The problem is: that’s not really the problem going forward — nor the challenge, so we are overwhelmingly built for the past — one gigantic sunk cost we cannot shake off EVEN as warfare is being radically redefined in Ukraine and globalization, per this op-ed, is moving on without us.
While the numbers have been dwindling, Tupperware still has a salesforce of more than 465,000 worldwide, the company said in a bankruptcy court filing this week.
The answer is fairly clear: the Post Office must become a humbler organisation, serving its local postmasters better rather than wasting money by throwing its weight around from London. It still behaves more like a state-owned company than a private franchise business, with too many management layers, and plenty of debilitating indecision and inefficiency. The results speak for themselves.
And so the climax of a modern Tour, the Rome of it, must be south-east Asia. Perversely, it can be easier to grasp the magnitude of the continent from somewhere like Vietnam or the Philippines than from a billion-plus nation. Each is more populous than the largest EU state. Each belongs to an Asean that has around double the population of the US. And in the end, the visitor reflects, this is a subregion of Asia. The Grand Tour of old was meant to impress on men as high on themselves as Byron that there was a world out there. The modern version can’t fail to induce the same humility.
What went wrong with housing, however, is a shortage caused by excessive government — not a “market failure” that socialism can fix. New construction is discouraged by the miasma of building permits, rent controls, the rage for climate change codes and above all zoning rules shaped by the 1950s vision of the US as a suburban nation of single-family homes on large lots.
The targets won’t just be terrorists. Our computers are vulnerable, and increasingly, so are our cars, our refrigerators, our home thermostats and many other useful things in our orbits. Targets are everywhere.
A Chinese space startup conducted what it called a “high-altitude” test flight of its Nebula-1 rocket on Sunday, launching the vehicle to an altitude of about 5 km or so before attempting to land it back at the Ejin Banner Spaceport in Inner Mongolia.
Trulove was acquitted in March 2015 and went on to a role in the film “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” A federal lawsuit he filed after his release — noting he was stabbed in prison when he failed to give his cell’s bottom bunk to a gang leader — cost the city and county of San Francisco $13 million. In a new podcast interview, he recounted his conviction: “I’ll never forget, when I turned around, and I looked, and I seen Kamala Harris — we locked eyes this one time, and she laughed — she literally just kinda busted out laughing,” said Trulove, who’s endorsed, Donald Trump.
Competitors receive vastly more subsidies than SpaceX or Tesla. The success of SpaceX/Tesla is in spite of competitor subsidies!
we need to claw our way back to base-level human civilization.
From the Google antitrust trial today: the US Census Bureau spent $364MM in paid media to promote the 2020 Census.
Alibaba’s Qwen has been shining on benchmark tests, despite chip restrictions.
Telegram updated its privacy policy on Monday to say that the company will provide user data, such as IP addresses and phone numbers, to law enforcement agencies in response to a valid legal order
There’s no other way to describe the role the 900 U.S. troops in Syria are playing, for example. With the collapse of the ISIS caliphate in 2018, then-President Donald Trump announced that “we have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there,” adding that there would be a “full” and “rapid” withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country. His defense secretary, Jim Mattis, and his Middle East guru Brett McGurk—who is now Biden’s Middle East guru—resigned in protest.
“We urge policymakers to strengthen Wisconsin hospital price transparency laws and enact a medical fee schedule. Both polices would improve our state’s economic competitiveness and help employers who are facing record-setting inflation.”
The ad, produced by conservative Oconomowoc-based political action committee Wisconsin Principles Inc., falsely claimed Keyeski gave herself a 16% pay raise while on the Lodi School District Board of Education — a position she has never held because she never previously ran for or held elected office.
The clerk’s office adds, the duplicate ballots have identical barcodes. If a voter were to submit two absentee ballots, only one can be counted. Once the barcode is scanned, the voting system does not allow a ballot with the same barcode to be submitted. “I would just tell the voters that you can destroy one of the ballots,” Verbick said. “Please do not send in both ballots, only one vote, one ballot and the other can be destroyed.”
