The best photos from the 20th stage of this year’s Tour de France.

Since Barack Obama won election in 2008, health insurance premiums have doubled for single employees. Family plans have skyrocketed to almost $24,000, on average.

“We’re all finding out by tweet,” said one Dem. “None of us understand what’s happening.”

Workers in Washington State are seeking a 40% pay increase in an attempt to claw back concessions previously given to the company by the union. The Local represents over 30,000 members in the region, which includes the plants in Renton and Everett, where the 737 Max and 777 aircraft are assembled.

Second, did you know the US is borrowing more[2] under the “Biden boom” than it did during COVID? Set aside whether a coronavirus should have been treated as a financial crisis.

For the protection of whistleblowers and our investigation, we will not be sharing further information with the congressional task force due to the connective tissue between that entity and FBI, USSS, and other entities.

I know I should not be astonished, but the fact is that I am incredibly astonished that virtually every Democrat voter is insanely happy to have literally no say whatsoever as to who their Presidential candidate is.

Very interesting that TikTok is aggressively laundering and rehabilitating Kamala Harris’s image.

Taylor Swift’s Jet Use In 2023.

The FBI used voice analysis to prove that he was telling the truth. EAD Moore knew that, but hid it from Congress.

But US can still have high QoL and prosperity if it doesn’t start WW3 by listening to dumb strategists and warhawks. Obviously stupid Ukraine tricks and pushing Russia into a deep alliance with PRC will be seen in retrospect as a mistake as big as the Iraq War.

The U.S. healthcare system requires substantial out-of-pocket payments by most consumers, which can prevent some from receiving needed medical services. Recent policy proposals seek to address this problem by increasing government health care spending in order to reduce out-of-pocket costs. The social value of these policies rests in part on the extent to which consumers face credit constraints in financing medical spending. We present a novel analysis of whether elderly households face such credit constraints by estimating the effects of wealth variation from home price changes on out-of-pocket medical expenditures. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study and various measures of home price changes, we find no evidence that housing wealth impacts out-of-pocket medical spending. The estimates are universally small and precise, allowing us to rule out even modest-sized effects. Effects are zero across the expenditure distribution, for specific categories of expenditure, and for different types of consumers split by health insurance status and SES. Our results suggest that further subsidizing health care for elderly homeowners, the majority of older Americans, would increase moral hazard costs without increasing access to needed care.

ActBlue money laundering scheme: reports indicate that $20 million from Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss was broken down into over 1.6 million donations across 400,000 donors.

Drone based contested trade with just one minor actor contesting it (Houthis).

The world’s only AI superpowers are engaged in an arms race for swarming drones that is reminiscent of the Cold War, except drone technology will be far more difficult to contain than nuclear weapons. Because software drives the drones’ swarming abilities, it could be relatively easy and cheap for rogue nations and militants to acquire their own fleets of killer robots.

We study how the widespread legalization of sports gambling over the past five years has impacted consumer financial health.

China’s electric vehicle exports declined 13.2% from the previous month in June to 86,000 vehicles, new data showed on Wednesday, signaling growing resistance to the cars as Europe raises trade barriers.

Note that overturning Euclid v. Ambler would not make zoning in the interests of health and safety unconstitutional. Indeed, it wouldn’t make any zoning unconstitutional it would just mean that zoning above and beyond that required for health and safety would require compensation to property owners.

With that in mind, Capitol Weekly recently did a very subjective, very unscientific email poll of our fellow journalists who cover the Capitol or other parts of California government to see who they think are the best press reps to deal with. And yes, we also asked who they think…. hmmm, how to put this nicely? … could be better at their job. We granted everyone anonymity so they could speak freely. Replies came from reporters whose beats span the gamut of government, from city council meetings to chronicling the day-to-day activities of Gov. Gavin Newsom. As one might expect their answers were similarly broad in scope.

It’s the petty, ugly, banalities of an entire subculture of tiresome neurotics who cannot dredge one single beautiful, interesting, or true thing out of their souls that would make you voluntarily pay attention.

A few weeks ago in Paris we got last minute tickets to Palais Garnier, one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world. The show ended up being horrific

If you drive a car made by General Motors and it has an internet connection, your car’s movements and exact location are being collected and shared anonymously with a data broker.

Phones are supported well beyond their average ownership lifetime. In stark contrast, automakers are struggling to work out how long their “smartphones on wheels” can be kept on the road.

An inconspicuous suburb close to Geneva became the first Swiss municipality to banish commercial advertising from its streets, in a policy that creates a blueprint for similar bans in larger cities across the country.

