A year and a half since fires devastated the historic town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, Hawaii, only six houses have been rebuilt—six out of more than 2,000. more.
The Crouches had unwittingly stumbled into a little-known battle over tidy neighborhood lawns. Celebrated in modern American suburbia, tended lawns have become a prized avatar of the American dream of home ownership, a key backdrop to neighborhood rituals and a symbol of order and calm and safety — of a good life. The moral rectitude around lawns has been given muscle through HOAs — which governneighborhoods home to more than 75 million Americans — and town and city ordinances that stipulate how long grass can be and how often people should trim it.
As with cryptocurrency, if it were so easy, it wouldn’t be worth anything. Value is tied to scarcity, and scarcity on social networks derives from proof of work. Status isn’t worth much if there’s no skill and effort required to mine it. It’s not that a social network that makes it easy for lots of users to perform well can’t be a useful one, but competition for relative status still motivates humans. Recall our first tenet: humans are status-seeking monkeys. Status is a relative ladder. By definition, if everyone can achieve a certain type of status, it’s no status at all, it’s a participation trophy.
In the meantime, those fascinated by accounting minutiae still have plenty to hold their interest, as Tesla invests heavily in AI infrastructure and has almost $7bn worth of assets under construction. Cash generation and debt issuance remain areas of interest.
The end of Argentina’s extensive rent controls has resulted in a tripling of the supply of rental apartments in Buenos Aires and a 30 percent drop in price. More.
Do you know how many times NPR interviewed Adam Schiff about the Russia Collusion hoax?”
NPR CEO: “Idk.”
REP FALLON: “25 times. How many times did NPR interview Chairman Comer about the Biden impeachment inquiry and the Biden family’s illicit business dealings?”
NPR CEO: “Idk.”
REP FALLON: “0 times. 25 to 0. Between June and November of 2023, PBS’s News Hour used the term ‘far-right’ 162 times, and ‘far-left’ was only used 6 times. Do you find that troubling?”
The most surprising thing about Ezra Klein is how he takes zero responsibility for his work lauding Obama, the ACA, and the entire framework he’s now criticizing. The idea of demand stimulus without looking at supply and regulatory bullshit is Obamacare!
Gotta find the guy who did that!
“I have contempt for such people and I want to make that clear. Because they’re virtue signaling and their lack of a solution means that kids don’t have a father. It means parents lost a son. For what? Nothing.”
2011: Obama signs a @DOGE-style executive order to “cut waste and promote efficiency.”
Recently, for no good reason at all, I did some archaeological research into the Postgres buffer manager locking design evolution for the past 30 years. I suppose no one but the most hopeless Postgres nerds will find this topic interesting. So, here we go!
First of all, what does Postgres buffer manager do? Just briefly, Postgres organizes on-disk data files in 8KB fix-sized pages. It also maintains a fixed-size array of page buffers in memory, to cache recent reads and writes of these disk pages and improve performance through caching and lazy disk flush.
This sprawling diagram was designed by Daniel McCallum in 1855 shortly after he became general superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad and drawn by Civil Engineer George Holt Henshaw. He created it as part of his efforts to improve accountability, operational efficiency, and lines of communications throughout the complex railroad system. Unfortunately, his insistence on enforcing rules he devised to govern all employees ultimately resulted in their resentment toward him, financial difficulties for the railroad as a whole, the first strike of railroad engineers in America, and his resignation. He was later appointed by President Lincoln to take charge of the United States Military Railroads due to his bridge and railroad expertise (Wrege et al., 2005). Despite its origins and the outcomes it precipitated, the diagram remains an impressive feat of design that up until just a few decades ago was relatively unknown.
I was first to report on a January 2016 letter from the intelligence community’s internal watchdog that exposed the Clinton email scandal. The Intelligence Community Inspector General concluded Clinton’s emails contained “CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET AND TOP SECRET/SAP” intelligence.