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As per a report from podcast search engine Listen Notes, the number of newly created podcasts had decreased by 80% from 2020 to 2022 worldwide.

GM announced on Friday that it would be spending $854 million to make its sixth-generation small block V8, and $64 million to help its EV efforts, in news that sounds like it belongs in a different year but isn’t. The news also confirms that a sixth-generation small block V8 is happening, which GM says it intends to use to “strengthen its industry-leading full-size truck and SUV business.”

Take the Junaluska apple. Legend has it the variety was standardized by Cherokee Indians in the Smoky Mountains more than two centuries ago and named after its greatest patron, an early-19th-century chief. Old-time orchardists say the apple was once a Southern favorite, but disappeared around 1900. Brown started hunting for it in 2001 after discovering references in an Antebellum-era orchard catalog from Franklin, North Carolina.

The Swiss hacker known as “Maya Arson Crime” blogged Thursday that he discovered a Transportation Security Administration “no fly” list from 2019 and the insecure Amazon Web Services cloud server used by the airline CommuteAir A group of related data.

The industry’s recent job cuts have been an awakening for a generation of workers who have never experienced a cyclical crash.

The second season of Great Chefs, which aired in 1983, focused on San Francisco, an era and region that calls to mind rustic grilled pizzas, little mesclun salads dotted with goat cheese, and fruits on plates. Instead, the season is a paean to pate. Of the 13 episodes, seven feature chefs who are French or trained in traditional French kitchens. They don’t all cook true haute cuisine, but their food is much closer to the refined, rich, technique-heavy cooking of traditional French restaurant kitchens than the rustic peasant-style French cooking that inspired Waters and others. The chefs featured in these episodes make salmon mousseline and duck liver mousse; they craft marzipan roses and bread baskets made of literal bread; they wield multiple wine-reduced sauces and stuff chicken legs with veal. There is so much straining. None of the food could be described as simple.

Of course, Arnu had one particular hobby that he felt might be of interest to federal investigators: he had spent the last two decades tending to a popular blog about “Area 51,” the remote military base near Rachel that was known for its shroud of mystery and UFO lore. Arnu’s site, Dreamland Resort, regularly posted news about the base—including articles about its alleged connection to “black projects” and other clandestine government operations. When police crashed into his life that wintry day, he suspected it had something to do with this. Still, running a blog wasn’t illegal, and the force with which the government had come down on him seemed unbelievable. Just what exactly were agents looking for what? And what did they think he’d done?

The museum, which resembles a luxury showroom, houses the wealth of the nation—currency notes of all shapes, sizes and colours. Some of the notes on display are from the ‘Bank of Hindostan’, ‘Bank of Madras’, ‘Bank of Bengal in Lahore’ and other pre-colonial era institutions. But the around 700 unique notes represent just 6 to 7 per cent of his collection.

One of my hobbies is buying up pre-antibiotic medical books. If you look at the history of western medicine, it’s often been a wash: it’s still not all that clear if letting a doctor treat you is a better idea than staying home, eating right, exercising and minding your own business. For example: click here. For stuff like bullet holes, doctors are pretty good from all the practice they get in war and American inner cities. Doctors are also good for prescribing antibiotics; antibiotics are the last big, epoch making breakthrough in medical technology. Public health innovations, such as not drinking toilet water, anesthesia, doctors washing their hands, and making sure people have sufficient vitamins (the ones we know about): these are the past big ones that really moved the needle.

Despite the amount of choices in the consumer market, several big companies own a large majority of major brands, effectively controlling everything you buy.

The biggest problem, however, for the Jetsons is Class B airspace governing air operations near airports. Air Traffic Control compliance is required in Class B air space. “If I’m going to fly in that general vicinity, I’ve got to be really capable.” There are minimum altitudes, visual flight and separation rules, and other requirements special to Class B air space. “Do I really want to have several thousand of these zipping around?” Condit asked.

Recently, Ocean Art Photo Competition announced its 2022 winners and runners up. Put on by the Underwater Photography Guide, the annual contest awarded over $100,000 in prizes to finalists. Kat Zhou’s image of an elderly mother octopus spending her final days with her offspring won the Best in Show award.

In his first journey, in the early spring of 1326, after a trip of over 3,500 km, Ibn Battuta arrived at the port of Alexandria, at the time, part of the Bahri Mamluk empire. He met two ascetic pious men in Alexandria. One was Sheikh Burhanuddin, who is supposed to have foretold the destiny of Ibn Battuta as a world traveler saying:

As the conversation winds down, the waitress returns with the check and a small placard. “If you haven’t been here recently, I wanted to let you know that we attach a 20% Fair Wage and Wellness Fee to all orders. This sheet of paper explains it. It’s… not a tip.” She slides the paper across the table and, somewhat embarrassedly, adds, “If you have any questions, please let me know.”

