Monthly Archives: May 2023

5.28

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DRAKON is a visual language from the aerospace industry for representing algorithms, processes, and procedures. The goal of DRAKON is to make procedures easy to comprehend.

Some context is warranted. First, the statement that SVB and SBNY were the second and fourth biggest bank failures is only true if we do not adjust for inflation or scale the failures relative to GDP. Once we take inflation into account and also the size of the bank’s deposits relative to GDP, we find that Depression-era failures were substantially bigger.

The former Union Bank building in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district, located at 350 California Street, was auctioned off last week. The winning bid was $65 million, roughly 75 percent less on a per-square-foot basis than comparable building sales from just before the pandemic.

Behind the scenes is China’s reluctance to forgive debt and its extreme secrecy about how much money it has loaned and on what terms, which has kept other major lenders from stepping in to help. On top of that is the recent discovery that borrowers have been required to put cash in hidden escrow accounts that push China to the front of the line of creditors to be paid.

Kinzer wrote that commentary for The Boston Globe; I suspect The New York Times, his old employer, wanted no part of his heresy. You can commonly find that sort of thing on Substack or Twitter, but only rarely does it slip past the goaltenders of our national media. Which brings me to the full-page advertisement just published in the print New York Times — print only! — that calls on the United States to work to end the war as quickly as possible through diplomacy.Signatories include several high-ranking U.S. military officers, Ronald Reagan’s former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, and the ubiquitous Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs.

“We are still training Ukrainians how to fly our F-16s that will be shot down by Russia as soon as they get into the war zone. The mainstream press is dedicated to Biden and the war and Biden is still talking about the Great Satan in Moscow while the Russian economy is doing great. Putin can stay where he is”—in power—“despite his failure to wipe Ukraine off the map as an independent state. And he thought he would win the war with just one airborne division”—a sardonic reference to Russia’s failed effort in the first days of the war to seize a vital airport by parachuting in an attack force.

The changing legislative landscape of the U.S. wine market provides a scenario to examine the effect of regulation on the size distribution of firms. Using the variation across states and time in the sum of in-state and out-of-state adult populations between 2002–2017, and a difference in difference-style empirical model, I examine how restrictions on Direct to Consumer (DTC) sales impact the number of establishments and the employ- ment at wineries. I find that the expansion of the potential wine market by 10 M adults caused about a 3.5% increase in the number of wineries. While reduced DTC restrictions explain growth in the number of wineries, I find no effect of lessened restrictions on the number of winery employees, though there is evidence of a lagged effect. Additionally, I find that the growth of smaller wineries substantially outpaces that of larger wineries when regulations are lessened. These results suggest that regulatory barriers in particular indus- tries may allow states to maintain an artificial size distribution.

Flynn that year hired Fenn, who earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience and was working in consulting at McKinsey. They recruited other industry pricing and marketing specialists to build a nine-person team. Flynn invested in computer servers to warehouse reams of data. Data scientists collected prices for individual items across Flynn’s restaurants, then layered on variables that could impact sales, such as bad weather or a change in restaurant hours. They began regularly monitoring prices for competitor restaurants within a three-mile radius of their stores.

The problem for Scott is that while Ellison is very driven by genuinely held beliefs and cultivated relationships, it’s not clear whether he has a broader strategy with these big bets. After all, why did Ellison give $1 billion to finance Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter? Because “it would be lots of fun,” as he texted Musk at the time.

Illinois and the other Great Lakes states fought for decades over how much lake water should flow through the backwards river. And in 1967 the Supreme Court set a daily water limit of 2.1 billion gallons per day, which since then has lowered water levels of Lakes Michigan and Huron by 2.5 inches.

Sort of like the old Star Trek episode “The Ultimate Computer” on massive steroids, Colossus is genuinely gripping as the coldly analytical Dr. Forbin begins to break down from the strain of trying to get his all-powerful technological genie back in the bottle, with terrifying results. Briskly directed by Joseph Sargent and written by James Bridges, Colossus was based on a novel by D.F. Jones. Pity we never got to film versions of Jones’ two sequels, in which a cult grows around Colossus, who is eventually deactivated and then rebooted when the Earth is threatened by an invasion from Mars.

