Many people in the West have been surprised by the events of the last week in which American TV presenter Tucker Carlson followed his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin with a series of increasingly bizarre videos. Tucker discovers that Moscow Metro stations are grand and impressive, that Russian supermarkets have shopping carts that can be rented with a coin that you can retrieve on returning the cart, and that food is cheaper in Russia. I don’t wish to bore the time-starved reader by addressing this silliness but if you’re interested, read this footnote1. Instead, let me explain why I am not surprised. I appeared on Tucker’s show twice during his tenure at Fox News. On both occasions we discussed subjects on which we agree: the erosion of freedom of speech in the West and the dangers the woke left poses to our society.

The people who are the most likely to attend religious services weekly are those with graduate degrees.

The Royal Canadian Navy is trying to fix a series of problems on its new Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ships including anchors that aren’t effective, a refueling system that’s too heavy to use, and areas on the vessels that are leaking.

The Republican and Democratic parties have distinct strengths within different subgroups of the U.S. population. However, Democrats have lost ground among some of their traditionally stronger support groups while gaining ground with others. This is based on analysis of Americans’ party preferences, which includes those who identify as Democratic or Republican and those who are independent but lean toward either party.

What’s more, says Frank, if car designers could draw better, cars would look better. The creative flow from mind to medium is less constrained using pen and paper than with a computer: more human and more inventive. ‘Using pen and paper, you’re less inhibited. You’re expressing your inner thoughts in the purest form.’ | Only one student, sponsored by a Chinese car maker, challenged his championing of paper and pen. She said that, in China, sketching was unnecessary. They increasingly use AI. ‘And it shows,’ said Frank.

One of Britain’s oldest steelmakers has developed a manufacturing technique that it claims could drastically reduce the time and cost to produce mini nuclear power stations, which have been proposed as one way to bridge the nation’s energy gap. Sheffield Forgemasters has become the first to use the so-called electron beam welding method to produce one of the core parts of a small modular reactor (SMR) at scale.

“Finland plans to open more than 300 new shooting ranges to encourage more citizens to take up the hobby in the interest of national defence.”

In the world of corporate medicine, Diamond, who has spent his whole medical career at One Medical, is what is known as a “friendly” or “straw” doctor, a physician who lends his name and license number to corporations seeking to comply with regulations requiring medical practices to be owned by licensed physicians. His name appears on the articles of incorporation for Amazon-owned clinics in Oregon, Florida, Virginia, Connecticut, Ohio, and about a dozen other states. Separately, a Florida straw doctor in one of Millstein’s other recent cases had attached his name to more than 200 practices.

However, in five years, when we look back, we will recognize that Apple’s Vision Pro, with its powerful spatial computing features, advanced optics, and 3D immersive imaging, was a game changer and a catalyst for moving computing from 2D to 3D. Given Apple’s evolutionary product roadmaps, they will make the Vision Pro more like regular glasses with lower price points when the technology becomes available to allow this to happen.

We’re just over a year into the existence (and proliferation) of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and other image generators, and despite the obvious (and reasonable) fear that these products will continue to erode the foundations of the already unstable economies of the creative arts, we keep running into the problem that these things are interesting, surprising, but not particularly useful for anything.

Been staring at it all morning trying to draw assumptions from it.

Wow. That’s quite a list of illegal activities you’re allowed to do as a CHS (“for investigative purposes”) when “authorized” by the FBI. Sounds exciting. Where do we sign up?

“It takes a rare breed of a leader to not sell to the highest bidder,” he said.

Really good to see this line in the PM’s speech yesterday. Of the 8 former eastern-bloc OECD members, NZ now is less productive than half of them.

Americans were sold the promise that electric vehicles would bring production companies and an influx of jobs to small towns nationwide as part of a modern day goldrush. However, as interest in EVs has slipped, lithium and nickel facilities – metals used in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles – are taking cost-cutting measures including mass layoffs and suspending operations. The demand for electric vehicles surged in 2022, rising by 76 percent in April of that year, but by the end of 2023, the number of vehicles sold dropped to just 50 percent.

No one who knows anything about America could imagine that it will reelect an administration ostensibly headed by an incomprehensible, senescent, sticky fingered, superannuated servitor. America and the world are on a glidepath to better things, whatever the Americophobic Guardian and the rest of the moronic euro-Left think of it.

“Never before in history has a declining empire beaten a rising empire, ever,” he said in a recent interview.

The United States would do well to expand the Civilian Marksmanship Program – for those not aware, you can buy a government-surplus M1 Garand from them for $700 with free shipping!

In other words, they don’t define themselves by their victimization but by their aspiration. Democrats are the party of victims, Republicans are the party of men.