Now sprinkle on long build times and difficulty of testing and it’s no wonder a lot of mobile native devs switch to something else more sane, like the web. Sure, the web has its own issues but it’s minuscule in comparison to that of mobile native dev on average. All this to say – Google and Apple keep making it more and more difficult for developers to ship and maintain quality mobile apps, but they market their releases as the next greatest thing. All the while no real innovation in mobile has happened in close to 10 plus years.

Why would such a fate befall the would-be Polish Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (as he’s dubbed in today’s Poland)? Why on earth would any country deprive itself of potentially becoming the leader in a vital and cutting-edge field of technology? This article looks into these very questions and looks a bit closer at the man behind the machine: Jacek Karpi??ki. 

The problem is that Democrats are so used to having total cloud supremacy — total information control — that they’ve never actually had to make an argument. It is completely demoralizing for them to see high production value videos with Democrats as the butt of the joke. Like a bully getting punched in the nose, these vicious wokes are finally facing committed, capable resistance in the information war. It is their first fair fight.

An African-American two-spirit Hindu Palestinian MtF transgender fat-liberated NEA union kindergarten teacher wearing a rainbow tutu and a Che Guevara halter top told me, “You know, I really don’t think Kamala is qualified to run this country, I’m voting for Trump.”

In my old business of providing Diplomatic Security in two active war zones we were expected to execute the basics or we would be fired. Clearly USSS failed at the basics of a secure perimeter and once shots were fired their extraction was clumsy and left DJT highly exposed to follow on attacks. It looked like they had never drilled together because those responses should be effectively autonomic. Will there be accountability? That’s not the Washington way.

In an email Saturday at 7:34 pm that appeared to be addressed to sympathetic journalists, and which was also sent to Semafor, Mehlhorn wrote that one “possibility — which feels horrific and alien and absurd in America, but is quite common globally — is that this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash. This is a classic Russian tactic, such as when Putin killed 300 civilians in 1999 and blamed it on terrorists to ride the backlash to winning power. Others who have embraced this tactic of committing raw evil and then benefitting from the backlash include Hamas on October 7. If any Trump officials encouraged or knew of this attack, that is morally horrific, and Republicans of decency must demand that Trump step down as unfit.” More.

This event feels like a bookend moment to the George Floyd killing. That opened wide the era of ACAB and insane public safety decisions made to appease the loud, leftmost fringe. There will be less appetite for things like the SAFE-T Act, police no-chase policy, and hands-off treatment of teen riots.

A stunning new report from our friends at Paragon Health Institute, quantifies the stunning scale of Obamacare fraud under the Biden administration, with millions of enrollees now receiving subsidies for which they are supposed to be ineligible based on income. The problem started when Biden made Obamacare “free” (fully taxpayer-funded) for incomes between 100 and 150 percent of the federal poverty level:

This is how you do good reporting. No speculation, no theories, no leading questions, just plain facts. Excellent work by @BBCBlindGazza with one of the best interviews of eye witness account on Trump assassination attempt. As an aside Gary is visually impaired but brings out the most visual account. Kudos as well to whoever is producing him.

A 501c3 called National Youth Advocate Project has been awarded $292 million by the Dept of Health and Human Services for assistance to unaccompanied illegal alien children in Ohio since 2021. The organization’s 2022 IRS form 990 says that the CEO, Marvena Twigg (social worker), earned $1.27 million that year. Wowie.

Well, I’ve thought the Secret Service were rubbish not just since we learned of the Cartagena hookers but for at least another decade before that. And increasingly, when it comes to American officialdom – from Kabul to Uvalde – to modify Henry Ford, you can get it in any colour as long as it’s bloated, lavishly over-funded and entirely dysfunctional. And yet and yet… it’s hard to believe even these guys (plus their bevy of five-foot-two-eyes-of-blue Keystone chorus girls) could be this crap. Assuming for the purposes of argument that the body on the roof is actually that of the perp, a goofball barely out of high school hatched a plan to have Donald Trump’s head explode in close-up on live TV – and, wittingly or otherwise, the world’s most flush money-no-object security state did their best to help him pull it off.

WithSecure assesses with HIGH confidence that due to geopolitical turbulence and low international relations with Russia, the Paris Olympic games will face an increased risk of malign cyber activity compared to previous Olympics.

