8.6

But it’s one thing to build a good product; it’s entirely something else to get users to try it — especially if they have to quit the easiest and most ingrained thing on the internet to do so.

Disciplinary eccentricity, and restless work ethic that set him apart. In 1905, after working on a handful of comic properties, he debuted what would become his signature strip, a sprawling full-page color adventure called “Little Nemo in Slumberland.” The series was an elegant fantasy in which the young title character, whose name means “no one,” is drawn from his bedroom into boisterous adventures in Slumberland, where walking beds, Godzilla-sized turkeys, and races through the stars were common fare. Each full-page story ended with Nemo suddenly waking up in his own bed, begging the reader to consider what might be real and what might be a dream. Film scholar Tom W. Hoffer notes that in Nemo, either

Llama 2 is the latest commercially usable openly licensed Large Language Model, released by Meta AI a few weeks ago. I just released a new plugin for my LLM utility that adds support for Llama 2 and many other llama-cpp compatible models.

Headwind #2 is that San Francisco has tried to commit suicide, including out-of-control crime, cost, complacency, chaos, and some would argue communism. A wealthy friend recently told me that the state might as well tax you 100% because anyone who’s still living here obviously doesn’t care about taxes.

 “AS THE PRICE OF MEDICAL CARE MOUNTS, health insurance has become a necessity; but insurance premiums are becoming more expensive too, while benefits dwindle as rapidly as the costs of medical treatment increase. Money aside, the consumer’s major problem is finding his way about an increasingly impersonal, fragmented, irrationally arranged set of health services.” While this could be a quote from today, it was written in The New York Review of Books in 1970, just a few years after Lyndon B. Johnson introduced federal health care insurance for the elderly and the poor. Medicare and Medicaid were necessary, but the new multibillion-dollar programs had few guardrails; doctors and hospitals saw them as guaranteed subsidies.

Through a string of unchecked acquisitions over 30 years, Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS USA Holdings, and National Beef have gained control of roughly 85% of the total hog, cattle, and poultry processing market. For brevity, we’ll call these four meat processing corporations “BigAg” (or “the cartel”).

On the other hand, the long fuselage, with a fineness ratio well over 10, is not structurally optimal (too long and thin). The weight of the fuselage employed in a real aircraft is, therefore, higher than for the shorter and more optimal dual aisle fuselage.

“One thing we added that’s actually pretty unique is we created parking spaces in the shop for our road technicians’ trucks,” he says. “It keeps the trucks out of the weather, and it makes the technicians more efficient, because all their tools are right there with them in the shop.”

Before the pandemic, the vast majority of Chinese households and smaller private businesses relied on an implicit “no politics, no problem” bargain, in place since the early 1980s: the CCP ultimately controlled property rights, but as long as people stayed out of politics, the party would stay out of their economic life. This modus vivendi is found in many autocratic regimes that wish to keep their citizens satisfied and productive, and it worked beautifully for China over the past four decades.

Automation is often a solution in search of a problem. It is a choice people have made, not an inevitability and certainly not a necessity. For instance, the United States faces a scarcity of truck drivers. The American Trucking Association has estimated that in 2021 there were 80,000 fewer drivers than the total needed and that, given the age of current drivers, over a million new ones will have to be recruited in the coming decade. To deal with this deficit, many tech moguls, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, have invested in the research and development of self-driving vehicles, technology that would reduce the demand for drivers. For Bezos, such technology makes corporate financial sense; Amazon relies on low shipping costs to keep its prices down. But it does not make wider economic sense because millions of people would be happy to drive trucks in the United States—they just need to be allowed to work in the country.

All three admitted they flagrantly lied either under oath to Congress or to federal investigators. The three were never indicted for their false and perjurious testimonies.

Three decades ago, James Carville, the American political adviser, quipped about wanting to be resurrected as the bond market because “you can intimidate everyone”. Since then, the market has grown fivefold. Tighter regulations on traditional lenders resulting from the recent rash of bank failures in the US will force even more borrowers towards bonds.

Shall a penny have more weight in my heart and give me more courage than God himself, who holds heaven and earth in his power, who gives us the air we breathe and the water we drink, who makes our corn to grow and gives us all things? It is so scandalous that it cannot be uttered, that God should not amount to as much with us as a hundred guilders. Why not think that God, who has created me, will surely feed me, if he wants me to live? If he does not want this, very well, I shall be satisfied.

6.4

State Farm General Insurance Company®, State Farm’s provider of homeowners insurance in California, will cease accepting new applications including all business and personal lines property and casualty insurance, effective May 27, 2023. This decision does not impact personal auto insurance. State Farm General Insurance Company made this decision due to historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation, rapidly growing catastrophe exposure, and a challenging reinsurance market.

SAR mobile opine values.

We know a lot about the final Aquarius design only because a detailed document containing the Scorpius specification was made available publicly by Apple (or more likely leaked and no-one cared given the project was over by then!)