The missile was supposed to have flown several thousand miles before landing harmlessly in the Atlantic between Brazil and West Africa. Instead, it dropped into the ocean near to where it was launched.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen has done a deep dive on “the one percent”—urban dwellers with post-graduate degrees and incomes over $150,000. These, by a four-to-one margin, support Joe Biden and his climate policies and progressive agenda. These professionals, particularly women, are increasingly the base of the Democratic Party. Whether as professionals or the ultra-wealthy, these Democrats may be voting their consciences, but also their class interests. Government, social assistance, and healthcare account for 56 percent of the 2.8 million net new jobs over the past year, notes the Wall Street Journal, and for nearly all employment gains in blue states such as New York and Illinois.

The numbers are stark. Two years ago, in February 2022, GM said it expected to sell 400,000 EVs by the end of 2023. Eight months later, it rolled that date back to mid-2024. (In October, it abandoned the 400,000 number altogether.) But its actual 2023 sales of Ultium EVs were a mere 13,838. Of those, 9,155, or two-thirds were one single model: the Cadillac Lyriq. Sure, GM sold 76,000 electric cars altogether, but a whopping 82% of them were the aging Chevrolet Bolt EV and  EUV—which it took out of production late last year.

Brooke Rollins, a former Trump domestic policy adviser, pitched Dunn in 2021 on a new think tank, America First Policy Institute, with a mission to perpetuate Trump-era policies for generations to come. The West Texas oilman, whose efforts in his home state have been both successful and polarizing, responded with both enthusiasm and money. “He’s a visionary,” said Rollins, who previously worked with Dunn building a political think tank in Texas. “His ability to build organizations and structure and culture is so incredible. I’ve relied on him more for that than his funding.” 

Trump’s attorneys have Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade’s cell phone data. At least 35 visits to Fani Willis’s condo before the “relationship” started. 2,000 calls and 12K texts between Wade/Willis in 2021.

Using big Medicare databases has never been cheap or easy. Under the current system, researchers could have the data transferred to secure university computers for about $20,000–that’s a lot but once the data was on the university computers it could be accessed by multiple researchers, cutting costs. A professor could buy the data and their PhD students, for example, wouldn’t have to pay again. Under the new system it will cost $35,000 for one researcher to access the data which will be held on government (CMS) computers. Moreover, it’s unclear how complex statistical analysis will be performed or how congested the CMS systems may become.

And so as part of that maturation, Marc and Ben—now Silicon Valley elders by today’s standards—decided that the spirit walk was over, and they had to return to the world of political fundraising, too. In December, seemingly out of nowhere, Horowitz wrote in a blog post that he and Marc were back, but this time that they would pledge to be “single issue” donors. “We believe that advancing technology is critical for humanity’s future, so we will, for the first time, get involved with politics by supporting candidates who align with our vision and values specifically for technology,” 

LT, “If the Bank of England governor can’t be sacked and the Prime Minister can be sacked, then the BoE will have more power than the PM. That is a problem in a democracy”

Yes, most Americans want to end the flood. Yet the federal government–that is, America–as a matter of national policy, maintains the frontier open. For example, as I write Washington forbids Texas to use barbed wire to stop the influx. This is official policy. From a Mexican point of view, America’s refusal to protect its borders is a major problem as it draws immigrants from all of Latin America, no favor, and then Mexico has to put up with America’s anger at Mexico’s failure to do what America should do for itself.

Egypt has agreed to a $35bn deal with the United Arab Emirates to develop the town of Ras el-Hekma town on its northwestern coast, Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly announced on Friday after weeks of speculations.

Over the past 19 months, a Reinsdorf-connected company has spent $44.7 million buying vacant lots from two politically connected families that have long offered discounted parking deals to fans of the Bulls and Blackhawks, records examined by the Chicago Sun-Times show. A third family has refused to sell its parking lots. More than half of that money has been paid to family-owned companies connected to longtime Bridgeport businessman Joseph Feldman Sr., whose late sister headed the political campaign fund for former Mayor Richard M. Daley.

In demanding these companies’ data, EIA appears to be responding to political pressure rather than a genuine “emergency” implicating public harm. But the Paperwork Reduction Act allows emergency exceptions only in limited circumstances—not including political pressure. So, EIA’s unlawful scheme must be set aside for good.

If the legacy primes can’t figure out how to build high-performance spacecraft at a reasonable cost, new companies like Astranis will have to build them instead.

Gov. Kemp just sent a letter to the White House demanding details, such as the immigration status, of the suspect charged with the murder of a student on UGA’s campus.

