12.8

I’ve reported from inside Syria since 2011 and I live in the MidEast. So, let me explain in this thread what the implications could be for Syria and wider region in case the Syrian regime falls:

What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2025?
A Festive Countdown. At the start of each year, on January 1st, a new crop of works enter the public domain and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose. Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain — and here we focus on three of the most prominent. Newly entering the public domain in 2025 will be:

“I complained to anyone who would listen about how archaic the technology was in my day and complain about how dreadful the data was,” he said.

Also can you imagine if your social media posts on Facebook would be the mechanism by which it was determined if you could or could not have a bank account!?

What could possess a respectable Victorian surgeon from York to spend much of his life travelling to remote and challenging parts of the world to study volcanoes and climb mountains? For Tempest Anderson, pioneering new techniques of ophthalmic surgery and inventing photographic equipment was not enough. He decided that his ‘limited leisure’ time could not be filled with reading, writing or socialising, he sought to occupy himself with something more exciting: volcanology. For him, it was a branch of science that did not have too much literature and had the ‘advantage of offering exercise in the open air’: he saw the sides of volcanoes not as dangerous but ‘picturesq

On December 3, 2024, Federal District Judge Amos Mazzant issued a sweeping, nationwide injunction against the enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). The CTA mandates more than 32 million small business disclose intrusive and confidential information to the federal law enforcement. The injunction comes less than one month before the January 1, 2025 reporting deadline after which businesses that failed to file a report, or whose reports contained errors or omissions, would be liable to civil and criminal penalties including fines of up to $500 per day.

Don’t ask agencies to identify every regulation they’d eliminate—a process that would take years and would get bogged down in bureaucratic procedures and legal challenges. Instead require them to justify the rules they’d keep. As things stand now, regulations will stay on the books unless someone acts to remove them, but a sunset rule would have them expire automatically unless agencies choose to keep them.

What is Software Anyways? Where Does it Exist?

6 lessons I learned working at an art gallery:
On agency, doing value-aligned work, and making your job fun

I am fairly confident of where the United Healthcare assassin escaped to. He escaped on an electric Citibike, according to police. I happen to continuously scrape Citibike data every minute, so I can see where individual bikes go. The only northbound Citibike to leave within 10 minutes of the shooting from any dock near the hotel went to Madison Ave & E 82nd St.

Evan:

This chart collection explores National Health Expenditure (NHE) data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). These data offer insights into changes in health spending over time in the U.S. as well as the driving forces behind spending growth. The data specifically show how healthcare spending changed in 2022 after deviating from historical trends in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A related interactive toolcontains more of the latest NHE data.

Excellent discussion w @RealDonaldTrump. I congratulated him on his election victory & we expressed our shared commitment to continue enhancing CY-US strategic partnership. We will work together to further reinforce our relations for the benefit of our countries & the region

I hunted for old annual (reports) when researching Buffett’s Early Investments (amzn.to/3B2SdgF). There are a few resources I’d point to:

  1. There is a database called Mergent Archives that many libraries (such as the New York Public Library) have. It allows you to search for company annual reports and Moody’s Manuals and download them to a USB. This was the foundation for much of my book and is the easiest resource to use.

When Calvin and Hobbes hit the nation’s funny pages in late 1985, it took everybody by surprise. A literate comic strip? By a guy who can draw? About a kid who acts like a real kid? And it’s funny? And it’s from a major syndicate!? The cognoscenti of the graphic narrative form thought they’d died and gone to comic strip heaven.

But its true. Against heavy odds, one man with a lot of determination and a fierce sense of his craft may have single-handedly given the strips a new lease on their artistic life. It’s been a struggle, but Bill Watterson, like his creation, is the real thing at last.

In the end, I decided to close on a globally distributed database – CockroachDB. It’s Postgres wire-protocol compatible, and inherits some of the more interesting features discussed above – large horizontal scaling, strong consistency – and has some interesting features of its own.

Diátaxis is intended to help documentation better serve users in their cycle of interaction with a product.

The impact could be significant for commercial aviation—and Boeing in particular. Before its repeated self-inflicted wounds began with the 2018/19 737 MAX crisis, which continues today, Boeing was by far the largest US exporter. Deliveries of its 7-Series airplanes outside the US helped balance the trade deficit the US usually has

Boeing began Monday installing “workplace occupancy sensors” in the main Everett office towers that use motion detectors and cameras mounted in ceiling tiles above workstations, conference rooms and common areas.