… biofuels would require about half of the country’s agricultural land. Fewer flights is, naturally, the easiest way to slice carbon emissions, and so a demand drop would come with its own climate benefits. The aviation industry’s report calculates that, in 2050, the drop in demand from raising prices to pay for sustainable airplane fuel would reduce emissions by 12%, and economic measures — such as emissions-trading obligations and CO2 removal investments — would lead to a further 2% reduction, compared with a business-as-usual scenario.

These responsibilities might seem functionally equivalent to those of a marketing analyst or data scientist, which are familiar and commonplace roles. The difference is in mandate: unlike the marketing data scientist, the marketing economist is charged with interpreting data to tell a credible narrative. Data scientists and analysts seek clarity through systematic, quantitative computation; the marketing economist embraces uncertainty and attempts to model the interaction between complex systems with robust, analytical assessment as well as through deductive reasoning. 

U.S. Naval Institute News reported Thursday that “an illegal Chinese salvage operation is raiding two United Kingdom World War II warship wrecks off the coast of Malaysia.” The battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse were sunk by the Japanese three days after Pearl Harbor, and more than 840 men were lost. “In all the war, I never received a more direct shock,” Prime Minister Winston Churchill recalled in his memoirs. 

Toyota’s Chief Scientist said that rushing the switch to electric vehicles will only make drivers hold on to gasoline vehicles longer.

There is a better alternative. Rather than using the timing of the cycle as the trigger for investment, it is much better to use the relationship between price and value. The whole point is that if we correctly diagnosed the problems as cyclical, the cycle will turn, usually within a couple of years, and the price/value gap should close when it does. So the way to prevent yourself from “being too early” is to demand a low enough price in relationship to value so that even if the time for the gap to close is on the outer end of the typical range our annualized rate of return is still very attractive.

Up to 65,000 dairy cows a year could be culled as the Government moves to bring the agriculture sector in line with climate targets, according to a report by the Irish Independent.

Orwell’s failed prediction stemmed from two reasons. First, he was imbued with zero-sum thinking. It should have been obvious that India was not necessary to the high standard of living enjoyed in England because most of that high standard of living came from increases in the productivity of labor brought about capitalism and the industrial revolution and most of that was independent of empire (Most. Maybe all. Maybe more more than all. Maybe not all. One can debate the finer details on financing but of that debate I have little interest.) The second, related reason was that Orwell had a deep suspicion and distaste for technology, a theme I will take up in a later post.

“We have a narrowbody engine that has a fan similar to the size of the GE9X.” It’s a narrowbody engine able to move the air the size of an engine on the 777. But there is no casing around it, so it’s not that much bigger in diameter than today’s LEAP, Hegeman said. If you combine it with a core that is the size of a business jet engine, moving the amount of air of a 9X engine but very efficiently with narrowbody level-type thrust. “That is what RISE is.”

And the Brewers are asking for a lot. The original stadium deal and 25 years of repairs and maintenance have cost taxpayers $1.56 billion to date, as Urban Milwaukee hasreported, and now the owners want another $290 million subsidy to be put aside (or $378 million with interest it is expected to earn), simply to guarantee they stay in Milwaukee for another 13 years. That would be the highest per-year subsidy in major league history as sports funding analyst Neil deMause has written.

Some former Apple employees who have worked on the headset have shared their own concerns about its design. For example, the headset’s external battery pack-an unusual design choice Apple made to reduce its weight and feeling of constriction around the head- can likely fit in a pocket or be clipped onto a belt, but how would it accommodate women wearing dresses?

We show that this hypothesis is consistent with the experiences of six historical societies: late imperial China, the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, the early United States, early modern England, the late medieval Italian city-states, and ancient Rome. We focus especially on the experience of late imperial China, which adopted a modern corporation statute but failed to see much growth in the use of the corporate form until the state developed the capacity and institutions necessary to uniformly enforce the new law. Our thesis complicates existing historical accounts of the rise of the corporation, which often emphasize the importance of economic factors over political and legal factors and view the state as a source of expropriation and threat rather than support. Our thesis has extensive implications for the way we understand corporations, private law, states, and the nature of modernity.

The Air Force’s Chief of AI Test and Operations said “it killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”

Moscow-based security firm Kaspersky has been hit by an advanced cyberattack that used clickless exploits to infect the iPhones of several dozen employees with malware that collects microphone recordings, photos, geolocation, and other data, company officials said. “We are quite confident that Kaspersky was not the main target of this cyberattack,” Eugene Kaspersky, founder of the company, wrote in a post published on Thursday. “The coming days will bring more clarity and further details on the worldwide proliferation of the spyware.”

Our vision is a world where gardening is embraced as a way of life – a source of joy and fulfilment, building healthier lives, stronger communities, and thriving environments. To achieve this, our mission is to be there for everyone on their lifelong adventure with gardening.