In our interview last summer and on an accompanying Check 6 podcast, he doubled down on the likelihood that Boeing might not roll out a new passenger jet before 2035—nearly 25 years after the company’s last clean-sheet aircraft, the 787, entered service. “The notion that we should be looking at niche opportunities or competitive dynamics—when you’re going to invest tens of billions of dollars in a program for 50 years—is just silly,” he maintained. His claim in March that development of a new airplane would cost $50 billion was met with widespread derision.

Short story: an accelerating amount of income is leaving MN vs coming to MN. Net migration of income has risen from $215 million in 2017, to over $2.19 billion in 2022.

The Thiel-Hoffman Face-off in Sun Valley

This isn’t then, but the old have difficulty noticing. Add a Congress incontinently ignorant of anything but the politics of Washington and of their home states There is nobody on the House China committee who reads, speaks, or writes Chinese. Yet Congress inveighs fiercely against Beijing like a swarm of feral hamsters. What if, for example, the Russian fleet shows up in support of China? If North Korea seized the chance and invades South Korea, giving Washington two major wars at once? If China sinks tankers going to Japan and Taiwan, neither of which has oil? If Washington insouciantly bombs the Chinese mainland, which it will, and China or Russia hits the Pentagon and Capitol with sub-launched missiles? What does the sole superpower then do?

13. Higher education has been a traditional Democratic stronghold, and it remains one.  Yet its clout and credibility have fallen significantly in the last few years. 14. The Democrats made a big mistake going after “Big Tech.”  It didn’t cost them many votes, rather money and social capital.  Big Tech (most of all Facebook) was the Girardian sacrifice for the Trump victory in 2016, and all the Democrats achieved from that was a hollowing out of their own elite base.

Why? Because all will be held in the Seine River in the centre of Paris. The swimmers – including four Australians – will pass famous landmarks such as the Musee d’Orsay as they swim through the historic heart of the city. This will have enormous scenic appeal for spectators.

There truly is no general policy. One of my chief mandates for our two wine directors is ‘no Excel spreadsheet wine list,’ meaning: no taking a wine and multiplying it by 3x or 4x no matter what the wine is. We buy wines with the knowledge that they will fit into the program economically, not the other way around. We look at all markets (auction, retail, wholesale year-over-year) and attempt to find value in wine purchases. Then we compare those same markets to competitive wine lists in our micromarket. Whenever we can, we seek to offer the best price possible.

Within gender-marriage cohorts – single women are the most anti-Trump; and – divorced men are the most pro-Trump.

“Do not tell the prospect that they are not permitted or unqualified to purchase or sell property because of information you obtained from Forewarn,” a company executive said at a recent training webinar with Illinois real estate agents. She emphasized that potential buyers “do not get notified” when they are screened with the app, a question she said many real estate agents ask.

Houston-based tech company Lancium and Denver-based Crusoe Energy Systems announced on Thursday morning a multibillion-dollar deal to build a 200-megawatt data center just outside Abilene, Texas, that is designed to “meet the unique needs of AI companies.”

In the talk, Steve Jobs predicts that by 1986 sales of the PC would exceed sales of cars, and that in the following ten years, people would be spending more time with a PC than in a car. These were absurd claims for the early 1980s. Describing what he sees as the inevitability that this would be a pervasive new category, he asks the designers in the audience for help. He asks that they start to think about the design of these products, because designed well or designed poorly, they still would be made.

That Biden will likely remain as president until January 20, 2025, should remind the country the Left is more worried about its own next four-year continuance in power than the fate of the country that now admittedly will be guided in the next sixth months by a president judged unfit by his own supporters to run for the very office that he will still keep holding.

Further irony arises when those who, as supposedly guardians of democratic norms, pontificated to the country the last nine years about the Trump-Hitlerian threat to democracy. Yet now they so cavalierly work overtime on how: a) to pull off the removal of their candidate from the November ballot on grounds of senility, b) but not the removal of the same president from office (their own fate is more precious than our collective fate as a nation), c) while trying to select, rather than elect, a replace candidate, d) without every offering any explanation, much less an apology, how a Democrat president from January 20, 2021, was daily declared vibrant, dynamic, and engaged but suddenly one day after June 27, 2024, was remanufactured as not?

That the Director of the Secret Service actually claimed in public that they couldn’t put agents on that roof because its slope created “safety concerns” — something so stupid it’s hard to believe someone said it — yet still has her job, shows how accountability-free DC is.

Apparently, leaked memos show that J.D. Vance is so hardcore against wokeness that he froze dozens of ambassador nominations over their views on gender transition and DEI. Incredible.