Using pull requests for code changes by your own team members is like having your family members go through an airport security checkpoint to enter your home. It’s a costly solution to a different problem.

“Bien,” the stockman whispered. “I am a cattle buyer. I have to have my funds in gold.”

Not Even a Recession: The Great German Gas Debate in Retrospect

In fact, it’s about everything. Look at the world from the vantage point of car paint and you begin to see various strands of the 20th century storyline unfurling: the early days of mass production and the modern factory, the ascent of mass consumption, the rise and fall of economic growth, all the way through to today’s “productivity puzzle” economists are trying to get their heads around.

On Reddit, Saudis laughed at anxious American tourists asking if their social media would be audited upon arrival (“lol u think KSA is a police state?” one user retorted, “we don’t care about some random american, just have fun”). On TikTok, middle schoolers showed off trendy sneakers and weekend trips to Al-’Ula, an ancient Arabic oasis city near Medina, occasionally coming into the camera’s view to ask their audience which international school they thought was the most toxic. European expatriates, mostly women, vlogged from big cities like Jeddah and Riyadh about how moving to Saudi Arabia had liberated them.

The company is mining flight data to assess and identify accident risks before anything goes wrong. And it’s preparing an internal education campaign for employees — from the executive suites to the engineering design offices to the factory floor — about lesson learned from the crashes.

Kids and adults of all ages have been folding and flying paper airplanes for more than 150 years. National Paper Airplane Day is an unofficial holiday celebrated every May 26th to bring some attention to this enjoyable pastime. We want you to have a ton of fun on this day, so please continue reading for suggestions of paper airplane activities and games that you can play with your family and friends.

Scout dates back to the late 1950s, when Ted Or­nas, an auto de­signer for In­ternational Har­vester, de­signed the com­pa­ny’s first Scout, a four-wheel-drive recre­ational ve­hi­cle, some­thing that didn’t ex­ist at the time. A month later, South Car­olina law­mak­ers ap­proved $1.3 bil­lion to help VW build the plant.

In many ways, the Twit­ter event was clas­sic Musk. It was hugely hyped, not fully baked and the talk of the in­ter­net af­ter­ward.

A critic of the en­vi­ron­men­tal, so­cial and cor­po­rate-gov­er­nance, or ESG, move­ment, Ra­maswamy wants to re­scind a Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion rule that al­lows re­tire­ment-plan man­agers to con­sider cli­mate change and other ESG ac­tors when they choose in­vest­ments. He is push­ing to cut more than 90% of the staff at the Fed­eral Re­serve and to pre­vent it from is­su­ing a digi­tal cur­rency. He op­poses reg­u­lat­ing bit­coin as a se­cu­rity and taxes on bit­coin min­ers.

In this context, the next iteration of the global security, political and economic system will not be framed by the United States alone. The reality is already something else. It is not an “order,” which inherently points to a hierarchy, and perhaps not even a “disorder.” A range of countries are pushing and pulling in line with their own priorities to produce new arrangements. We in the transatlantic community may need to develop some new terminology as well as adapt our foreign policy approaches to deal with horizontal networks of overlapping and sometimes competing structures. We have entered what Samir Saran, President of India’s Observer Research Foundation, has dubbed the age of “limited liability partnerships.” The regionalization of security, trade and political alliances complicates our national security strategies and policy planning, but it may also intersect with our priorities in useful ways if we can be flexible and creative—rather than simply resisting and responding when things go in directions we don’t like. As British security expert Neil Melvin has suggested, we should embrace the idea of “mini-lateralism.”