Ashley Blewer is a video systems developer and archivist who’s troubled by the repercussions of the embargo: “We should be encouraging related or derivative works instead of trying to prevent them, and I don’t see how screenshots and discussion hinder the intellectual property of these platforms in any way.” In one of her blog posts from 2018, titled “Wild Wild Countryand the Magnetic Media Crisis,” Blewer mines the documentary series (which was then streaming on Netflix) for “egregious” visual errors and then annotates them with technical insights. Screenshots are Blewer’s visual compass for this kind of writing and without them, her work may suffer. “What am I gonna do now,” she asks, “act like this is a crime-investigation court case and make illustrations?”

Considering the centrality of sports to American culture, there are too few really good books about athletics. I blame the New York publishing houses, which push writers to do books praising specific players or coaches, not to analyze sports generally. New York publishing houses think sports fans can’t handle complicated thoughts. This is completely wrong – smart people are just as obsessed with athletics as anyone else! I hope Sports Literate helps show this.

Tesla Inc. and its battery partner are poised to receive about $1.8 billion in production tax credits this year under the Inflation Reduction Act, according to forecasts from researcher Benchmark Mineral Intelligence – a windfall that far exceeds an estimated $480 million haul for General Motors Co. and LG Energy Solution. Another rival, Ford Motor Co., won’t begin to reap any benefits from the law’s battery manufacturing credits until 2025.

After 40 years of research, Brazilian scientists and agronomists managed to develop wheat varieties that can be grown in hot and dry areas, typical of the tropical climate. Production has already started in the cerrado, in states such as Goiás and Minas Gerais, with good results. The expectation is to make Brazil self-sufficient in the production of wheat, the only agricultural commodity that the country needs to import.

If the initial subproject you choose to work on is a UI, then you can quickly see some results of course! For various reasons, I rarely start frontend first and usually start backend first. And in any situation, you’ll eventually get to the backend and reach a similar challenge.

Now look at where the two sides ended up: The Fiscal Responsibility Act is much closer to McCarthy’s original position than it is to Biden’s. It doesn’t hike taxes. It reduces spending. It contains measures the Left can’t stand. The public supports the deal by a two-to-one margin. Most Republicans and Democrats voted for it. The media, as usual, highlight McCarthy’s internal critics. They are a distraction. The press is so obsessed with Republican infighting that it overlooks the real story: Kevin McCarthy is shaping up to be the most effective House GOP leader in decades. Biden, the Democrats, and the liberal culture have been unable to transform him into a bogeyman. To the contrary: His net approval rating has risen by double digits since January. Biden’s numbers have dropped. Nor is McCarthy’s favorability the result of playing to the media crowd and appeasing the Left. The Fiscal Responsibility Act is the latest piece of significant center-right legislation that the House has passed this year.

Ireland Looking To Kill 200,000 Cows To Fight Climate Change; Are US Herds Next? In the latest effort to reduce emissions from agriculture, Ireland said it may kill 200,000 cows. Meanwhile, climate activists have American farms and ranches in the crosshairs.

Book­ing tick­ets on­line: Yes, you read that right. Bud­get air­lines bake an elec­tronic car­rier charge into the on­line ticket prices they dis­play. Fron­tier charges up to $23 per pas­sen­ger per flight seg­ment. Spir­it’s pas­sen­ger us­age charge is $23 per flight seg­ment, Al­le­giant’s $22. All are per flight seg­ment.

The increase in nomads has become a flashpoint in debates over the city’s housing problems. “[The presence of foreigners] primarily affects the economic livelihood of the regular person here,” said Arturo Mares, a clerk at a furniture store in the upscale Roma Norte neighborhood. “Costs are rising because these people are spending a lot of money here, since they think everything is cheap.” In November, people took to the streets of Mexico City to protest gentrification and rising rents.

The Lost Archive of Major Martin J. Manhoff is one of the great photographic discoveries of recent decades. The collection’s thousands of color slides and over two hours of film footage present a unique and captivating visual record of Stalin’s Soviet Union that has attracted millions of viewers around the world.  

Here’s where you need the pen and paper. The reason QR codes are masked in the first place is that sometimes particular combinations of data bytes produce QR codes with certain undesirable features (like big empty blocks in the middle). These undesirable features confuse the QR code reader, so the data is masked against a value in order to make the code easier to process when it’s scanned by a QR code reader. The computer then unmasks the original data bytes using the same process, and retrieves the data.

Bitcoin is, in our eyes, a load-balancing economic battery, and batteries are essential to the energy transition required to reach the targets of the Paris Agreement. Our ambition is to be a valuable partner in new renewable projects.