The people who wanted “special” ASINs were pretty persistent, though, so I threw them a bone: they could have all the ASINs that started with the letter A, and I would start the counter for ASINs at B000000000. Finally, this proposal had to get past Shel, and Shel was not super keen on the idea of someone going through the code and changing every last place that ISBNs were referenced to something that was an ASIN. Even though this proposal actually minimized the hazards in several ways (same length string, same set of allowable characters, ISBNs are still legal ASINs, etc.), it was really going to involve a lot of code being changed at the same time. And an error would be very bad.

We study credit card rewards as an ideal laboratory to quantify redistribution be- tween consumers in retail financial markets. Comparing cards with and without rewards, we find that, regardless of income, sophisticated individuals profit from reward credit cards at the expense of na ??ve consumers. To probe the underlying mechanisms, we exploit bank-initiated account limit increases at the card level and show that reward cards induce more spending, leaving na ??ve consumers with higher unpaid balances. Na ??ve consumers also follow a sub-optimal balance-matching heuristic when repaying their credit cards, incurring higher costs. Banks incentivize the use of reward cards by offering lower interest rates than on comparable cards without rewards. We estimate an aggregate annual redistribution of $15 billion from less to more educated, poorer to richer, and high to low minority areas, widening existing disparities.

Although more rapidly changing the payment system away from fee-for-service will help, the best hope and most progress is to change the behavior of the large systems and universities to view rural areas not as referral pipelines but as citizens and providers that need real population healthcare partners.

Today, however, we know that the blame is correctly assigned to the system, not the individual. “America’s system for handling classified documents is broken, say lawmakers and former officials” (NBC News, 1/24/2023):

President Ronald Reagan’s farewell speech included this Biblical reference: “In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”

There are plenty of reasons you might find yourself in a big unfamiliar codebase. You might have just started a new position. You might be doing technical due diligence on a possible acquisition or contract with an external company. You might be evaluating a third party framework or engine. Regardless of how you got there, learning to navigate unfamiliar code effectively is a useful skill that is seldom taught or discussed. Having evaluated and worked in many (sometimes wildly different) codebases over the years, I’ve developed a personal process for understanding new code that I wanted to share here. This advice is obviously somewhat personal, so should be read through the lens of a game engine programmer (who largely does rendering-esque work), but while the content here is geared mainly towards understanding large codebases, I suspect many of these tips will generalize to smaller codebases or codebases in other domains as well.

It is not uncommon for Gothic cathedrals to be left unfinished, such as the Dom in Cologne, which, as they say, “if will be finished, the world will end”. Or the Duomo in Siena with its large, empty main nave, or Beauvais Cathedral, where the five-hundred-year-old scaffolding itself is already considered a monument. This, however, had a reason as serious as the building itself: war, black death, earthquake. As comical as it was to build a Gothic cathedral in Biniamar, just as banal and farcical was the reason for its failure.

Don’t look to greed for the explanation: look to public policy. (I assure you the big developers of the 1950s were as greedy as the ones today.) Minimum lot sizes and zoning-related caps on density and height do a lot to incentivize larger houses, because they put a floor on the fixed costs, such as land and infrastructure, associated with a single unit of housing. The soft costs associated with permitting fees and delays in receiving permission to build have the same effect, privileging deeper pockets and larger projects.

In fact, many countries are doing the opposite of what the hardest-line voices in Washington seek. Instead of decoupling or deintegrating economically, many countries are instead deepening trade with China even as they hedge against potential Chinese pressure by diversifying business operations, building new supply chains in third countries, and reducing exposure in the most sensitive areas. Perhaps that is why, in 2020, despite years of American warnings, China overtook the United States as the European Union’s largest trading partner. Both EU exports to and imports from China grew in 2022. And Asian and European leaders, spurred by the November 2022 visit to Beijing by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, now look set to beat a path to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s door, with trips by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., French President Emmanuel Macron, and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni likely to drive a broader trend.

Our mission to automate the toughest tasks in farming now extends to tree fruit, with our robotic apple harvester. By reusing the majority of our custom technology that we use in strawberry harvest, we have gained a lot of momentum after just one season.

The authors argue that, in addition to minimizing the risks of major escalation, U.S. interests would be best served by avoiding a protracted conflict. The costs and risks of a long war in Ukraine are significant and outweigh the possible benefits of such a trajectory for the United States. Although Washington cannot by itself determine the war’s duration, it can take steps that make an eventual negotiated end to the conflict more likely.

Live Nation was put on the spot Tuesday in the very first hearing of the new Congress. Many such moments are easy for corporations to dodge, with a few old uninterested men reading boring questions that are easily dodged by slick lawyers. This time, the opposite occurred. For four hours, Live Nation’s President Joe Berchtold had to absorb the anger of both Republicans and Democrats, virtually every one of whom accused the corporation of having and abusing its monopoly. The Senators were so good that some moments became TikTok memes.

Sprightly and trim at 83, Kelvin described a can-do culture that produced the 747 in the 1960s, an attitude he credits to inspirational upper management led by Sutter, the chief engineer. His team, “close-knit” and determined, pushed forward at a frenetic pace. “We worked a lot of hours, seven days a week, 12 hours a day for quite a while,” Kelvin said. “I don’t think we ever thought anything but success.”