For a broader examination of the way Israel has engaged in a systematic propaganda campaign about the events of October 7 and beyond, see my recent piece, “Israel’s Ruthless Propaganda Campaign to Dehumanize Palestinians:”

Addressing industry figures, government officials and dozens of reporters at the ceremony, Chang recounted his very first trip to Japan. He arrived in 1968 as vice president in charge of Texas Instruments’ integrated circuit business to start a joint venture with Sony in Japan. The first person he met during that visit was Akio Morita, the legendary founder of the electronics titan. During their two-hour conversation, Chang recalled, Morita told him: “You will be pleasantly surprised by the yield you will achieve in Japan.”

Requires each county to maintain on its website a list of its policy procedures and expectations for administrative approval of Live Local Act-eligible projects.

But here’s the thing: being able to say, “wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement. Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’tbe controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.

But perhaps the most memorable piece of advice was from a late-career writer who didn’t mince words. You want to make it in journalism, he said? Marry rich. We laughed. He didn’t.

The theft of a giant radio tower has silenced what used to be the voice of a small Alabama town and the surrounding county, the radio station’s general manager said. A thief or thieves made off with the 200-foot (61-meter) tower, shutting down WJLX radio in Jasper, Alabama. So far, no arrests have been made.

This competition can occur even in the physical world.  There will be many new, AI-generated and AI-supported projects, and they will bid for real resources.  How about “AI figures out cost-effective desalination and so many deserts are settled and built out”?  That will draw away resources from competing deployments, and your project will have to bid against that.

Ireland, Germany, Singapore and China as well as a US county and Amsterdam in the Netherlands have introduced restrictions on new data centres in recent years to comply with more stringent environmental requirements. | Commentary.

Waylon soon grew to be “two hundred fifty pounds of pure protein,” as Austin likes to say—more than an average-sized NFL linebacker. By then, Austin had moved him to a large pen a few hundred yards away from the family home. On particularly beautiful days, he liked to lie on the ground in the enclosure, listening to sports radio and watching the clouds pass by. Inevitably, Waylon would lie down beside him, gingerly resting his enormous, wart-covered head on Austin’s thigh. They could remain that way for five or six hours at a time. 

Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWS who successfully escaped, an estimated one-third were aided in their flight by the rigged Monopoly sets… Everyone who did so was sworn to secrecy indefinitely, since the British Government might want to use this highly successful ruse in still another, future war.

People talk about threats to democracy in Poland, and I am not happy they have restricted the power of their judiciary.  But consider Germany.  The country has given up its energy independence, it may lose a significant portion of its manufacturing base, its earlier economic strategy was to cast its lot with Russia and China, AfD is the #2 party there and growing, and the former east is politically polarized and illiberal, among other problems.  Most of all, the country has lost its will to defend itself.  That is in spite of a well-educated population and a deliberative political systems that in the more distant past worked well.  You can criticize Trump’s stupid provocations all you want, but unless you have a better idea for waking Germany (and other countries) up, you are probably just engaging in your own mood affiliation.  On this issue, “argument by adjective” ain’t gonna’ cut it.

A serial burglar in Edina, Minnesota is suspected of using a Wi-Fi jammer to knock out connected security cameras before stealing and making off with the victim’s prized possessions. Minnesota doesn’t generally have a reputation as a hotbed for technology, so readers shouldn’t be surprised to hear that reports of Wi-Fi jammers used to assist burglaries in the U.S. go back several years. PSA: even criminals use technology, and more are now catching on — so homeowners should think about mitigations.

They gave local news away for free. Virtually nobody wanted it. 

Call me old-fashioned, but I love reading interesting cover letters. Yes, I understand they’re time consuming to write, but that’s your problem – not mine. If you’re spraying and praying resumes to a bunch of jobs to be efficient, that’s fair. But if there’s a handful of dream jobs that you really want, you need to write a cover letter.

The decision to invade Italy had been made at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, where Roosevelt granted Churchill’s wish to pursue the war in the Mediterranean further. The US was keener on invading Normandy as soon as possible, and agreed to a limited Italian campaign as long as Operation Overlord retained priority. This is why the armies in Italy were short on resources – not only manpower but shipping and landing craft for amphibious assaults. Furthermore, harking back to the Union’s terms during the Civil War, Roosevelt insisted on ‘unconditional surrender’, which perturbed Churchill but suited Stalin because it precluded the Allies lining up an Axis enemy as an anti-Soviet ally (for the rapidly approaching Cold War), even if it also prevented Stalin from concluding his own peace. The American mentality was that of a heavyweight flexing for a knockout in a couple of rounds: across the Channel, into the Ruhr and Saarland, then onwards to Berlin. The British, bloodied at Dunkirk and Tobruk, and haunted by the ghosts of Flanders, were more cautious: a welterweight contender jabbing for weaknesses. Churchill called Italy ‘the soft underbelly of the crocodile’, and, mixing his animal metaphors, was emboldened after Sicily to ask: ‘Why should we crawl up the leg like a harvest-bug from the ankle upwards? Let us rather strike at the knee.’