US residential home values have declined modestly since their 2022 peak, reflecting higher mortgage interest rates. But residential values have plunged in San Francisco, falling by about 16.7%, compared to a decline of just 3.3% in the rest of the country, a difference of about 13.4 percentage points. San Francisco’s housing stock was valued at nearly $2 trillion by real estate valuation firm Zillow before the price plunge. This additional 13.4 percentage-point drop means that San Franciscans have lost an extra $260 billion more in residential real estate value than it would have had it kept pace with the rest of the country. 

The evidence of dramatic, global human progress across a broad range of indicators (e.g., mortality, income, education, political liberties) in recent decades is well?established. Less known is that the gains have been widely shared rather than accruing mainly to a small elite.1 Globalization and market liberalization over the past few decades have not only raised absolute living standards but also reduced inequality by many meaningful measures.

5.21

“We are hardening targets — both physical and digital — to make them less desirable to thieves and working with our law enforcement partners to bring perpetrators to justice,” Postal Inspection Service Chief Gary Barksdale said in a statement.

“When government officials cash in on their public service by lobbying, advising, or serving as board members and executives for the companies they used to regulate, it undermines public officials’ integrity and casts doubt on the fairness of government contracting,” wrote Senator Warren. “This problem is especially concerning and pronounced in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the United States’ defense industry.”

Meanwhile, the Blick security guard kept texting me videos. He needed someone to see what he was seeing out there, on his patch of Market Street, between Fifth and Sixth. Did I know how the black markets worked? Had I walked down Market Street at night? Did I know that some of the street addicts were rotting, literally: their decomposing flesh attracting flies. The Anthropologie, where he used to work, announced it would close. “What it really feels like living in San Francisco is that you’re lying to yourself,” he said. “Oh, I live in San Francisco. It’s so nice. When you walk by the junkies you’re like, They don’t exist. they don’t exist. You’re lying to yourself.”

So let’s take those points about authenticity and licensing and have a bit of fun. Because anyone can take those images and modify them, I can take those images and modify them. (Do I feel entirely comfortable doing this? No. Taking and editing someone else’s work is always weird. Especially when it features a living subject with whom I have no connection. But that’s the nature of this type of licensing and usage, so please forgive me. I should stress that there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with the original images, and I’ve described some of the context and thinking that’s likely to have been involved.)

Swiss site Tichy’s Einblick here reports on how police and consumer advocates are warning homeowners heat pumps are being stolen and that often aren’t insured because they are not not secured indoors.

United thinks Delta is trying to suppress demand with artificially high fares so it can then show DOT that demand is dead and it needs flexibility. I don’t see this the same way as United. I think Delta is simply not planning on flying this route. It hopes it can get the flexibility to use the authority to fly from another gateway, but if not, it’ll just walk away from the slot. Delta really doesn’t want to take a bunch of bookings which it will just have to refund or rebook. To me, this is just a pragmatic way to deal with the situation while Delta waits to see how it plays out.

  • “Try hard to stay on good terms with everybody. Civility is an important property, and burning bridges is generally a bad idea; you never know who you’re going to work with again, who you might work for, or who might work for you.” “You can learn something from virtually everybody. One example: I was being driven in a limousine in Palm Springs by a white-haired guy. And I remember thinking, ‘This poor guy, it’s too bad. Here he is driving a limo. It’s nine o’clock at night. He ought to be just out there on the links playing golf and having a nice time.’ We struck up a conversation, and I find out that he actually did retire—from being the chief financial officer of one of the largest insurance companies in Chicago. He got bored playing golf, so he decided to drive a limo three times a week because he knew he was going to meet interesting people.”

LobbyFacts empowers journalists, activists, and researchers to search, sort, filter, and analyse data from the official EU Transparency Register, tracking lobbyists and their influence at the EU level over time. Use the search functions below to get the answers to these questions and more.

The day after the mission, King George VI visited the squadron to congratulate the Dambusters, and later all were invited to Buckingham Palace to receive military honours for flying skill and bravery.

This conventional story is, in our view, both simplistic and self-serving. It fails to account for the well-documented—and perfectly comprehensible—objections that Russians have expressed toward NATO expansion over the past three decades, and obscures the central responsibility that the architects of U.S. foreign policy bear for the impasse. Both the global role that Washington has assigned itself generally, and America’s specific policies toward NATO and Russia, have led inexorably to war—as many foreign policy critics, ourselves among them, have long warned that they would.

In Part One we’ll look at the years 1998-2006, when digital photography was a rapidly changing landscape of experimentation and progress, with occasional peaks marking new solutions that would continue to this day. Part Two will follow the trail from 2008 to the present time.

There’s nothing in today’s report that justifies 4 years of our time.

The Human Rights Campaign’s Healthcare Equality Index, bankrolled by Pfizer, is changing our medical care

The United States is happy for India to continue buying as much Russian oil as it wants, including at prices above a G7-imposed price cap mechanism, if it steers clear of Western insurance, finance and maritime services bound by the cap, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Friday.

Not only did the FBI predicate its investigation on hearsay, but Durham says it failed to corroborate the information it received with any other intelligence agency.