Mr. Kissinger leaves no doubt that he be­lieves in a Pax Amer­i­cana and in the need “to de­fend the ar­eas of the world es­sen­tial for Amer­i­can and de­mo­c­ra­tic sur­vival.” But the abil­ity to “ex­e­cute it po­lit­i­cally,” he says, “has de­clined sharply, and that is our over­rid­ing prob­lem now.” He as­cribes this po­lit­i­cal weak­ness to a de­cline in be­lief in the U.S. in its own his­tor­i­cal am­bi­tions and in­sti­tu­tions. “There’s no ele­ment of pride and di­rec­tion and pur­pose left,” he laments, as Amer­i­can lead­ers grap­ple with angst gen­er­ated by events of “300 years ago.”

5.21

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“We are hardening targets — both physical and digital — to make them less desirable to thieves and working with our law enforcement partners to bring perpetrators to justice,” Postal Inspection Service Chief Gary Barksdale said in a statement.

“When government officials cash in on their public service by lobbying, advising, or serving as board members and executives for the companies they used to regulate, it undermines public officials’ integrity and casts doubt on the fairness of government contracting,” wrote Senator Warren. “This problem is especially concerning and pronounced in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the United States’ defense industry.”

Meanwhile, the Blick security guard kept texting me videos. He needed someone to see what he was seeing out there, on his patch of Market Street, between Fifth and Sixth. Did I know how the black markets worked? Had I walked down Market Street at night? Did I know that some of the street addicts were rotting, literally: their decomposing flesh attracting flies. The Anthropologie, where he used to work, announced it would close. “What it really feels like living in San Francisco is that you’re lying to yourself,” he said. “Oh, I live in San Francisco. It’s so nice. When you walk by the junkies you’re like, They don’t exist. they don’t exist. You’re lying to yourself.”

So let’s take those points about authenticity and licensing and have a bit of fun. Because anyone can take those images and modify them, I can take those images and modify them. (Do I feel entirely comfortable doing this? No. Taking and editing someone else’s work is always weird. Especially when it features a living subject with whom I have no connection. But that’s the nature of this type of licensing and usage, so please forgive me. I should stress that there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with the original images, and I’ve described some of the context and thinking that’s likely to have been involved.)

Swiss site Tichy’s Einblick here reports on how police and consumer advocates are warning homeowners heat pumps are being stolen and that often aren’t insured because they are not not secured indoors.

United thinks Delta is trying to suppress demand with artificially high fares so it can then show DOT that demand is dead and it needs flexibility. I don’t see this the same way as United. I think Delta is simply not planning on flying this route. It hopes it can get the flexibility to use the authority to fly from another gateway, but if not, it’ll just walk away from the slot. Delta really doesn’t want to take a bunch of bookings which it will just have to refund or rebook. To me, this is just a pragmatic way to deal with the situation while Delta waits to see how it plays out.

  • “Try hard to stay on good terms with everybody. Civility is an important property, and burning bridges is generally a bad idea; you never know who you’re going to work with again, who you might work for, or who might work for you.” “You can learn something from virtually everybody. One example: I was being driven in a limousine in Palm Springs by a white-haired guy. And I remember thinking, ‘This poor guy, it’s too bad. Here he is driving a limo. It’s nine o’clock at night. He ought to be just out there on the links playing golf and having a nice time.’ We struck up a conversation, and I find out that he actually did retire—from being the chief financial officer of one of the largest insurance companies in Chicago. He got bored playing golf, so he decided to drive a limo three times a week because he knew he was going to meet interesting people.”

LobbyFacts empowers journalists, activists, and researchers to search, sort, filter, and analyse data from the official EU Transparency Register, tracking lobbyists and their influence at the EU level over time. Use the search functions below to get the answers to these questions and more.

The day after the mission, King George VI visited the squadron to congratulate the Dambusters, and later all were invited to Buckingham Palace to receive military honours for flying skill and bravery.