Veteran radio broadcaster David Gleason built a nine-million-page archive to set the record straight on what he sees as the medium’s oft-distorted history. The Library of American Broadcasters Foundation is honoring him for the effort.

For me, the most interesting part of visionOS is the input part of the interaction model. The core operation is still pointing. On NLS and its descendants, you point by indirect manipulation: moving a cursor by translating a mouse or swiping a trackpad, and clicking. On the iPhone and its descendants, you point by pointing. Direct manipulation became much more direct, though less precise; and we lost “hover” interactions. On Vision Pro and its descendants, you point by looking, then “clicking” your bare fingers, held in your lap.

Marshfield Clinic Health System has recently halted services, redirected some services to facilities with more resources and furloughed about 3% of its employees. In a statement regarding the company’s furloughs, the health system said the furloughs were necessary to address the challenges of providing health care in rural areas. “Providing health care in our rural geography comes with challenges and it’s imperative we think differently,” said Jeff Starck, a media relations specialist for Marshfield Clinic Health System. “Managing rising supply and labor costs are key to continuing to meet the needs of our patients across the region.”

Drilling down into those individual domain links revealed inboxes for each employee or user of these exposed websites. Some of the exposed emails dated back to 2008; others were as recent as the present day.

it’s almost as if people are just taking words, randomly mixing them together, and christening these new dialogues. Those dialogues have not served US interests well at all over the years.

According to his memoirs, Eugène-François Vidocq escaped from more than twenty prisons (sometimes dressed as a nun). Working on the other side of the law, he apprehended some 4000 criminals with a team of plainclothes agents. He founded the first criminal investigation bureau — staffed mainly with convicts — and, when he was later fired, the first private detective agency. He was one the fathers of modern criminology and had a rap sheet longer than his very tall tales. Who was Vidocq? Daisy Sainsbury investigates.

Many engineers tend to be linear thinkers. They see how X is done today, so they immediately tackle a small, incremental improvement to X using known iteration techniques. I’d call that somewhat lazy engineering in high tech, as understanding Moore’s Law tells us that incremental improvements cascade from that constantly with even only modest additional effort. Process size reduces? Chip complexity and/or speed increases. Speed increases? Data access increases. The list goes on and on. A lot of tech engineering tends to be just trying to keep up with Moore’s Law, not taking new advantages of it or changing something else about how you’re using it. The change from CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) to RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer), for instance, was a big one that’s still having trickle effects, particularly in the GPU and NPU arenas. But such dramatic shifts tend to happen much more rarely than iteration.

The decline of financial privacy.

John Deaton, prominent crypto attorney, eyes US Senate race against Elizabeth Warren

My organization, American Economic Liberties Project, developed a full suite of recommendations and earlier this month we shared them with the public and lawmakers in Washington. “How to Fix Flying: A New Approach to Regulating the Airline Industry” is a paper I co-wrote with Ganesh Sitaraman of Vanderbilt University. We tackle competition, access, regional inequality and underserved communities, pricing, passenger protections, and of course, safety. 

ShotSpotter disaster only the latest example of mayoral incompetence: Chicago suffers from these unforced errors, Mr. Mayor

To that end, Mr. Faury said, Airbus is sticking with plans to elevate production of the A320neo to 75 jets a month in 2026, though probably not more than that for several years after. Boeing had planned to increase production of its 737 model to 50 planes per month by around 2025. But the U.S. company suspended its forecasts last month, as it addresses quality control issues highlighted by an incident in early January in which a door panel blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 plane shortly after takeoff.

Westby said the Apple agent told her that Apple had not contacted her, that the call was almost certainly a scam, and that Apple would never do that — all of which she already knew. But when Westby looked at her iPhone’s recent calls list, she saw the legitimate call from Apple had been lumped together with the scam call that spoofed Apple:

This week, I surveyed members of the White House press corps—reporters, on-air correspondents, photographers, etcetera—and they all emphasized that the symptoms of Biden’s age had become more noticeable in recent months and a frequent discussion topic at the desks behind the Brady briefing room. “Anyone who covers this White House knows he’s showing the signs of his age—he whispers, he shuffles, he misremembers,” one White House reporter told me. “Anyone with an elderly parent knows what this is.”

As it turned out, the 2002 NIE was a pioneering effort in a new form of executive mischief, one that wedded selective releases of classified research to suppression of dissent to build public cases for action, with secrecy rules guaranteeing long delays between initial public deceptions and later disillusioning revelations. This practice is at the center of today’s Racket/Public story about how the January 6, 2017 report that “Cooked the Intelligence”to hide that Russia didn’t fear a Clinton presidency, and people of all political persuasions should care about it because the corruption issue isn’t partisan.