Swedes tend to be active but the hearts of some of those who completed a Vasaloppet showed strain, the researchers found. Overall, the skiers showed no greater risk of AFib than the other Swedes. But those male skiers who had entered the most races or finished with the fastest times, suggesting they’d trained the hardest, were more likely than anyone else, skiers or not, to develop AFib in the following years. (Female skiers had the lowest rates of AFib of any group in the study.)

The first is a return to national self-sufficiency. The post-Cold War decades were defined by shrinking budgets and a willingness to rely on imported weapons. Prior to 1990, many countries – South Africa, Taiwan, Yugoslavia, Romania, Israel, Japan, and others – had a national fighter jet plan. When my career began, the Italian-Brazilian AMX looked like the future.

The Dutch government is considering plans to restrict cattle numbers to two cows per football pitch-sized field, putting them on a collision course with the country’s farmers.

And that reason is simple. Musk’s real heresy wasn’t returning something closer to free speech to Twitter. It was proving that the company could operate on 20% of its old budget and one-quarter of its staff.

A bill sponsored by state Senate Majority Leader Andy Billig, D-Spokane, creates tax credits that will provide subsidies of up to $2 per gallon for SAF, which is 2 to 5 times more expensive than regular jet fuel that currently costs about $2.17 per gallon.

Progress is nearing White Wolf, where the rooftops of bathrooms and other structures are just starting to emerge. Roads are buried beneath at least ten feet of snow, much of it heavily compacted, and crews will have to carefully navigate several hazardous avalanche zones.

In all, he won more than 60 national and international championships in inland lakes scows, Olympic classes, larger offshore sailboats and a record seven Skeeter ice boat championships.

Consumer technology, especially apps, is more advanced than anything used in Europe. You can order food and see where the courier is on a map. You can select seats for your cinema, and the seats turn into characters from the movie, backdrops at concerts show the lyrics on an LED. And the electric car industry is advancing at a super rapid speed and will take the world by surprise. Etcetera.

“But so we went for a walk and I asked him lots of questions,” Lewis continued. “First thing is I call my friend and I said, ‘go ahead do the deal. What could go wrong?’ And the second thing was, is I thought like, ‘I just want to see what happens to this person.'” Lewis didn’t give a formal publication date, but he said he wants the release the book to coincide with the start of a criminal trial against Bankman-Fried, if one occurs. Prosecutors set an original target date for the trial in October, though Bankman-Fried’s lawyers have suggested they may try to push back the date.

“We’ve discovered that it is one thing to build a search engine, and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better choice.”

Using background knowledge of Antarctica and information concerning these activities that has been published since the early 1940s, it is demonstrated: that the two U-Boats could not have reached Antarctica; that there was no secret wartime German base in Dronning Maud Land; that SAS troops did not attack the alleged German base; that the SAS men in the region at the time had civilian jobs; that Operation Highjump was designed to train the US Navy for a possible war with the Soviet Union in the Arctic, and not to attack an alleged German base in Antarctica; and that Operation Argus took place over the ocean more than 2000 km north of Dronning Maud Land. Activities that were classified have subsequently been declassified and it is no longer difficult to separate fact from fancy, despite the fact that many find it attractive not to do so.

“As long as we don’t do something stupid — which is a daily challenge in this industry — we will continue to wipe the floor with every other airline in Europe,” he said.

2.19

Most of the world’s olives grow in southern European countries, such as Spain and Italy. In the U.S., California dedicates more than 30,000 acres to the commodity. But Florida may be the next agricultural region for small-scale commercial olive production.

It appears that editors will support Hersh’s work when it serves the interests of the party they support, the Democrats, whether those stories are true or not. His establishment media enablers stayed away from the Biden pipeline piece because it aligned with the belief of many on the right, including senior GOP officials, that Biden blew up the pipelines.

Of liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz’s $195,000 fundraising haul in large donations last week, only $7,500 came from in-state donors.

It’s a tactic Democrats employed nationally in last year’s midterms to mixed reviews from their partisan camp. The strategy involves implicitly siding in partisan primaries with the GOP candidate opponents feel would appear to voters as most conservative in the general election, then going after that candidate and casting them as out of touch with voters after the primary

‘The left has become largely irrelevant in the US because it is incapable of working with the right’, said Nick Brana, chair of The People’s Party, which organised the rally with libertarians. ‘It clings to identity politics over jobs, health care, wages and war, and condemns half the country as deplorables.’

That progress could be overstated and the company isn’t out of the woods just yet, according to an internal memo from one of the company’s top executives that Recode obtained. Meta still faces major business challenges, including Apple limiting its advertising business, TikTok’s rising popularity, and its brand sentiment with users in the US.

This is the reality of the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Washington seems determined to pursue its increasingly illusory goal of maintaining international hegemony, now packaged in spurious claims of supporting “democracy versus authoritarianism.” Not many buyers there. How long will the US continue to flail in endless foreign wars to desperately prove to itself and the world that it is still # 1?