Why undertake anything so obviously cockamamie? The reasons are several. Start with the insular complacency of a city long-accustomed to immense international power and unable to see that it no longer has it. Many who hold the reins in the city are old men who remember the world of decades ago when an aircraft carrier could intimidate almost any country, including China. This isn’t then, but the old have difficulty noticing. Add a Congress incontinently ignorant of anything but the politics of Washington and of their home states. There is nobody on the House China committee who reads, speaks, or writes Chinese. Yet Congress inveighs fiercely against Beijing like a swarm of feral hamsters.

Arlines already use mobile devices for gate checkin, lounges, and kiosks. Hotels are the same. Even TSA. Hospitals already use connected systems via browser and/or Citrix. From now, the only strategy that is not negligence is to move critical infrastructure to mobile devices.

The best photos from the 19th stage of this year’s Tour de France. #TDF2024  

A new show about the Cold War, “Not All Propaganda Is Art,” reveals the dark, sometimes comic ironies of trying to control the world through culture.

This is known as the Steel Man Technique. Put simply, it’s building the best form of the other side’s argument and then engaging with it. It’s being charitable and patching up the weaknesses in the other side’s proposition so that he can bring the best counter-argument to your point of view.

This tileset would be both the beginning and the end of the story, if not for one catch: it’s a commercial tileset, hosted by Stadia Maps and offered on a subscription plan. (I’m not affiliated with Stadia Maps and I’m not getting any incentive to write about them.)

Figure out what side-impacts the automation may have on your results. I could write a dissertation on all the “automation” that is undocumented or even mostly unknown that comes into play with both our cameras and our post processing workflows. The “average” user, on the other hand, wants to use automation as much as possible because there are too many variables that should be controlled to make you a perfect craftsperson (or deviant artist).  

David Axelrod is hammering Biden nonstop. Speaking for himself, or channeling Obama?

Milwaukee radio station says it agreed to cut out parts of their interview Joe Biden that made him look bad after the Biden campaign called and demanded it.

Nearly 250 years after the publication of Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ and the West has lost the economic plot.

The drone ascended ~3,500 meters from the base camp to the summit of the highest mountain in the world.

Now here’s the kicker: In response to questions about the reliability of their study, Newstead and Hill reanalyzed their data and published a follow-up report (2022) which found no significant change in population abundance of piping plovers at Boca Chica over time. A decreasing trend in abundance over the first three years of the study was balanced by an increase in the final year of the study (once data from additional survey visits was added to the analysis).

For our part, we have conducted nine years of monitoring using a protocol developed with US Fish and Wildlife Services, and for the past two years we have ensured consistent sampling throughout the year by surveying monthly. The findings show little to no strong evidence of trends, either increasing or decreasing, for any of the target species, including piping plovers.

The American System.

In one of the most significant data breaches in recent history, hackers stole AT&T customers’ call and text metadata spanning several months.

The financial record also needs to be complete. More specifically, both the sub-ledger and the general ledger are a complete representation of all business activities that occurred at a specific time. If there is an event that occurred but is not in the financial record, than the system is not complete. Note, that this doesn’t imply eventual consistency not acceptable. You just need to know when your data will become complete, to notify stakeholders that data has settled.

(Do we remember the rodeo clown who merely wore an Obama mask during a bull riding contest and was punished by being permanently banned by the Missouri State Fair authorities?)

The effort was turbocharged by disclosures that several senators made very profitable trades in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when members of Congress were getting classified briefings that warned of how disastrous the virus could be for the U.S. economy. The FBI launched insider trading investigations into three senators, but eventually ended the probe without making any charges.

Often the best solutions are relatively simple. Greece, for example, has been forced to introduce new laws to protect its beaches from over-commercialisation. Regulations introduced earlier this year mandate that umbrellas and deckchairs must be at least 4m from the sea and that they can’t be rented out on smaller beaches. Beaches are being monitored by drones; so far fines of almost £300,000 have been issued.

The true story — as best I can remember — of the origin of Mosaic and Netscape.

We’ve released a new dataset, Newswire https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09490 2.7M unique newswires reproduced 32M+ times over a century (1878-1977). Articles have location and topic tags and person ids (from Wikipedia). Fun fact: see the prohibition related crime spike in the 1920s

Foreigners make up 8% of the French population but account for 24% of prison inmates. They committed 77% of rapes in Paris, 54% of street crimes in Niceand 40% of vehicle thefts, and 38% of burglaries and 31% of muggings across France. And in recent months, the stark reality of mass immigration, the glaring lack of social integration, and, to be blunt, what happens when Western nations import people who hate who we are has been further highlighted by a series of shocking atrocities.