The chatbot provided inaccurate information, encouraging Moffatt to book a flight immediately and then request a refund within 90 days. In reality, Air Canada’s policy explicitly stated that the airline will not provide refunds for bereavement travel after the flight is booked. Moffatt dutifully attempted to follow the chatbot’s advice and request a refund but was shocked that the request was rejected.

We asked some of the Michelin Inspectors to tell us about some of the dishes that made a great impression on them this Guide year. This could be something that told a story, something that showcased an unusual technique or something they just found simply delicious.

The satanic globalists have had it all their way for at least the last 79 years. They promised Heaven and they delivered Hell on Earth. But the pendulum is already swinging back, and it is going to swing back hard with a holy vengeance.

This week, I bring you Ford and GM’s “Regrets and Apologies” tour, as both of their CEOs backpedal and make excuses for dumb decisions and flat-out wrong assumptions.

Greens try to flip the script: Blame conservatives, not the Green Deal. ‘The farmers are protesting decades of conservative farming policy,’ one official argued. That case will be a hard sell amid a cacophony of green-bashing.

Toyota: just look at what they do,
not what they claim to do. https://t.co/xOwvvpwLGn

— stekkerauto ??? (@stekkerauto) February 4, 2024

Think about this in 0-2 years when they can be 100% autonomous and immune to jamming, and 1-4 years when they have iPhone 15 Pro level compute onboard and can be fully passive autonomous with terrain-following multi spectral. https://t.co/GwCSZDiVi3

— Ryan Lackey (@octal) February 4, 2024

Bombing is not diplomacy, but politicians like it because it conveys the impression of substantive action. Bombing is neither a strategy nor a simple exercise in virtue signaling. Bombing is an act of war. Bombing does not contain conflict, nor does bombing deter an opponent from future action. If anything, bombing escalates tension and leads to all-out war.

At no time in Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia were American bombings, sea-based operations, or ground incursions truly effective in deterring enemy moves or in preventing more and more destructive war from breaking out. The North Vietnamese simply absorbed the losses and escalated their attacks wherever U.S. forces were weakest on the ground.

These measures of fitness are important because they allow us to make an apples-to-apples comparison of how hard the riders were pushing. The amateur was slower, but was he pushing just as hard relative to his fitness? Not quite—which isn’t surprising, since the pro was racing for his livelihood while the amateur was on vacation, and also since the amateur was spending twice as long on his bike each day. Here’s the distribution of relative time spent in seven different intensity zones:

Even so, the results of consolidation are always the same: less competition and, ultimately, higher prices. And sometimes deteriorating service as well.

There is another alternative and it deals with the way corporations are chartered in the United states. We could go on about this for many pages, but the key points are:
1. The idea of the corporation was invented by the Dutch in 1602 as a way of getting more ships into the water to compete with the larger European countries during the Age of Exporation.
2. The British sorta copied the Dutch idea, blending it with their then old concept of an appointment by the crown to be a supplier to the crown and its ministries. Charters were granted by the king and could be revoked just as easily.

That Protasiewicz was boosted in 2023 by Emily’s List, End Citizens United, and Family Friendly Action PAC is likely to prompt further calls from the GOP for the justice to step away from the Elias Law Group’s motion, which seeks a new congressional map in time for the election this November. Protasiewicz waved away requests from conservatives last year for her to recuse from lawsuits in connection to the state’s GOP-drawn legislative maps, which the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled were unconstitutional in December 2023. Democrats have a 4-3 court majority.

Comparing Large Language Models Against Lawyers

Workers’ posts online and details from a company Q&A session on Friday, as reported by the Verge, paint an ugly picture of the Mountain View tech giant’s current employee-boss relations. Long known as a bastion for innovation and a cushy environment for engineers, Google and its work culture are now getting skewered as overly corporate and generally aimless.

Saudi Arabia has threatened to imprison the bankers and consultants it works with if they cooperate with a probe by US lawmakers into the planned merger of the PGA Tour with LIV Golf.

A similar opportunity exists today in maritime transportation; all we need to do is ignite it. Optimally, the prize should encourage a radical rethinking of maritime transport, including its form factor, materials, power plant, and crewing. The award should also be large enough to attract many entrants and encourage bold thinking. If successful, the outcome of this prize would be;

It is with great sadness that we announce John’s death on Friday, February 2, 2024. He was born in Maryland, USA to William and Bertha Walker, who preceded him in death. John is survived by his wife Roxie Walker and a brother, Bill Walker of West Virginia.

There is a shortage because our lone factory’s maximum capacity is 28,000 units (i.e. 24 ku) per month in the face of Ukraine asking for 600,000 units (600 ku) per month.

