7.16

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Following months of oversight work by the Ways and Means Committee, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Daniel Werfel informed employees in a new memo on Friday of their constitutional and statutory right to make protected disclosures to Congress. Previous communications by the agency to employees may have had a chilling effect on whistleblowers, as they failed to inform them that their rights included sharing concerns directly to Congress. A recent letter from attorneys for Hunter Biden may have had a similar effect for calling into question whether it was appropriate for these employees to come to Congress with their concerns.

But Elon Musk is not one to trust someone else’s knots. He’s made his fortune by disregarding other people’s work and rethinking things from first principles. To his credit, he’s worked miracles in categories most entrepreneurs would never dream of tackling, from electric cars to rockets to satellite internet service. There may be only a handful of people who could’ve pulled off Tesla and SpaceX, and maybe only one who could’ve done both. When the game is man versus nature, he’s an obvious choice. When it comes to man versus human nature, on the other hand…

Sotomayor’s staff has often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children’s books, works that have earned her at least $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009. Details of those events, largely out of public view, were obtained by The Associated Press through more than 100 open records requests to public institutions. The resulting tens of thousands of pages of documents offer a rare look at Sotomayor and her fellow justices beyond their official duties.

When Peter Thiel emerged as the right’s potential heir to Sheldon Adelson during the ’22 midterms, a highly connected Democratic operative launched a guerilla opposition research campaign to chill his political influence. What happened next was sordid, and ultimately tragic, but also a telling reflection of a new era in political combat.

The layout of the Disney parks may not be something you think about except for at the end of the day when your feet are aching and sitting feels like the best ride ever. Or when you’re hiking around the Epcot World Showcase in the blazing sun and afternoon heat. But the ways the Imagineers have creatively designed the parks influence your experience more than you think, and in ways you might not have considered before.

The AD-BASED internet is DYING, and it’s getting WORSE in the process

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The free movie.

Cancer cells-to-be accumulate a series of specific genetic changes in a predictable and sequential way years before they are identifiable as pre-malignancies, researchers at Stanford Medicine have found. Many of these changes affect pathways that control cell division, structure and internal messaging — leaving the cells poised to go bad long before any visible signs or symptoms occur.

The late-night liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites on Sunday set a new record for the most flights by a SpaceX launch vehicle, with a first-stage booster flying for a 16th time. SpaceX now aims to fly its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 20 times, double the company’s original goal.

IN 1943, BRITISH NAVAL INTELLIGENCE and MI5 devised a cunning plan to fool German command into thinking that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia instead of the actual objective; Sicily. All the plan required was a floating corpse and a fake identity.

To me, though, it is a fascinating feat. It feels magical when a machine solves an abstract problem like that, with minimal input from me as a user! I was, therefore, delighted when the nice folks at Prefix.dev hired me to create an open-source dependency solver for the Conda package ecosystem. Not that I am an expert in the topic (far from it!), but I do know my Rust and I’m a quick learner. In fact, after 5 weeks the new solver is finally available as an experimental option in the rattler1 project!

Since July 2022, health insurance companies have been required to publish how much they pay healthcare providers for nearly all health care services. In the past, these negotiated prices were kept secret, leading to wide differences in payments between providers. Patients and even doctors had very little idea how much was actually being paid for healthcare.

San Francisco institution Anchor Brewing Co., the godfather of steam beer, is shutting down after 127 years. The brewery was “losing millions of dollars a year,” said Anchor spokesperson Sam Singer. “Economic pressures have made the business no longer sustainable.”

The legacy press is doing just that and will likely continue to do so, handing politicians free rein to defame the whistleblowers. The question, then, is whether the House Ethics Committee will curb Goldman to send a message that whistleblowers aren’t political pawns.

In 1997, Wired magazine published an article called The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020 (archived). The subtitle reads: “We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?” As you might expect, the piece makes interesting reading here in the actual future, particularly the sidebar of “10 Scenario Spoilers”:

Pulling my site from Google over AI training.

Crouching in the shadows of the much larger Süleymaniye Mosque, the Rüstem Pasha Mosque is like a cave filled with hidden treasure. Built by the famous Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan for the extremely influential – and somewhat controversial – Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha, the mosque is unique in a number of ways.

Judicial Watch announced today that a Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit forced the release of anorganizational chart from the U.S. State Department Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, which shows that the office employs at least 45 people. Judicial Watch uncovered the record thanks to a FOIA lawsuit filed in September 2022, against the State Department for records related to travel costs, calendars, and organizational charts for the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:22-cv-02844)). The Biden agency is releasing responsive records in batches to Judicial Watch every six weeks.

In any event, she cites King once: “An individual has value because he has value to God. Whenever this is recognized, ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ pass away as determinants in a relationship and ‘son’ and ‘brother’ are substituted.” Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? 102–03 (Beacon Press 1968). Funny because the sort of quote I remember from that book is “White Americans must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.”

The AP separately queried more than 100 private colleges, universities and charities that have also hosted justices or organized events for them, requesting that they provide the same information that was asked of public institutions. Some confirmed basic details of the visits, but few provided substantive information.

Two paragraphs later, Microsoft said that Storm-0558 used the forged token to gain access to Exchange email accounts through a programming interface for Outlook Web Access (OWA). The researchers wrote:

Despite having four cylinder banks, the INNengine (depending on its configuration) actually has eight pistons. This is because the engine is an opposed-piston motor, meaning that each piston’s compression stroke is performed against a second piston placed in the same cylinder bank rather than a static cylinder head. It still only has four combustion chambers, though, which means it sounds similar to a four-cylinder engine.

Yesterday, a friend sent me a screenshot of an Instagram storyfrom mordlustderpodcast asking for an intuitive explanation of the Monty Hall problem (which, as I found out, is called the “Ziegenproblem“, or “goat problem”, in German). The basic problem is this:

The box of sweets was given to a schoolgirl to celebrate the 1902 coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra and has remained untouched for more than a century.

From defence secretary Ben Wallace to historian Tom Holland, our panel selects the greatest war movies to mark the release of Oppenheimer

Sending a thumbs-up emoji may now be considered the agreement of a legally binding contract, a Canadian judge has ruled. The thumbs-up emoji proved pivotal in a case involving farmer Chris Achter of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and a 2021 deal to sell 87 metric tons of flax to grain buyer Kent Mickleborough. Mickleborough signed the contract for the deal and texted a picture of it to Achter and wrote “Please confirm flax contract,” according to court documents. Achter responded to with a thumbs-up emoji.

After nearly five decades working at Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman department store, Betty Halbreich has helped a range of generations. Here, she reflects on what’s different—and what isn’t.