SQLite is one of those projects that I wish I had known about long before I did. I had heard about it, but for many years I never thought about taking a serious look at it because I was under the false impression that is was a tiny database only useful for personal address books and small embedded devices.

As defense counsel has pointed out, and the Government does not dispute, many individuals use a VPN for benign purposes. In the Government’s view, however, the use of a VPN raises several potential concerns. First, a VPN is a mechanism of encryption, hiding online activities from third parties, including the Government. Second, it is a means to disguise a user’s whereabouts because a VPN server essentially acts as a proxy on the internet. In other words, because the demographic location data comes from a server in another country, a user’s IP appears as if it is in that country, and the user’s actual location cannot be determined.

“The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems,” Seshadri said. “They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called ‘Ads’ that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins. (1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement.”

Even before the famous scandal, there was another kind of snow he was interested in: the stuff falling from the sky. His passion for winter weather and vehicles that could traverse those icy conditions became one of DeLorean’s main sources of post-GM income (and a significant pawn in the post-conviction DMC bankruptcy) but was somehow simultaneously his least known business endeavor. In fact, the first DeLorean wasn’t the DMC-12—it was a snowcat.

The suit, filed in 2017 by a sales representative for a competing medical device firm, alleges an illegal kickback scheme between Medtronic and hospital employees. According to the complaint and documents released in the suit, between 2011 and 2018, VA health care workers received steakhouse dinners, Apple electronics and NASCAR tickets, and in turn, Medtronic secured a lucrative contract with the hospital. Meanwhile, the company’s representatives allegedly “groomed and trained” physicians at the facility, who then deployed the company’s devices even when it was not medically indicated.

China’s state-run aviation industry is working toward self-sufficiency because of sanctions. But it is these same sanctions that will make it difficult to achieve.

Denver’s snow plowing response was widely criticized following the December storm, when a sustained cold snap combined with the city’s failure to deploy side-street plows caused mounds of snow and ice to languish for weeks. In response, the city upped its plowing efforts for the Jan. 17-18 storm, dispatching small plows to clear residential streets. Still, due to a sidewalk clearing system that relies heavily on business and private property owners to ensure sidewalks and curbs are accessible, problem areas have inevitably remained.

“The mainstream media, they have decided on their own that we are at war and by ‘we,’ that means the Acela corridor, the expensive suburbs of the East Coast … and that means the rules (of journalism) have changed,” Brecher offered.

Back at the Boulevard Mall, I return to LensCrafters to pick up my glasses. I’m anxious because I have one ear that’s higher than the other and a touch of undiagnosed OCD, and getting them to fit the way I like them—almost floating, not gripping my ears like tight little baby hands—is always an ordeal. But the young man who helped me choose the frames bends and shapes them with such slow and attentive care that I am put immediately at ease. As he works, we talk. His name is Pouyan. He is twenty-eight years old, bearded and solidly built, with intense blue eyes and a warm, open manner. He immigrated to Las Vegas three years ago from Fardis, a city outside Tehran, by way of Turkey, to which he had escaped by foot, and where he was later met by his parents and younger brother. He was an optician in Iran, as was his father, but his family is Baha’i, a persecuted religious minority there, and the Iranian government shut their optical shops down.

The items and issues included the US SPR levels, the North / South divide on the energy transition, the challenges of expanding minerals supply, the IRA, the strong push governments are giving the energy transition, the talk and the mood at Davos, Dan’s perspective on European governments and their palpable return to reality on energy security, the different perspectives that will be showcased at CERA on the energy transition, and the US and China relationship.

Kerry is no stranger to long flights and extravagant stays as Biden’s climate czar. From March 2021 to June 2022 alone, he flew nearly 200,000 miles—the equivalent of traveling around the world more than seven times—to fight climate change, the Washington Free Beacon reported in September. Those flights produced 9.54 million pounds of carbon, roughly 300 times the average American’s carbon footprint for an entire year. In November, meanwhile, Kerry attended an international climate conference in Sharm El Sheikh, an Egyptian resort town known for its long beaches, luxury resorts, and recreational watersports, including windsurfing, an activity Kerry has long enjoyed.

But in America, the exact opposite attitude holds: woke virtue signaling is more important than scientific achievement, but not more important than beating the Steelers.

My Dear Fellow Clergymen: I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham.

An e-battery factory and new cultural center have put Skelleftea at the heart of an eco-urban renaissance

Paying – Repeatedly – for Epic’s Walled Garden

Taxpayers have spent more than $38B (!) since 2011 on a backdoor electronic medical record subsidy [1]. Verona based Epic Systems lobbied [2] for these expenditures and has benefited greatly from this federal taxpayer largesse.

Interoperability, that is the ability to move your digital health data anywhere, was one of the arguments for this lavish spending.