A cryptocurrency firm has lost a bid to force BC Hydro to provide the vast amounts of power needed for its operations, upholding the provincial government’s right to pause power connections for new crypto miners.

A woman in Connecticut suddenly began getting mail advertisements for cremation services soon after she completed chemotherapy, according to a startling anecdote in a new report by the state’s attorney general’s office. According to the report, she was added to a marketing list for the cremation company by a data broker. 

Daily Trader Joe’s Price Tracker.

« These men, and they were all men, kept the faith: they continued to assert that communism was a better system, and though it had disintegrated it would win out in the end. ». An interview w Australian author Anna Funder about her 2003 book Stasiland…

What can be anticipated from #Putin’s #interview with. @TuckerCarlson? Understanding the context is crucial. Putin perceives 2024 as a pivotal year, viewing it as a window of opportunity for Russia to potentially shift the dynamics of the war in Ukraine in its favor. He anticipates a temporary gap in Western military support, with ammunition production expected to ramp up only by early 2025. Concurrently, the U.S. election cycle might lead to a less decisive American geopolitical strategy towards supporting Kyiv, and the European Union, facing its own internal disagreements, is unlikely to compensate for this support on its own. Moreover, Ukraine could be grappling with significant internal political challenges, especially with the anticipated resignation of Zaluzhny.

It’s striking how little of my lived experienced “dealing with health issues” over the past four years really shows up in the broad strokes of the data. Though it looks like clinical notes are missing from my EHI export, so that obscures some of the story.

Biden ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer deleted Joe Biden’s audio files after learning about the special counsel probe. Zwonitzer wrote wrote extensively about the Biden family and their work in Ukraine and might’ve accessed (classified?) records. The Biden DOJ is not charging him. More.

In its Form 990, In-Q-Tel makes it clear that it does not disclose its financials to the public, so where does the oversight of In-Q-Tel come from? The 990 states that: “IQT receives regular oversight from the CIA and other client agencies, who keep Congress informed of the company’s activities.”

As economist Alan Blinder said at the 1988 Nobel Prize ceremony, “The ideas here seem obvious with the passage of time. But someone had to think of it first.”

I left my VW Polo at home, hopped on a train and made by way to Central London where I met the legendary car journalist and TV presenter James May in London to discuss what made German cars so ‘nice’, what they mean to people in Germany and around the world and where he thinks this is all headed. A history enthusiast as well as a car man, James is ideally placed to give us a whistle-stop tour of German cars from Benz and Beetle to Trabant and TT. Enjoy!

Robinson is one of the greatest living Christian novelists, by which I don’t just mean that she’s a Christian—though she is an active one—but that her great novels (five so far) and her versatile, morally stringent essays (four collections and a book of lectures, on subjects including Darwinism and the Puritans as well as her own childhood) reflect a deep knowledge and love of Christianity. Robinson, who has taught Bible classes and preached at her church in Iowa City, Iowa, is a learned lay theologian of the Calvinist variety. In many of her essays and particularly in Gilead, she makes us aware of a John Calvin who does not at all conform to his reputation as a dour ascetic.

With cloud costs and complexity higher than expected, many enterprises are making a U-turn and putting applications and data back in traditional systems.

Let’s start off by reminding everyone that Elena did not come through qualifying, nor did she appear out of nowhere to win her Wimbledon title. She has been one of the WTA tour’s most promising prospects for the last few years. She’s had a slow and steady climb up the rankings and reached the upper echelon of tennis without the backing of the Russian government (she was born in Moscow). In 2020, right before the pandemic hit, Elena made 4 finals in less than 2 months and was on the fast track to the top 10. She was actually set to reach a career-high ranking of number 5 in the world, but the rankings froze because of Covid. She had a difficult time finding her sparkling form again once the tour resumed.

Sales and use tax rates change on a monthly basis. This chart is for informational purposes only. Specific questions should be addressed to your tax advisor. Rate information is gathered from various State Department of Revenue materials and various rate providers including Thomson Reuters and Vertex, Inc.

Nothing in Going Infinite is subtle. Lewis deals us heavy-handed metaphors, endless cliches, and contrived plot devices. Sam’s lair is the Dragon’s Hoard, lifted from his favorite video game Storybook Brawl. The entire architecture of the FTX offices is designed around a $250,000 tungsten cube?—?which then goes missing. Sam’s stuffed animal Manfred represents his need for emotional attachment.

Finally, amid all of this, Apple is also ramping up its in-house personal finance efforts to reduce reliance on third parties like Goldman Sachs. Internally, this is called “Project Breakout” and would bring things like lending, fraud analysis, and credit checks in-house.