Mapping the Podcast Ecosystem with the Structured Podcast Research Corpus

He held his breath. Here was the truth: the Lord had given him the word; and behold, there the word was written, there it rang out, a word that could be repeated and transformed for ever: “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

Examples of premature generalisation are everywhere. As a security and cryptography engineer, I see the same mindset in tools like PGP or JWTs (JOSE): overly-complex and easy to screw up footguns because they try to cover too many use-cases in a single tool. The reaction has been the development of special-purpose tools like Age or minisign, that follow the Unix philosophy of “do one thing well”. 

3) Lastly, @dehenau_ points out that it’s still really hard to get bank financing for any construction biz that isn’t one of the massive players. People often ask him why he doesn’t build homes. He would like to, but getting the loans to make that happen is nearly impossible

I present evidence that firms serve as tax-free consumption vehicles. Drawing on a unique combination of data from an electronic invoicing program in Portugal (e-Fatura), I show that individuals who control firms shift 36% of their monthly personal expenditures to firms and 31% of their household expenditures. The effects are driven by owner-managers of small closely held firms through expenditure categories on the border between business and final consumption but are widespread among business managers across the whole income distribution. My results suggest that the government revenue losses due to consumption through the firm amount to 1% of GDP. Reallocating the tax savings and personal expenditures hidden within firms to the reported household income of business managers increases the Gini by one percentage point and the top 1% income share by half a percentage point.

Glamour is more than a synonym for fashionor celebrity, although these things can certainly be glamorous. So can a holiday resort, a city, or a career. The military can be glamorous, as can technology, science, or the religious life. It all depends on the audience. Glamour is a form of communication that, like humor, we recognize by its characteristic effect. Something is glamorous when it inspires a sense of projection and longing: if only . . . Whatever its incarnation, glamour offers a promise of escape and transformation. It focuses deep, often unarticulated longings on an image or idea that makes them feel attainable. Both the longings – for wealth, happiness, security, comfort, recognition, adventure, love, tranquility, freedom, or respect – and the objects that represent them vary from person to person, culture to culture, era to era. In the twentieth-century, ‘the future’ was a glamorous concept.

Why I like my Model Y

In his second book, ‘Cambridge – Time & Space’, photographer Martin Bond has carefully chosen a picture for every day of the year selected from the period before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Photographs that capture the months before lockdown are interspersed with desolate images of deserted streets and candid moments as a city and its people searched for perspective during the chaos of a rapidly unfolding situation.

Merkel, a one-person case for constitutional term limits, is entitled to look out for herself. “I was the most damaging European leader since 1945,” was never going to be the gist of her book. To her credit, she doesn’t even use her best excuse: that a generic German chancellor of the period would have done the same things — on energy, on defence, if not on asylum — such was the then national consensus. The people I’m keener to hear from are her fans. Why did western liberals fall for Merkel? Because she was a woman? No, they disliked Margaret Thatcher, and mistrust Giorgia Meloni. Because she was of the left? No, her party is centre-right, even if the exchange rate between German politics and the Anglosphere kind isn’t so neat. Because she let in a million refugees, then? She was hailed as the “Queen of Europe” well before that. 

A truly suspended moment with actress Marion Cotillard and cellist Yo-Yo Ma on the poem “Le Pont” by Victor Hugo

The Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel directing the South African soprano Pretty Yende and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, in this pitch-perfect rendition of Amazing Grace at Notre Dame today.

Paying Krebs a visit these days isn’t easy. A recent trip to his home meant leaving behind all smartphones and internet-connected devices, to prevent any kind of digital trail that hackers could pick up. Visitors must navigate through winding Virginia farm country roads using a paper road map. No cameras are allowed.

Yet Ortberg also has “the biggest opportunity,” said Gautam Mukunda, a lecturer at the Yale School of Management. “Because the man who saves Boeing is going to be a legend of American business.”

There was no big CEO smile or swagger as Ortberg addressed the dire situation during the Nov. 20 internal all-hands presentation, delivered to a small in-person group at the Boeing Field jet delivery center and webcast companywide. 

Dressed in a dark Boeing fleece and khakis, Ortberg offered somber realism as he urged everyone in the company to pull together to lift Boeing out of the pit it’s in.