However and unfortunately, Epic’s Founder and CEO, Judy Faulkner is now lobbying once again [3], this time to prevent such open movement. Her actions seek to reinforce Epic’s “walled garden” [4], that is creating roadblocks to data leaving their systems.

Curiously, former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson is also advocating Epic’s walled garden position, to the detriment of entrepreneurs everywhere. [5]

Citizens pay for healthcare and therefore vendors such as Epic in many ways, from our local, state and federal taxes to exploding insurance premiums and co-pays.

The ability to move our data opens up many opportunities, including more cost effective services.

[1] $37,920,077,070 in Taxpayer Electronic Medical Record Subsidies: 2009 – January 2018.

[2] Mike Ivey:

Officials at Epic Systems are not commenting on a New York Times report Wednesday that the firm was central in lobbying Congress on a $19 billion “giveaway” (now $37B and growing) to convert all U.S. medical records from paper to computers.

[3] Epic’s CEO is urging hospital customers to oppose rules that would make it easier to share medical info.

[4] Walled garden, or closed platform.

[5] Tommy Thompson HHS’ new health IT rule would hurt Epic and Wisconsin’s economy. Tommy Thompson links: open secrets search

P.S. A few more links on Epic.

Airdrop trumps $40B taxpayer medical record subsidies.

Madison’s property tax base growth and the backdoor electronic medical record subsidy.

2007. Then Governor Jim Doyle’s failed $30M electronic medical record taxpayer subsidy proposal.

Apple and Microsoft representatives are set to join a meeting on Monday promoting patient access to health data.

A Letter to Ms. Judy Faulkner & Mr. Tommy Thompson.

This is what information blocking looks like boots on the ground.

These are the realities people face when they are living with life-altering, life-limiting, absolutely earth-shattering diagnoses.

While patients and their loved ones can’t get the information they need to make educated, empowered decisions about their care, even while actively dying, hospitals, EHR vendors like Epic, as well as MANY other entities, have ludicrously shared and sold the same patient information for commercial purposes, to “improve hospital operations”, for “re$earch”, leveraging the legal loopholes of HIPAA, stating all is legal, this is business as usual. Without needing informed, explicit patient consent. Without any effort dedicated to patient education, public awareness, and transparency under the guise of “Nothing to see here”.

As patients and carepartners, WE WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS A MOMENT LONGER.

Thank you Ms. Judy Faulkner, CEO of EPIC, for your recent letter urging some of the biggest hospital CEO’s and presidents to oppose the proposed rules to improve interoperability and grant patients access to their information. You have made it crystal clear that you are not aligned with the real-world unmet needs and the barriers patient and carepartners face daily. Thank you for illustrating what paternalism looks like in 2020.

Thank you, Mr. Tommy Thompson, former governor of Wisconsin, for your guest column on why the proposed health IT rules would be a detriment to EPIC and Wisconsin’s economy. You have made it crystal clear that the business priorities of Wisconsin are of a greater importance than legal rights and the sanctity and dignity of the lives of all the patients of this great country of the United States of America.

Thank you for helping me refocus. Thank you for helping me answer the questions and address the self-imposed imposter syndrome that can momentarily cloud one’s perception. The answer is: IT IS ALL WORTH IT.

Heather Landi:

“We’ve often looked at interoperability in a narrow view, which is just as a replacement for moving the patient’s chart. Modern computing and APIs offer a vastly richer and more empowering global computing environment. Well-built APIs can do almost anything that your creativity allows,” he said.

Before Rucker took the stage at Health Datapalooza, HHS Secretary Alex Azar also addressed the upcoming interoperability rules and the Trump administration’s commitment to putting “patients in charge of their data” and called out industry stakeholders who are “defending the status quo.” They are protecting a health records system that is “segmented and Balkanized,” he said.

“We have a serious problem—and scare tactics are not going to stop the reforms we need,” Azar said.

Dr. Bharani Padmanabhan:

John Ehrlichman authorized breaking into Dr. Fielding’s office on September 3rd, 1971, to steal Daniel Ellsberg’s medical chart. In those days, medical charts were confidential and access strictly controlled. Any break-in was physical and impossible to miss. Even if the government did steal your private chart, at least you knew about it.

Which is why Nixon’s lawyer, Egil Krogh, went to prison for 4 months for violating Dr. Fielding’s Fourth Amendment right.

One of the many lessons the government learned was that stealing medical charts needed to get easier. This eventually culminated in Executive Order 13335 (69 FR 24059) which ordered that all Americans must have their medical charts in electronic form.

CBS News Epic: How a company you never heard of handle.

Posted in Uncategorized.