This conventional story is, in our view, both simplistic and self-serving. It fails to account for the well-documented—and perfectly comprehensible—objections that Russians have expressed toward NATO expansion over the past three decades, and obscures the central responsibility that the architects of U.S. foreign policy bear for the impasse. Both the global role that Washington has assigned itself generally, and America’s specific policies toward NATO and Russia, have led inexorably to war—as many foreign policy critics, ourselves among them, have long warned that they would.

In Part One we’ll look at the years 1998-2006, when digital photography was a rapidly changing landscape of experimentation and progress, with occasional peaks marking new solutions that would continue to this day. Part Two will follow the trail from 2008 to the present time.

There’s nothing in today’s report that justifies 4 years of our time.

The Human Rights Campaign’s Healthcare Equality Index, bankrolled by Pfizer, is changing our medical care

The United States is happy for India to continue buying as much Russian oil as it wants, including at prices above a G7-imposed price cap mechanism, if it steers clear of Western insurance, finance and maritime services bound by the cap, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Friday.

Not only did the FBI predicate its investigation on hearsay, but Durham says it failed to corroborate the information it received with any other intelligence agency.

Swedes tend to be active but the hearts of some of those who completed a Vasaloppet showed strain, the researchers found. Overall, the skiers showed no greater risk of AFib than the other Swedes. But those male skiers who had entered the most races or finished with the fastest times, suggesting they’d trained the hardest, were more likely than anyone else, skiers or not, to develop AFib in the following years. (Female skiers had the lowest rates of AFib of any group in the study.)

The first is a return to national self-sufficiency. The post-Cold War decades were defined by shrinking budgets and a willingness to rely on imported weapons. Prior to 1990, many countries – South Africa, Taiwan, Yugoslavia, Romania, Israel, Japan, and others – had a national fighter jet plan. When my career began, the Italian-Brazilian AMX looked like the future.

The Dutch government is considering plans to restrict cattle numbers to two cows per football pitch-sized field, putting them on a collision course with the country’s farmers.

And that reason is simple. Musk’s real heresy wasn’t returning something closer to free speech to Twitter. It was proving that the company could operate on 20% of its old budget and one-quarter of its staff.

A bill sponsored by state Senate Majority Leader Andy Billig, D-Spokane, creates tax credits that will provide subsidies of up to $2 per gallon for SAF, which is 2 to 5 times more expensive than regular jet fuel that currently costs about $2.17 per gallon.

Progress is nearing White Wolf, where the rooftops of bathrooms and other structures are just starting to emerge. Roads are buried beneath at least ten feet of snow, much of it heavily compacted, and crews will have to carefully navigate several hazardous avalanche zones.

In all, he won more than 60 national and international championships in inland lakes scows, Olympic classes, larger offshore sailboats and a record seven Skeeter ice boat championships.

Consumer technology, especially apps, is more advanced than anything used in Europe. You can order food and see where the courier is on a map. You can select seats for your cinema, and the seats turn into characters from the movie, backdrops at concerts show the lyrics on an LED. And the electric car industry is advancing at a super rapid speed and will take the world by surprise. Etcetera.

“But so we went for a walk and I asked him lots of questions,” Lewis continued. “First thing is I call my friend and I said, ‘go ahead do the deal. What could go wrong?’ And the second thing was, is I thought like, ‘I just want to see what happens to this person.'” Lewis didn’t give a formal publication date, but he said he wants the release the book to coincide with the start of a criminal trial against Bankman-Fried, if one occurs. Prosecutors set an original target date for the trial in October, though Bankman-Fried’s lawyers have suggested they may try to push back the date.

“We’ve discovered that it is one thing to build a search engine, and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better choice.”

Using background knowledge of Antarctica and information concerning these activities that has been published since the early 1940s, it is demonstrated: that the two U-Boats could not have reached Antarctica; that there was no secret wartime German base in Dronning Maud Land; that SAS troops did not attack the alleged German base; that the SAS men in the region at the time had civilian jobs; that Operation Highjump was designed to train the US Navy for a possible war with the Soviet Union in the Arctic, and not to attack an alleged German base in Antarctica; and that Operation Argus took place over the ocean more than 2000 km north of Dronning Maud Land. Activities that were classified have subsequently been declassified and it is no longer difficult to separate fact from fancy, despite the fact that many find it attractive not to do so.