With the end of the department store in sight, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris has put on an engaging and thoughtful exhibition about its beginnings, examining the grand magasin as social, architectural and economic phenomenon from its birth in the 1850s to its zenith in 1925, the year of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs from which Art Deco got its name (until 13 October). The show opens, somewhat unexpectedly, with a display of maps, street plans and railway guides, for it was the reconfiguration of Paris in the mid-19th century, between the fall of the restored monarchy and the collapse of the Second Empire, when the great boulevards were cut through the city and the web of railway lines spread around it, that enabled the mushroom growth of an entirely new form of commerce.
Since I’ve spent many years developing the map tile infrastructure for MapHub, I decided to open-source it so anyone can use it. With OpenFreeMap, you now have the option to either set up your own server with just one line of code or use our public instance.
BBC sound effects library is now free to use.
In the latest slap at a pharmaceutical company by a local government, the city of Baltimore has filed a lawsuit accusing Biogen of striking an “unlawful” scheme with the largest pharmacy benefit managers to block generic competition of a best-selling multiple sclerosis treatment.
Who did this?
In other news, Apple has silently now included nuclear in their definition of clean energy
Three mile island Microsoft deal.
Big banks back nuclear power.
DoD Breaks Ground on Project Pele: A Mobile Nuclear Reactor for Energy Resiliency
It is a victory, indeed, and we celebrate it with a great guardian of the Constitution, the rule of law and justice: Lester Pines.
We are so busy in our health care system billing and coding and paying each other and every stakeholder has their gigantic lobby in Washington D.C. and everybody’s making a lot of money except for one stakeholder, the American citizen. They are financing this giant expense of health care system through their paycheck deduction for health insurance and the Medicare exercise tax as we go down this path of billing and coding and medicating.
The business model that funded the internet is going away, and the open web will never be the same.
It also appears that [Harris’s // Trump’s] dalliance with [Antifa // January 6] rioters in 2020-21 left more of a sour taste in the mouths of independent voters than [Democrats // Republicans] had imagined. Voters concerned about elitist influence on American politics were deeply put off by the partisan involvement of billionaires like [Mark Cuban // Elon Musk] and celebrities like [Taylor Swift // Hulk Hogan]. Few voters, it turns out, were swayed by cross-party endorsements by marginal characters like [Dick and Liz Cheney // Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard].
And while the U.S. is trying to remedy this with a Polar Security Cutter programto build a series of new heavy polar icebreakers (to be followed by a series of medium icebreakers), the program is going poorly. When the contract was first awarded in 2019, the plan was to have the first icebreaker completed by 2024. But as of July this year, the design of the ship was still incomplete. If and when the ships are completed (currently 2029 for the first vessel at the earliest), they are expected to cost $1.7-1.9 billion apiece, roughly four to five times what a comparable ship would cost to build elsewhere. Icebreakers, then, are another unfortunate example of the costs inflicted by binding national interests to an inefficient shipbuilding industry.
One of the other initiatives we took two years ago was to buy 108 acres owned by Bagels Forever, who were planning on building a bagel factory at the intersection of Highway M and Woodland Drive,” Grosskopf said. “We placed several conservancies over it so it will never be developed.”
The problem was that Boeing demanded the engines be sized for the 787 when the 787-9 was a 220t aircraft and demanded 64klbf thrust, and the 787-8 was a 205t aircraft demanding 58klbf thrust. We know what happened: The 787-8 landed at 228t, needing 72klbf thrust, and the 787-9 landed at 253t, needing 76klbf.
That is a 20% increase in thrust needed on engines designed tight to the original specification. The result was turbine sections that were highly stressed, where the GE GEnx-1 handled it better than the Trent 1000.