Probability of losing per passenger

If you take a walk around Washington or a Western European capital today, there is no feeling of looming catastrophe. The threats are too complex, with many moving pieces and overlapping layers of risk adding up to a larger danger that is less obvious. People can be forgiven for not seeing the cloud hanging over them, for feeling that all is well — even as in Eastern Europe they are digging in for war. But this complacency is itself part of the problem, making the threat more difficult to foresee, to manage, or, potentially, to avert.

A gallery of U.S. state welcome signs

The terms of the deal show that Volkswagen is paying $1 billion by the end of the year to acquire Rivian stock. Half of this sum is locked at a Rivian stock price of $10.84 per share, which was likely the price when the deal was inked. The rest will reflect the share price closer to the deal completion date but not earlier than December 1, 2024. Even if the stock skyrockets by then, Volkswagen is projected to become Rivian’s second-largest shareholder, behind Amazon.

Still, Mickey entering the public domain brings up the question: what cartoon characters enter the public domain next? Below is a list of 10 major cartoon characters entering the public domain over the next decade, with the year they enter the public domain in parentheses. Note these are the earliest versions of the characters entering public domain; like “Steamboat Willie” Mickey, they likely won’t have most of their familiar modern aspects. (So while you can use 1938 Superman when he enters public domain, you’ll have to wait another two decades before you can show or mention his cousin, Supergirl.)

But recently they’ve deteriorated further, mostly due to Jill Biden.

It also contains a project named Protego ( wikileaks.org/vault7/#Protego ) which is not a malware but a missile control system, that can, if used in a specific way, can cause a missile launch to fail.”

Every time you transact in property, you will notice a variety of ticky-tack transactional frictions added to a (hopefully) itemized list. The largest, by a substantial margin, are agent commissions, which have come under substantialscrutiny for their set-by-a-disciplined-cartel character.

Common knowledge is why coronations and executions are held in public – not so a crowd can see the new king or the hanged man, but so a crowd can see a crowd seeing the new king or the hanged man. Common knowledge is why sitcoms have laugh tracks, why American Idol has a live studio audience, and why professional sports teams pipe in crowd noise. Common knowledge is why the Egyptian government fell in 2011 after a televised protest in Tahrir Square, why the Romanian government fell in 1989 after a televised protest in Palace Square, and why the Chinese government will arrest you today if you distribute pictures of a 35-year-old protest in Tiananmen Square. Common knowledge is why inflation has been non-transitory and persistent, why the US withdrawal from Afghanistan collapsed into a fiasco, and why the US response to Covid was so heavy-handed and ineffective. Common knowledge is why the 2024 Biden/Harris campaign has collapsed.

The historical left is in full meltdown…. They don’t understand that the MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than President Trump. They will look back fondly at Donald Trump. They’ll ask: Where’s Trump when we need him?

Conceptually the Portable Data Transmitter is essentially a 5G Xperia phone that can only send and receive data, rather than making phone calls. In practice it’s a little more complex than that: adding direct HDMI and LAN inputs and dual USB-C sockets so that it can stream data and video directly from cameras to the internet using its 5G cellular connection.

Japan’s well-known population collapse issues foretell severe labor squeezes in the coming years, and one specific issue this project aims to curtail is the continuing rise in online shopping, with a forecast decline in the numbers of delivery drivers that can move goods around. The country is expecting some 30% of parcels simply won’t make it from A to B by 2030, because there’ll be nobody to move them.

“So what I’m saying is enlarge the pie,” he said. “We have the smallest U.S. active duty military that we’ve had since the eve of World War II. …We are in a major crisis, a 1930s-style crisis, and we’re making decisions that we don’t need to be making about a small amount of resources when we can increase that amount of resources.”

Japan’s kei cars are a common sight on the country’s streets. Today kei trucks, the hard-working cargo versions of the kei car, are increasingly seen offroad and in camping areas as users find ways to customize them for adventurous outdoor use.

Carville advised donors who want Biden out of the race to cut off money to politicians who won’t take their side.

For folks not interested in dropping thousands on an Apple headset, the IR cameras could offer other perks, including bringing “in-air” gestures to AirPods, per Kuo. The IR module could be similar to the receiver that powers Apple’s facial recognition feature, FaceID. The analyst’s report follows a from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, which noted that Apple was looking into the idea of camera-powered AirPods.

