would Focused Protection Have Worked?

And there you have it, Ms. Sosa: twenty of the Texanist’s favorite Christmas songs by Texans. He knows it’s more than what you requested, but, like so many Christmas-minded Texas musicians, the Texanist is a generous sort. Happy holidays! 

12.11

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During a three-month period at the beginning of this year, Northwestern charged for fewer than 1% of messages on its MyChart portal. Northwestern charges $35 per encounter, said spokesman Christopher King. Similarly, Lurie has charged for about 300 MyChart encounters in the last year, a sliver of the nearly 300,000 messages it’s received, said Dr. Ravi Patel, vice president of digital health for Lurie.

If the 20th century was the industrial century, the 21st is the computing century. Microchips are becoming much smaller, much faster, and much cheaper. Software is replacing hardware as the main focus of innovation. Real-life problems (like how to detect cancer, fold proteins, or regulate traffic in cities) are starting to be solved by algorithms (artificial intelligence.) And finally, all of these individual bits of technology are being networked so they can talk to each other.

“The real barrier” to setting up manufacturing in the U.S. “is comparative cost to build and operate,” it said.

The entire shooting process was live-streamed on TikTok, allowing fans and followers to watch as Lampert worked to construct, compose and capture his shot. The resulting photograph is a convincing composition, with the LEGO Eiffel Tower appearing so real it’s hard to believe he wasn’t in Paris at a quick glance.

The woke agenda has caused millions of Americans to leave” their deep blue states “for greener pastures,” and particularly for Florida—the anti-woke promised land, the main destination of the new exodus of Americans voting with their feet for lower taxes, schools open for in-person instruction but closed to woke indoctrination, businesses unhampered by extreme anti-COVID rules, and citizens enjoying law and order. This pro-freedom, anti-woke agenda, roughly the opposite of California’s and New York’s, is what Florida has gotten emphatically right.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Boeing has in effect permanently shuttered its Moscow Design Center, formerly the company’s preeminent overseas engineering facility that at one time housed about 1,500 engineers. “Right now, it’s gone,” said Lynne Hopper, Boeing vice president of engineering strategy and operations. Since the summer, Boeing has been facilitating travel for about 100 Russian engineers and their families who wanted out — a process now complete — and is arranging jobs for them at its facilities in other countries.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Jeff Bezos-owned publication has lost 500,000 subscribers since Trump left office in January 2021, which amounts to a decline of roughly 20 percent. The Post is on track to lose money in 2022 after years of profitability. The New York Times reported in August that the Post‘s business has “stalled” since President Joe Biden was sworn in, and layoffs are being discussed amid management’s frustration with “numerous low performers in the newsroom.” Trump called it as early as December 2017, when he predicted that “newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes.” The Post is hardly the only media outlet suffering in the post-Trump era. BuzzFeed, Gannett, and CNN announced significant layoffs this month in an effort to cut costs.

And Boom promises radical transformation: The company’s founder, Blake Scholl, has said repeatedly that its goal is delivering passengers “anywhere in the world in four hours for $100.”

12.4

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The US network — linked to individuals associated with the US military — operated across many internet services and focused on Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Somalia, Syria, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

But Darwin was wrong and that’s why Gómez-Silva is here.

Farmer’s bigger problem was that her patients weren’t dying fast enough. Some fished, drove tractors, and babysat grandchildren. Their longevity prompted concern around the office because of a complicated formula that governs the Medicare benefit. The federal government, recognizing that an individual patient might not die within the predicted six months, effectively demands repayment from hospices when the average length of stay of all patients exceeds six months.

Miniature Calendar is an incredible ongoing project by Japanese artist Tatsuya Tanaka, that features beautiful miniature dioramas of everyday life using common household objects such as food, cloth, stationery, electronic devices, and even masks.

Those praying for its awakening (basically, everyone in real estate) need office workers to return. This is why some office landlords are quietly applauding Big Tech’s mass firings, hoping the thousands of now unemployed engineers will portend a buyer’s market for talent, one so strong that employers can insist that the office actually be part of office work. Some landlords might even welcome another dotcom collapse, likening it to a Covid vaccination: nasty side effects at first, but a much better chance of long-term survival.

Sansone and Keyes violated their employment agreements by using SSM Health Dean property and equipment during business hours “to plan a competing business,” and “induced and encouraged” the other surgeons to breach their contracts, the lawsuit says.

From 1979 into 1981, JaM became a major component in a new effort in Geschke’s laboratory. This was a push to develop a printing language that could be commercialized, used with the production version of PARC’s experimental computers called the Xerox Star, and more broadly used across all of Xerox’s lines of printers. A group of six Xerox researchers—Chuck Geschke, Butler Lampson, Jerry Mendelson, Brian Reid, Bob Sproull, and John Warnock—melded the JaM approach with other more established protocol techniques. The result was named Interpress.

The Federal Council of Switzerland has therefore published draft legislation, which outlines four tiers of escalating measures to conserve electricity and avert potential blackouts. The first prescribes a lot of temperature restrictions for things like refrigerators and washing machines. The second includes more unusual rules, such as the demand that heating in clubs and discotheques “be set to the lowest level or switched off completely,” and that “streaming services … limit resolution of their content to standard definition.” The third foresees cutting business hours, banning the use of Blue Ray players and gaming computers, and also limiting the use of electric cars, which should be driven only when absolutely necessary. A fourth and final tier mandates closure of ski facilities, casinos, cinemas, theatre and the opera.

A lot of that comes from how Tacitus represents the structure of Roman rule in Egypt: he describes Augustus as having ‘kept in the [imperial] house’ (retinere domi) the governance of Egypt, assigning it to an equestrian2 prefect.3 Egypt was a relatively late addition to Rome’s growing Empire; the Ptolemaic dynasty had ruled it since the death of Alexander the Great in 323. From the 160s that Ptolemaic kingdom had become effectively a client of Rome, its independence maintained by the threat of Roman arms (demonstrated vividly in 168 when Rome turned back a Seleucid invasion of Egypt with noting more than https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/ a consultum of the Senate), but had remained independent until Cleopatra’s disasterous decision to back Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) in the last phase of Rome’s civil war. After their defeat, Octavian (soon to be Augustus) had in 30 BC after the suicide of Cleopatra, annexed the kingdom, creating the province of Roman Egypt.

After violent camera robberies, a number of photographers plan to stay away from San Francisco

The COVID-19 pandemic drove home an important lesson: that the smallest organisms can be the deadliest. Not only are they highly fatal, they are also incredibly adept at evading the antibiotics and antimicrobials that we have in our relatively pitiful arsenal of drugs. In conjunction with World Antimicrobial Awareness Week (18-24 November), Prof Stephen Baker, molecular microbiologist and Director of Research at the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge, dials in to share his research on antimicrobial resistance, and how we can change the course of this global health threat.

East books read in 2022.