I do think that after decades of Iraq and Syria, financial crisis and coronavirus, inflation and deindustrialization, that the DC regime has lost the Mandate of Heaven. They inherited a hyperpower in 1991 and squandered perhaps the largest advantage in human history in just 30 years.

6) As a concrete example, Raytheon — a defense contractor! — admits that it can’t build without China.[2] That means the US military itself is made in China. And you can’t fight your factory.

We launched the widget on Android in March, which was a big engineering challenge since Android widgets can look and perform differently depending on the version and device type. And for our learners on iOS, we added a new type of widget learners can add to their lock screen that tracks their streak:

Blackmagic Camera unlocks the power of your iPhone by adding Blackmagic’s digital film camera controls and image processing! Now you can create the same cinematic ‘look’ as Hollywood feature films. You get the same intuitive and user friendly interface as Blackmagic Design’s award winning cameras

Matt Pottinger: “Courting China — as the Biden administration has done recently by sending senior officials to visit — gives “the wrong signal”. More to the point, Pottinger says, “[Beijing] treated them not all that well. [Treasury secretary] Janet Yellen was fed psychedelic mushrooms at a lunch. [Commerce secretary] Gina Raimondo — the moment she was leaving, [Huawei released a phone that] managed to subvert the export controls she’d put in place. [Climate envoy] John Kerry could barely even get a meeting. While John Kerry was in China [in July], Xi Jinping hosted Henry Kissinger for an intimate chat, but would have nothing to do with President Biden’s emissary. China is giving every indication that they view us as weak right now.” “Like President Reagan used to say, you can really get a lot done in Washington DC if you’re willing to give someone else the credit.” more.

The Lotus team showed Jobs an early prototype. “Steve Jobs thought it was the coolest thing ever,” Salas, now a professor at Brandeis University, tells Quartz. Jobs then convinced Lotus to develop the pivot table software exclusively for the NeXT computer. The software came out as Lotus Improv, and though the NeXT computer was a commercial failure, Lotus Improv would be hugely influential. The “flexible views” aspect of Improv would be built into both Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel (the latter was the first to actually use the term “pivot table”).

Nearly a decade after the selling of the Iran deal, it’s much easier now for Americans to see that it was the origin point in a series of hugely consequential lies that have shaped our country at home as surely as they have shaped the lives of people in the Middle East. They lied about Obama’s successor being a Russian spy to delegitimize the government and divide the country, in the hope of removing an elected president from office. They lied about an “insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021, to justify designating one half of the country as domestic terrorists, in order to put their political opponents in jail. They’ve lied about so many things because they’re certain that their communications infrastructure—where intelligence officers direct big tech and censor what was once America’s independent press—will shape the “information space” on their behalf, effectively controlling what we see, hear, and read. They first built their echo chamber to sell the idea that the Iran deal would stop Iran from getting a bomb; now the echo chamber is everywhere—a high-tech version of how the press is run in countries like Egypt, or Iran.

Photographer Christopher Dodd gets accidentally locked inside Tempelhof Airport…

Want to hear a new Steely Dan song? Well, it’s actually a 50-year-old song that was recently uncovered. And it’s not so much a “song” as it is an extended jingle. Oh, and that 109-second composition is about Schlitz. Still want to hear it? Of course you do.

The hardest thing about night photography is that you can’t see anything you’re shooting until after you’ve shot it. If there is a mountain in the distance that you want in the shot, you have to know where it is ahead of time. Our planet is always rotating, so if you’re wasting darkness time getting a perfectly composed foreground, the night sky will have moved by the time you’re ready. Preparation in daylight is essential.

For someone of his wealth, it’s unusual to not have myriad of estate planning done to avoid probate, keep affairs private, and to help out with incapacity. I can only suspect that because of his networth, his lawyers, associates, friends and family had inquired and encouraged estate planning, but that he made the decision to not put any plans in place. Nobody knows when they will die, but they nonetheless likely have the knowledge that their assets are well beyond the federal estate tax exemptions.

Home Assistant is disappointed that Mazda has decided to take this position. We’re also sad that Mazda’s first recourse was not to reach out to us and the maintainer but to send a cease and desist letter instead.

In this context, what distinguishes Banks’s work is that he imagines a scenario in which technological development has also driven changes in the social structure, such that the social and political challenges people confront are new. Indeed, Banks distinguishes himself in having thought carefully about the social and political consequences of technological development. For example, once a society has semi-intelligent drones that can be assigned to supervise individuals at all times, what need is there for a criminal justice system? Thus in the Culture, an individual who commits a sufficiently serious crime is assigned – involuntarily – a “slap drone,” who simply prevents that person from committing any crime again. Not only does this reduce recidivism to zero, the prospect of being supervised by a drone for the rest of one’s life also serves as a powerful deterrent to crime.
This is an absolutely plausible extrapolation from current trends – even just looking at how ankle monitoring bracelets work today. But it also raises further questions. For instance, once there is no need for a criminal justice system, one of the central functions of the state has been eliminated. This is one of the social changes underlying the political anarchism that is a central feature of the Culture. There is, however, a more fundamental postulate. The core feature of Banks’s universe is that he imagines a scenario in which technological development has freed culture from all functional constraints – and thus, he imagines a situation in which culture has become purely memetic. This is perhaps the most important idea in his work, but it requires some unpacking.