The Devil is in The Retail

Edwin Heathcote:

The only way these big developments have been able to get planning permission is for a local authority to parcel together a big tract of land (usually formerly industrial or railway land, often formerly publicly owned) and to give over the whole thing to a developer who is charged with driving the “regeneration” that the public sector has largely lost the ability to conceive. Consequently, rather than the network of public streets interspersed with public spaces, private blocks and semi-private but accessible courtyards that forms the fabric of the traditionally complex city centre, we get the pseudo-civic space of the mall without walls. Protest in these spaces is banned, as is public gathering, distribution of leaflets, drinking, sleeping and, of course, photography. Yet there has been no outcry.


Particularly in the UK, we have become so inured to the smooth transition of public assets into private ownership that even the loss of our public spaces seems to us quite natural. I have been asked to stop taking photos of new office buildings from the public street outside, I have been stopped in malls, in piazzas and by canals. I have even been asked to stop taking notes. What Debord was calling for was a city in which what was important was not the way it looked or how many new shops it had but the multiplicity of ways in which it could be used. His way of subverting the structure of a Paris that had been conceived by Baron Haussmann, with wide avenues to enable an army swiftly to quell a revolution, was to walk across it on an aimless walk – the famous dérive – in which the flâneur concentrates on the mundane and the banal and does not allow his gaze to be directed to the formal or the ceremonial.



. . .



The Guatamalan architect Teddy Cruz, who works in the strange hinterlands between the wealth of San Diego and the poverty of Tijuana just across the border in Mexico, has called for a new system of measuring the success of a city – one based not on density of population or on the value of turnover and rent but on the frequency of social transactions. It represents a radical departure. The idea of regeneration that has emerged over the past couple of decades has been based solely on the generation of money. Big, retail-led and commercial schemes are encouraged, even subsidised, planning controls are loosened to accommodate them and civic democracy and local objections are overridden as the objectives of rising property prices, increased local taxes and the presence of “flagship” and “anchor” stores and brands becomes a planning Xanadu.

When Public Records are Too Public

Jason Fry:

But then there’s another set of personal details that have made their way online, and these documents are much more worrisome. Property deeds, marriage and divorce records, court files, motor-vehicle information and tax documents are increasingly being digitized, and contain a wealth of information that few of us would want online: Social Security numbers, birth dates, maiden names and images of our signatures. Local governments have rushed to put those documents online for a decade or so, often without scrubbing them of such information. And that’s made them potentially fertile ground for busybodies, stalkers and identity thieves.
Betty “BJ” Ostergren, a 58-year-old from outside Richmond, Va., has made it her mission to alert people to the dangers of public records online. Ms. Ostergren is feisty bordering on ferocious: Her tactics include mailing letters to people alerting them that their personal information is online and posting copies of public documents (or links to them) displaying the personal information of circuit-court clerks and other politicians, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. (See her Web site, the Virginia Watchdog, here; this Washington Post profile of her is also a good read.)

Should Milwaukee Suburbs Pay for City Services?

AP:

A new study shows Milwaukee residents are way behind their neighbors when it comes to taxable property values, prompting some officials to urge wealthy suburbs to share their tax revenues in exchange for their use of city services.
The Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission ordered the study from consulting firm Ruekert & Mielke Inc. to analyze 147 cities, towns and villages in the counties of Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington, Racine, Kenosha and Walworth.
The study released last week shows that Chenequa in Waukesha County boasts the top “fiscal capacity” rate, a measure of property value per resident, of $600,570, while Milwaukee ranks at the bottom with a rate of $36,507.

Former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin mentioned this strategy as well – tax ’em while they are driving in.

Political Math

Mary Lazich comments on the political spin around small changes to the State’s UW Budget (the budget is going up, just not quite as much as Governor Doyle wants). Doyle refers to this as a “cut” while Lazich corrects his math:

There are two ways to do simple math. There is the way most everyone does it. And there is the way Governor Jim Doyle does it.

As a member of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee entrusted with crafting the state budget, I voted with the majority to approve a package to give the University of Wisconsin System a slight increase in state aid over the next two years. The increase amounts to $9 million.

Nevertheless, the governor could not resist issuing a news release referring over and over again to “cuts” he called “senseless.” Apparently in the governor’s world of fuzzy math, an increase is considered a cut.

The fact is the Joint Finance Committee gave the UW System more money for the next two years. The UW System is not being shortchanged. It receives close to $1 billion a year. That is billion with a “b.” Funding for the UW System accounts for close to 8% of the entire state budget.

Matt Pommer, writing in the Capital Times also referred to this change as a “cut”. He doesn’t mention total state support anywhere in the article. We’re better off getting our facts right. There’s no doubt that education funding at all levels has its challenges, but we do currently spend a great deal of money on education, at all levels. Choices must be made, perhaps there are things the State should not fund, allowing additional cash for education purposes.

Finally, Madison’s recent school referenda initiative was also somewhat guilty of this. The questions were often phrased as costing a taxpayer no more than a Latte per day (avoiding any mention of the current, growing school taxes that property owners already pay). Transparency is critical to public support. Our politicians, and some writers, have a ways to go on this matter.