“As long as we don’t do something stupid — which is a daily challenge in this industry — we will continue to wipe the floor with every other airline in Europe,” he said.

5.14

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ArtraLab is a new Hong Kong-based company and they just announced two new NONIKKOR full-frame lenses for Nikon Z, Sony E, and Leica L mount. The lenses have a classic/retro/vintage look, feel, and style based on an old Nikon/Nikkor lens design. One model is from the 1960s and the second is from the 1980s. The lenses are built with high-quality materials and advanced optics

Every year, the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards celebrate the best books across a range of food and cookery categories. Here British food writer Clare Finney, one of the judges for this year’s awards, talks us through the fabulous books that made the the 2023 shortlists—and shows how they are about much more than just delicious food.

Listen to this clip of editor-at-large Travis Okulski lapping the new Z06 during our Performance Car of the Year test. You get that smooth flat-plane V-8 sound, and both the dominant frequency—the fourth order—and the eight order are very present. As I explained in my column about helmholtz resonators, the tone of a sound is made up of more than one pitch. The volume of each of those pitches defines the quality of the sound, and it’s why a piano and a guitar playing the same note sound different, and why a C8 Z06 and an F355 spinning at 3000 rpm sound different too.

Neuroimage, the leading publication globally for brain-imaging research, is one of many journals that are now “open access” rather than sitting behind a subscription paywall. But its charges to authors reflect its prestige, and academics now pay over £2,700 for a research paper to be published. The former editors say this is “unethical” and bears no relation to the costs involved.

Callum admires the simplicity and minimalism of Tesla’s design and is by no means a technophobe. But he spent a lot of time fighting what he says was “a huge amount of pressure” to put most functions on to touchscreens, including heating, air conditioning, ventilation and more. “I resisted to the moment I retired.”

What if we look at Ukraine’s situation from a German, not an American, perspective? The German way of war focused on the operational level. Ukraine has a strong German heritage in its approach to war, reflecting the facts that Germany and Austria-Hungary gave Ukraine its independence during World War I and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fought alongside Germans to defend their country and people from Stalin in World War II. As best I can tell at this remove, Ukraine’s army has been fighting German-style maneuver warfare at the tactical level, which is one reason for its surprising successes. So, Kiev, who are you going to listen to, Milley or Manstein?

Our Latin American partners, for their part, are right to put their own self-interest over “great power competition,” but doing so does not mean merely embracing the suitor who offers those in power a big infrastructure project with side payments to the fortunately well-connected, or “royalty treatment” on a state visit. Nor does it mean betraying one’s own principles by keeping quiet about China’s crushing of Hong Kong democracy, mass incarceration of Uyghurs, or “without limits” friendship supporting a brutal invasion and depredation of a neighboring country, to avoid offending Beijing and jeopardizing receipt of its largesse.

Yes, slippery but hegemonic, the tarde reigns over it all, an amorphous concept that spans a chunk of the day so large that other languages need two words for it. The tarde resists control, and there is no social consensus on what it means. Spanish people themselves cannot agree when it begins or ends. “In that sense there’s a chaos in Spanish life,” says Fernando Vilches, a linguist at Rey Juan Carlos university. I think we can give my affliction a name: scheduling shock.

In total, 22 states borrowed money for unemployment insurance from the federal government. All but four, California, Colorado, Connecticut, and New York, have paid back their debts – with California owing the most by far at $18.6 billion as of May 2, followed by New York at $8 billion, Connecticut at $187 million and Colorado at $77 million, according to data from the US Treasury.

They assumed that clicks were their goal. What else is media about? They assumed that because their business model is built on selling advertising. And advertisers pay for clicks. Hence, their job was to deliver those clicks. There are a hundred reasons why this is stupid. First, there aren’t enough clicks in the universe to support this business model. Google has already swallowed most of them. It’s like Pac Man on steroids, gobbling them down as soon as they appear.