Well here’s a statistic for you: GoPro alone sold about 2.9m cameras in 2023. Given that CIPA reports all cameras shipped in 2023 as 7.7m units and that it’s leaving out all these “odd-ball” cameras from countries other than Japan, can you see the problem more clearly now?
I have flown on many DC/NYC shuttles where one or more House or Senate members is sitting in the first row of first or business class and I am sure they didn’t pay extra for their ticket. If anything I have assumed that those seats are chosen for the politicians for security reasons. If airline upgrades are graft, then we should be able to arrest and empty out the Congress and start over which might be good for our democracy.
Overheard in Silicon Valley: “The transition from the Jobs Way to the Musk Way in US startup culture is fascinating to watch. The founders are switching from artistic UI hippies to weightlifter hard executors.”
As you may know, the IRA made several statutory changes to the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit. As a result of the rushed provisions in the IRA Part D redesign, Medicare premiums increased by 21% in 2023. Additionally, Medicare Part D premiums were expected to rise even higher this year when open enrollment begins in October. Yet, the Biden-Harris Administration very deliberately initiated a demonstration program to address rising costs for seniors only in an election year.
Here’s the full 16-minute edited video of @Gwynne_Shotwell speaking to the Texas House of Representatives. I removed pauses and answers by other panel members. It contains some great information
What a man, hero! Consider bookmarking this @JMilei speech and making time for it if you haven’t already. The world needs more dissent
Some of the instructors there were burned agents who had returned from the field; others had never been agents themselves, but had expertise in other fields that turned out to be remarkably useful for spycraft. The school’s first explosives instructor was Bill Cumper, a boisterous character who walked around with his pockets full of bomb parts and “a detonator behind his ear as if it were a cigarette.” Cumper was an army engineer who knew, as all army engineers do, that the world has two kinds of engineering journals: civil engineering journals, which explain how to build bridges, and military engineering journals, which explain how to blow up those same bridges.
Earlier this week, The Trade Desk, Inc. filed preliminary proxy materials for a special meeting of stockholders. The purpose of the meeting is to approve the reincorporation of the corporation from the State of Delaware to the State of Nevada by conversion. This particular proxy statement caught my eye because it specifically calls out several Delaware court decisions
For those inside the tennis bubble, this is much needed. It was perfectly valid of the All England Club chairwoman Debbie Jevans to repeat on Friday that Wimbledon is in danger of losing its status as the world’s premier tennis tournament. The three other grand-slam tournaments — the Australian Open, French Open and US Open — have all grown their player facilities and spectator capacity in recent years.
An employee of IBM just about writes the “Jerry Maguire letter”.
What the authors report–and supposedly this is common knowledge at the hyperscalers–is that a couple cores per several thousand machines are “mercurial.” Due to subtle manufacturing defects or old age, they give wrong answers for certain instructions. These can cause all sorts of impossible-to-diagnose issues. Some rare problems at Google that were traced back to bad CPUs include:
Every major pillar of the US health care system, as a statement of economic fact, makes money when Americans get sick. The most valuable asset in this country today is a sick child. The pharma industry, the hospital industry, and medical school industry make more money when there are more interventions to perform on Americans. And by requiring insurance companies to take no more than 15 percent of premiums, Obamacare actually incentivized insurance companies to raise premiums to get 15 percent of a larger pie. This is why premiums have increased 100% since the passage of Obamacare, making healthcare the largest driver of inflation while American life expectancy plummets.
“Regulation is a blocker to innovation. If you care about prosperity and you kill innovation, you’re going to kill prosperity”
Glad that someone is talking about this
In an afternoon, we extended our data service library to perform large-scale data migrations. It reads token ranges from a database, checkpoints them locally via SQLite, and then firehoses them into ScyllaDB. We hook up our new and improved migrator and get a new estimate: nine days! If we can migrate data this quickly, then we can forget our complicated time-based approach and instead flip the switch for everything at once.
An entire HR team was terminated after their manager discovered and confirmed that their system automatically rejected all candidates – including his own application.