Between 1945 and 1960, RAND operated as the world’s most productive research organization. Initially envisioned as a research arm of the Air Force, RAND made century-defining breakthroughs both in basic science and applied strategic analysis. Its members helped define U.S. nuclear strategy, conceptualized satellites, pioneered systems analysis, and developed the earliest reports on defense economics. They also revolutionized much of STEM: RAND scholars developed the basics of game theory, linear programming, and Monte Carlo methods. They helped conceptualize generalized artificial intelligence, developed the basics for packet switching (which enables data transmission across networks), and built one of the world’s first computers.

I’m thinking about what *I* want, as a capable, curious adult. I want to use its ideas to invent enabling environments for myself—to help me better think, learn, and create.

Immersion

My most cherished learning experiences have involved diving into a topic, trying things, getting my hands dirty, living and breathing it. In the real world, this kind of learning is somewhat rare. Many topics just seem too abstract. Or, when I try to “just dive in”, I’ll struggle to find an effective way to engage. But this is mostly how we see Nell learn: through immersive, hands-on action.

You can now short the Party with cryptocurrency.

VP Kamala Harris career timeline. Market action.

This website wants to document the technical tools used by the Spanish government to censor official informative websites about the referendum in Catalonia to be held on October 1, 2017. 

Were algorithmic “gotcha” questions still asked? Were the questions easier? Was the bar just higher?

So, the ID. Buzz GTX is facing some stiff competition – and early impressions suggest Volkswagen isn’t competing in the same league. It might be faster than the E-Transit in a straight line, but it doesn’t stop, corner or ride anywhere near as well, which I think rather defeats the point. And that’s before I address the practicality limitations.

Are Democrats even capable of running a presidential campaign without massive hoaxes, disinformation campaigns and election interference involving corruption of government officials and complicity of the mainstream media? This should be offensive to every voter.

The Democratic Party crushed all opposition during the primary with behind-the-scenes arm twisting and threats to discourage potential candidates from running, legal challenges to prevent NoLabels, @deanbphillips, @RobertKennedyJr and others from getting on the ballot in many states, and unprecedented limitations on the recent debate (which enabled the exclusion of @RobertKennedyJr) to limit the possibility of a third-party candidate successfully running for president.

A small group of local reporters (including me) were set to travel with President Biden to a handful of other stops today. We’ve now been told we don’t have transportation and won’t be doing so.

The solution to the software crisis will not be a reversion to more constrained platforms, but a constraint on the number of layers of abstraction we are allowed to apply, as well as the requirement of information preservation between these layers. We must narrow the (semantic gap) so that everyone may scale it.

All new vehicles sold in Europe – including Northern Ireland but not Great Britain – will be fitted with a mandatory speed limiter from 2024 to keep cars within the limits and boost road safety.

The funds, announced Tuesday by the U.S. Economic Development Administration, will create a new shared health database, send a fleet of cancer screening vans to underserved neighborhoods, provide lab space for science startups and help biohealth businesses develop apprenticeship programs.

But there is another dimension, too. Like East Germany, Prussia has left a mark on Germany that didn’t vanish when the state did. There are historians today who constitute an ‘otherness’ of the country’s East based on the idea that it had already been ‘different’ when it was Prussia. Traditions of Prussian liberalism are ignored in this picture and the focus is on perceived attributes of militarism, autocracy and general backwardness. A line is still often drawn from Prussia to Nazi Germany, an image of continuity favoured by Hitler himself, who liked to put himself in line with Prussians like Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck and Paul von Hindenburg.

Funding isn’t an issue. Revolut had $22 billion of customer balances (including over $19 billion of deposits) globally at the end of last year but only $680 million of loans, primarily in the personal lending and credit cards space.

Nuno Cunha Barnabé, a tax partner at Lisbon law firm Abreu Advogados, said the inclusion of retirees in the previous regime had made Portugal an anomaly. “It was against demographics. It didn’t make sense,” he said. “We already have an old population. Attracting pensioners puts more burden on our health system. We need to attract young people.”

Niall Ferguson

The most impressive feature of Thursday’s debate between Brezhnev and Andropov—sorry, Trump and Biden—is that anyone watching was in the least surprised by what it revealed.

The president is senile. The former president is a blowhard. Both these truths have been obvious for years. Yet somehow The New York Times editorial board, the hosts of Pod Save America, and numerous other eminent liberal authorities were shocked by what CNN broadcast from Atlanta.