They are all items you can find in the collections at the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy (AIHP), an archival library located in the basement of Rennebohm Hall, which houses the School of Pharmacy at UW-Madison. The AIHP is a nonprofit organization devoted to advancing knowledge and understanding of pharmacy’s place in history.

The Willard family has lived and farmed in Still River since 1676; to say that they have built a community is both literally and figuratively true. According to Harasimowicz, the Willards have grown a loyal following, selling their produce only at the farm stand and using an honor system. “People appreciate the neighborly feel this service provides,” she writes. “You weigh your tomatoes, do the math, and leave the money—the big bills go in a slot in the safe—or you can make change in the wooden box with smaller bills. Sometimes people leave an IOU. I always round up. I think many people do.”

The study examined close to 50,000 non-earnings-related 8-K filings between 2005 and 2018, where the firm also issued a news release on the same day. It found that, alongside 8-K reports featuring negative news, managers tend to push out simpler, unrelated press releases to divert attention from the harder-to-read regulatory filings.

As a member of the senior leadership team, Abbott will lead a new integrated end-to-end software organization focused on the development of vehicle and enterprise software technologies and solutions, and delivery of digital services and features to retail and commercial customers. The newly created team will bring together three now distinct software functions within the company, including teams led by Scott Miller, vice president, Software Defined Vehicle and Operating System; Stacy Lynett, vice president, Information and Digital Technology; and Edward Kummer, chief digital officer, Digital Business.

Rather than fixate on these types of details, “Wonder Boy” opts to tell a psychological and personal tale of a young Asian American man who had all the talent and vision in the world, but found himself unsatisfied and increasingly dependent on booze and drugs. After making thirty-two million dollars from the sale of his first company, an online ad-sales platform called LinkExchange, Hsieh made good on a bet that he had made with his friends at college: if he became a millionaire within ten years of graduation, he owed them all a trip to the Caribbean. “While surrounded by friends in the Bahamas as a newly minted millionaire, Tony felt a sense of melancholy,” Au-Yeung and Jeans write. “What’s next? What is happiness? What am I working toward? he wondered.”

Here’s the thing with me: I find almost everything other than Jesus and the people I care about irrelevant at this point. Politics and politicians? Blech! World events? I watch them because they are related to Bible prophecy, but anything I might say about them has been said by more learned individuals. Homelessness, racial division, crime, etc.? You can read this newsletter to find out what I think. I’m saying this to ask: what would you like me to talk about? I hope and pray that whatever it is, I can do it justice.

A 46-year-old man was fatally shot on Monday afternoon in East Germantown while canvassing for the city’s upcoming mayoral primary, police said, in an incident that stemmed from a dispute with a 22-year-old man, who was also canvassing on behalf of OnePA, a progressive-leaning political group.

Jen Angel, owner and operator of Oakland bakery Angel Cakes, died on February 9 due to injuries sustained in a violent robbery. Angel was known not only as a maker of outstanding pies and treats, but also as a longtime organizer of the Anarchist Book Fair and a member of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The East Bay activist, writer, anarchist, and entrepreneur was declared to have lost all brain function by her medical team at Highland Hospital in Oakland on February 9. She was 48 years old.

I was among those targeted by the Iran Disinformation Project. In other words, my tax dollars were being used to fund trolls’ attacks against me. Most disturbing has been Twitter’s refusal to remove accounts which violate their rules, even when I (and other researchers) have spoon-fed them data.

“the number-one issue is a generation-long Democratic Party campaign against growth”. More regulations, more agencies, more rules, restrictions on energy use: these discourage growth. Some on the left – usually, those already with plenty of money of their own – shake fists against growth.

Mr. Rockwell’s team had previously planned to ship the device many times over the past few years, and delays have included coordinating the software to run properly with the hardware, said former employees and other people familiar with the matter.