Their mentor’s playbook relies on threats, playing one set of stakeholders against the others, to win concessions from all. Asking Calhoun to make peace with his unionized workforce may be simply too much to ask.

As more shopping is done online, experts say consumers are now looking for retail that is close to the road and fast to get in and out of. Shoppers who seek out strip malls are hyper-local and loyal customers — “the regulars.”

The war machine votes to leave our troops in the middle east as bait, funds our enemies until they kill Americans, then uses the dead troops as a justification for a new war.

This scam only benefits Iran & the defense contractors who own too many members of our government. https://t.co/1QFQXWXdoO

— Joe Kent for WA-3 (@joekent16jan19) January 28, 2024

Kaiser Permanente, Oakland’s largest private employer, has issued a memo directing workers in downtown Oakland to stay in their buildings for lunch and work, in response to street robberies of workers who went out to grab something to eat. Workers are told to bring their own food or have it delivered.

As they collect and analyze massive amounts of genetic sequences from plants, animals, and microbes, biologists keep encountering surprises, including some that may challenge the very definition of life. The latest, reported this week in a preprint, is a new kind of viruslike entity that inhabits bacteria dwelling in the human mouth and gut. These “obelisks,” as they’re called by the Stanford University team that unearthed them, have genomes seemingly composed of loops of RNA and sequences belonging to them have been found around the world.

What happens when environmentalists and sympathetic lawmakers fail to see the downside of too much legal review

Wisconsin Retirement System benefits are based on your 3 highest years of pay, your years of service and age. As a judge, Lena Taylor will make $164,000 a year – up big from $57,000. I wonder how much extra she will get in retirement thanks to Evers?

But some neighbors opposed the project because it eliminated the former commercial use and was too tall for its setting, could cause traffic safety hazards and more. They appealed the commission’s decision to the City Council. In May 2022, the council voted 17-0 with two abstentions to uphold the commission’s decision. Then, five residents filed a challenge in Dane County Circuit Court. It contends the city erred in allowing the project to exceed the maximum number of housing units because it’s not a functional “mixed-use” building envisioned by ordinance; failed to enforce a zoning regulation that requires commercial block buildings to locate parking behind or on the side of the structure; failed to enforce a prohibition against blank walls facing a public street; and failed to enforce a zoning regulation requiring commercial storefront for a minimum 40% of the facade.

“one can say that Boeing held $40bn in funds from airlines and it cost them $10bn in borrowing costs to do so.”

“And that’s when I met Rob LoBreglio, the brewmaster for Great Dane [and a co-founder], and get to talking and telling him about this idea that I want to do,” Dawson says. “And he’s like, ‘I’ve had this idea for 30 years. I want to do it. I’m happy to help you. Let’s work together.’”

Pretend you are a banked individual, which in the U.S. context means that you have a checking account in your own name trivially available to you. You are handed a physical check. You would prefer to have money. What do you do?

Each facility’s Epic (the dominant EHR) has a distinct interface. Painstakingly built menus, phrases and unique shortcuts developed in one context cannot transfer to another. Orders have different names and codes. Muscle memory is useless. (In contrast, the VA’s 1983 VistA designers, knowing clinicians rotate through services, focused on only two goals: patient care and rapid adaptability). It is time-consuming and none of this is actual patient care.

More solar energy powered Texas than ever before on Sunday morning, with over one third of the electricity running on the state’s power grid coming from the sun. Experts say it’s a Texas record that’s not expected to last very long.

Deere confirmed at CES 2024 that the See & Spray software-as-a-service (SaaS) pricing model will vary by customer but said it is currently charging $4 per acre in the test run with corn growers, according to analysts at J.P. Morgan, in a Jan. 11 note to investors. See & Spray tech has been used on 1 million acres so far, saving 8 million gallons of chemicals.

The San Francisco of my youth was full of small shops whose friendly eccentricity felt like part of the place. Some of them still exist but they’re rarer now. Many had old photographs of the business or the neighbourhood, some had artefacts of the past or pieces of the owner’s art. The little liquor and grocery store in my old neighbourhood had a wall of pictures of locals attending its annual barbecue and a ledger in which the proprietor recorded transactions with elderly locals who bought their groceries on credit and paid up at the end of the month. The exchanges between people who knew one another were non-commodities these small businesses offered along with whatever was for sale.

“You cannot change demand for energy by destroying supply,” it wrote. “If the United States did indeed curtail LNG exports, it would just drive customers into the arms of competitors such as Australia, Qatar, Algeria, and, yes, Russia. Quite possibly, some potential customers would choose to meet their needs with coal instead.”