Sen. Frank Church, the liberal Democrat from Idaho who chaired the committee, had come to believe that the future of American democracy was threatened by the rise of a permanent and largely unaccountable national security state, and he sensed that at the heart of that secret government was a lawless intelligence community. Church was convinced it had to be reined in to save the nation.

The plane’s bias is northwesterly, across an inky Arctic Sea, without the contracting longitudinal lines on the maps I have studied, all of which converge on the Pole. I am bound for Ellesmere Island, a vast orogeny still birthing after 300 million years, with an intermediary stop in the town of Resolute on Cornwallis Island under glaciated hills, the adjacent sea littered with ice shards. Distant cliffs levitate and then are gone, then back again, shimmering in the thermals.

Naomi Wolf has been relentless in calling out the left for their attacks on free association and free speech, in addition to their acquiescence to Big Pharma. Each of these people say that they have a moral obligation to call out their own tribe. Now to my own tribe: the libertarians. For three years, I’ve been reluctant to say anything about the elephant in the room, the near-complete failure of libertarians to stand up to the lockdown and mandate regime. It was a moment in history that was tailor-made for them. Everything in their training taught them to be suspicious of government power and relentless in the defense of liberty. Instead they mostly went silent. Worse, they became the Praetorian Guard of the lockdown Caesars, giving them cover when they deserved it least. The “radical” libertarians defaulted to a completely conventional careerism, even to the point of manufacturing rationales for terrible attacks on the most vulnerable.

Hong Kong and Singapore, once dirt-poor, have astonishing success stories to tell. Both are hubs for international finance, trade, transport and tourism. Both have attracted the brightest professional minds.

5.7

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How Chinese state companies make debts disappear Deal involving Shandong-controlled entities highlights complexity of such maneuvers

For example, unlike much of the world, such as in Europe and Australia, nearly every U.S. commercial airport is owned by a local government. What’s more, airport security isn’t just regulated to government standards; it’s also mostly carried out directly by the government through the Transportation Security Administration (TSA.) And from the time the plane pushes back from the gate to the time it arrives at its destination, it’s told exactly where to go by air traffic controllers, who are government employees.

Modern states, by contrast, are obsessed with demarcating their borders, and have sophisticated tools of mass control at their disposal. The largest states in the world have the scale of empires but, Roberts suggests, they are a new breed. They are ‘superstates’, distinct from their neighbours ‘by expanse of territory, number and diversity of people, and social and economic complexity’. They aren’t quite empires and they aren’t all superpowers. Instead they represent a more recent development in a linear history: ‘The age of empires gave way to the age of states and next to the age of superstates.’

A website is about giving visitors content to enjoy and ways to interact with you.

Meanwhile in Philadelphia, traffic stops fell from 330,000 a year in the late 2010s to 150,000 in 2020 and 2021, a steeper decline than can be explained by reduced traffic counts in the COVID era. (The city recorded more than 150 traffic deaths in 2020, a 10-year high.). Which brings us back to the fake license plates. Their popularity seems to jibe with this new, live-free-or-die status quo on the road, a cynical exploitation of a unique moment in policing. The left has soured on traffic stops, recognizing their discriminatory qualities and tendency to lead to tragic police-citizen interactions. The right has blocked automated traffic policing in many statehouses, because freedom. The police are wary of both cameras and enforcement.

Stop aiming for the same obvious target as everyone else. Figure out your first principles as a person—the Lego blocks of your talents, interests, and preferences—and paint the target around them.

As a result of these regulatory and legislative changes, the S&L industry experienced rapid growth. From 1982 to 1985, thrift industry assets grew 56 percent, more than twice the 24 percent rate observed at banks. This growth was fueled by an influx of deposits as zombie thrifts began paying higher and higher rates to attract funds. These zombies were engaging in a “go for broke” strategy of investing in riskier and riskier projects, hoping they would pay off in higher returns. If these returns didn’t materialize, then it was taxpayers who would ultimately foot the bill, since the zombies were already insolvent and the FSLIC’s resources were insufficient to cover losses.

Each database query tells us something about the state of the current world. For instance, if we have a world w we can ask a question parent(X,Y) where we get all XY for which parent(X,Y) is true.

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. Or, at the very least, that we can add controls, information, and affordances to our chatbot interfaces to make them more usable. I can’t wait to see the field become more mature and for us to start building AI tools that embrace our human abilities.

And that’s not all. The warranty and MRO contracts on today’s generation engines proved to be a huge liability for OEMs. The Trent 1000 powering the Boeing 787 had technical problems so severe that Rolls-Royce’s finances crashed like an airliner going through a wind shear. What’s especially troubling is that the problems emerged nearly a decade after service began.

Nordstrom is planning to close both of its Downtown San Francisco stores, choosing not to renew its lease obligations at its location in the Westfield Mall. It will also close a second nearby Downtown Nordstrom Rack.

This is something my uncle discovered in 1960/61. He realised during the Bay of Pigs crisis that the CIA had devolved into an agency whose function was to provide the military-industrial complex with a constant pipeline of new wars. And my uncle came out of one of those meetings as the Bay of Pigs invasion collapsed, and he realised the CIA had lied to him, and he fired Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, Charles Cabell, Richard Bissell, the three top people in the CIA, for lying to him. And he said at that time: “I want to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.” We have to recognise that it’s not just our civilian agencies that have been captured by industry — the military agencies, the Pentagon, and particularly the intelligence agencies have been captured by the military-industrial complex. We have to recognise that and we have to say, “We don’t want constant wars in our country; we can’t afford them.”

Signaling that demand for US debt is so low that the US is being forced to Japanify itself to prop up the market for treasuries.

According to anonymous sources, the trans activist manifesto of the Nashville mass shooter has been put in a top-secret crate in a top-secret warehouse for safekeeping, right next to the motive for the Vegas shooting, the Epstein client list, and the Ark of the Covenant. 


“The fiscal recklessness of the last decade has been like watching a horror movie unfold,” Druckenmiller, who once was George Soros’ chief strategist and now runs his own Duquesne Family Office, said in a speech Monday at the USC Marshall School of Business. In a follow-up email to Bloomberg, he said he hopes the US government doesn’t go into default, “but honestly, all this focus on the debt ceiling instead of the future fiscal issue is like sitting on the beach at Santa Monica worrying about whether a 30-foot wave will damage the pier when you know there’s a 200-foot tsunami just 10 miles out.”

Amazingly, Rolling Stone only published two photos from the shoot, and the rest of the imagery went unseen for decades. Rapoport later excavated the shots from his basement to sell to Corbis around 2014, and the photos slowly found their way — through tweets, blog posts and subreddits — to “Star Wars” fans around the world.

The Biden Administration in January 2022 stopped the EastMed pipeline. That joint effort of our allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel sought to bring much needed clean-burning Mediterranean natural gas to southern Europe.

After winning 2022 Satellite Technology of the Year award, Michael Trela spoke with Via Satellite about creating Apple’s emergency messaging via satellite service that is already saving lives and bringing peace of mind to iPhone users across the world.

The World Bank Group is implementing a new corporate flagship, Business Ready (B-READY), to assess the business and investment environment worldwide annually.

Discontent over government plans to address the problem until now date led to a major defeat for Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s governing coalition in regional elections in March.

Now, former Nakoma residents Jon and Brenda Furlow are proposing to build a two-story, 4,492-square-foot home with two-car garage on a quarter-acre lot behind the tavern at 3701 Council Crest.

…..

and enacted the state’s voter ID law, which after several court challenges took effect in 2016. “As soon as Wisconsin adopted that, it really caused the state to drop in accessibility,” said Michael Pomante, a Jacksonville University political science professor and co-author of the Index. He added that the drop suggested Wisconsin voters faced a “significantly” different landscape compared with other states.