I think it’s the other way around. Apple is taking us into the future, into a new era of computing. Some of us are running as fast as we can to get there, and others are being dragged, kicking and screaming. But we’re all going. We’re going to the moon, and we’re going to look around at the ghostly luminescence of ancient dust under a black, star-studded sky, and we’ll just know that this is the future of computing and entertainment and apps and memories, and that this apparatus wrapped around our head will change everything.

I thought most of us were going to die from the climate crisis. I was wrong.

In funds provided by the State Department and U.S.-backed United Nations outlets, religious-based and other humanitarian groups are paving “migration trails” with cold cash and free “loans” to help ease the hardships immigrants face as they head to the border, like over 300,000 did in December.

In her remarks at the Hyatt in Minneapolis, Omar also spoke of the return of “missing territory” to Somalia in an apparent nod to the push to unite ethnic Somalis across the Horn of Africa, including those living in land controlled by Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya. Asked if she was calling for Somalia to gain control over those lands, Omar said, “no.”

That’s right, I’m not adding menus and controls willy nilly. It’s not that kind of camera. It’s Quality with Convenience. If you want some “menu like” things, check out what the app can do. It’s where any added camera features would appear.

Taylor, Travis, And Taxes: Addressing The Environmental Cost Of Private Jet Travel

To worship at the altar of mega-scale and to convince yourself that you should be the one making world-historic decisions on behalf of a global citizenry that did not elect you and may not share your values or lack thereof, you have to dispense with numerous inconveniences—humility and nuance among them. Many titans of Silicon Valley have made these trade-offs repeatedly. YouTube (owned by Google), Instagram (owned by Meta), and Twitter (which Elon Musk insists on calling X) have been as damaging to individual rights, civil society, and global democracy as Facebook was and is. Considering the way that generative AI is now being developed throughout Silicon Valley, we should brace for that damage to be multiplied many times over in the years ahead.

“There was a time when compact equipment didn’t exist,” notes the history section of construction equipment manufacturer Bobcat. “Machinery only came in one size: Big. If you were trying to tackle a tough job in a small space, your only choice was a shovel and a wheelbarrow. There wasn’t anything that was both compact and powerful.”

The first presentation of the FL Grand Jury investigating COVID. Note: they state they aren’t finished yet. I will offer perspective and thoughts once I’ve read this.

Phil Connors finds meaning, real meaning, next-level amor fati meaning, in a little garden of a town, a kind of Brigadoon outside of time and space. He finds meaning not by changing everyone around him but by helping them be and do the things they want to do. Connors is not some Nietzschean ubermensch who imposes his will on others or overthrow conventional morality. He doesn’t redefine or remake Punxsutawney. He learns to love Punxsutawney for what it is. He doesn’t revolutionize traditional morality, he embraces it. Which is why, at the end of the movie, he decides he wants to live there.

What the heck, I’ll just do a quick thread to open-source what few people know but don’t want to admit: How this op often gets run in Washington. (thread on how to “work” the current system in DC)

Japan will create the system to accept “digital nomads” who can work from anywhere they happen to be, envisaging that it will attract, among others, workers and owners of consulting companies abroad and YouTubers earning advertising fees from overseas companies.

Redistricting reformers have proposed many solutions to the problem of partisan gerrymandering, but they all require either bipartisan consensus or the agreement of both parties on the legitimacy of a neutral third party to resolve disputes. In this paper, we propose a new method for drawing district maps, the Define–Combine Procedure, that substantially reduces partisan gerrymandering without requiring a neutral third party or bipartisan agreement. One party defines a map of 2N equal-population contiguous districts. Then the second party combines pairs of contiguous districts to create the final map of N districts. Using real-world geographic and electoral data, we employ simulations and map-drawing algorithms to show that this procedure dramatically reduces the advantage conferred to the party controlling the redistricting process and leads to less-biased maps without requiring cooperation or non-partisan actors.

The West’s humiliating electric car climbdown has begun. Ambitious plans for an electrification-led industrial revolution are in full-scale retreat.

Google’s CEO faces employee questions about layoffs / At this week’s all-hands meeting,

“We are partisan D” Investing in Us’ Dmitri Mehlhorn (Reid Hoffman): “Tech and America’s $30bn election year”. Related “fiscal indulgences”.

I’d never seen this until @AlexLuck9 posted it: Tom Clancy giving a talk on the writing of The Hunt for Red October at the National Security Agency in 1986. Just him on a stage for three quarters of an hour, being very entertaining and interesting. youtu.be/VS54M5Mqa9M?si…

Here’s what he says: I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one. This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius.

Minnesota coach Bob Motzko didn’t shy away from offering an opinion. “They’re both goals,” he told The Rink Live, adding in a second-period review that went against his team. “I mean, c’mon, everybody in hockey knows that they’re both goals. It’s too bad.”

Keurig Dr. Pepper workers vote out Teamsters union at three Wisconsin facilities