Edward Feser wrote a critique of President Trump’s new tariffs and his trade policy. A reader asked ChatGPT to respond to his critique as if it was me. And apparently AI now does non-fiction nearly as well as it does fiction.

1. Feser’s Overemphasis on Prudential Moderation over Existential Necessity

Vox Day might begin by pointing out that Feser’s argument is essentially one of technocratic prudence—tariffs might be useful in moderation, if well-targeted, in the right economic climate, with good timing, and clear justification. Vox would call this academic dithering in the face of civilizational crisis. From his view, America is not merely suffering a mild imbalance of trade—it is being gutted by decades of globalist betrayal that have systematically offshored its manufacturing capacity, hollowed out its industrial base, and turned its working class into wage-serfs of the service economy.

Forget “incrementally,” it’s got to be exploded. Would more of the same and a slow death be better?

In the absence of a more senior officer, the surrender was accepted by Colonel Bùi Tín, a journalist who many years earlier had witnessed the departure of the French from Hanoi. Bùi Tín would eventually become disillusioned with the new order. He was destined to end his days in Paris, an exile from his homeland. His memoir Following Ho Chi Minh is one of the very few inside accounts of life in the upper reaches of the secretive Vietnamese Communist party.

MUSK: “People think that Biden was asleep at the switch. They weren’t asleep at the switch. It was a massive large scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and making it a deep blue one party state from which there would be no escape

Find new friends. I just left visiting my two youngest daughters, one with a 5 day old son and one with a 3 month old daughter. They are happier than I have ever seen them. Their joy was palpable.

A few months back Linneaus reached out to me on Twitter, asking if we could have a formal debate on the topic of Race. I agreed, and our opening arguments are published here (and on his website oldluth.com). 

The restaurant was broken into twice within three months, prompting Tarantino to spend thousands of dollars on reinforced security windows. Pink Tarantino was in the building in her office when the second break-in unfolded and saw the whole thing on their security cameras.

The statements the jury was not allowed to see demonstrate the FBI’s deep involvement in concocting not only the Whitmer plot but a separate one against VA governor Ralph Northam (by using same handlers and informant, Dan Chappell), organizing almost all of the events including the “recon” trip to Whitmer’s vacation cottage, and even disclosing exculpatory evidence.

Hurdles to convenient voting access once worked to the benefit of the Republican party in Wisconsin, whether deliberately or not. Now, the calculus appears reversed. The best chances for a GOP candidate will appear in an electorate of 3 million or more. As any Democrat working on campaigns in the Obama years could tell you, winning elections by maximizing turnout is possible, but hard.

Altair Basic.

1) 1996 Chuck Schumer says the number one reason illegals come to the US is to defraud Social Security

Does the Governor realize that since 2000 the number of Illinois manufacturing jobs has fallen from over 900,000 to less than 600,000?

Now you identify genuinely strategic areas. You do not care about French wine or Canadian maple syrup. You do care if the US military’s vendor’s vendors are located in China, as per this Pentagon-commissioned study:

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.

Cummins is launching a gas engine that behaves like a diesel to avoid all the DEF regulations.
B6.7 inline-six gas engine makes up to 300hp and 660 lb-ft torque at 1,800 RPM. They will launch in Kenworth Class 5 to 7 trucks. That covers T180-T480 models.

this is the key question. events like this were terrible for journalism

The NYT reporter who reported this initial story was neither a health nor science reporter (of which the Times employs many of both). She was, however, the daughter of a journalist infamous for collaborating with the intelligence community.

A Secret Mortgage Blacklist Is Leaving Homeowners Stuck With Unsellable Condos. Fewer homes can get Fannie Mae-backed mortgages, a response to Surfside condo collapse and insurance crunch

Starlink operates in more than 120 markets worldwide, though in some countries, SpaceX must coordinate spectrum sharing with domestic satellite operators before activating service.

Still, despite Weissmann’s status as a ferocious Trump critic and symbol of Russiagate, the Jenner & Block letters hint at wider institutional issues. “The problem is, all of Washington does this,” says an administration spokesperson. “The revolving door has turned into something completely corrupt, and that the weaponization of government is often coordinated from K Street. The administration wants it stopped.”

FinCEN “issued a Geographic Targeting Order (GTO) to further combat the illicit activities and money laundering of Mexico-based cartels and other criminal actors along the southwest border of the United States,” according to the announcement. “The GTO requires all money services businesses (MSBs) located in 30 ZIP codes across California and Texas near the southwest border to file Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) with FinCEN at a $200 threshold, in connection with cash transactions.”

If I had to choose, I’d definitely choose to return to the job market of the 2010s, so I can be paid more to work less and have more job security. I’m not an idiot. But the silver lining to actually having to ship is that you’re no longer living in a dream. If you’re realistic about how things work, the job of software engineering becomes much easier to understand:

1. Providing value to the company gets you rewarded
2. Not providing value to the company gets you punished
3. “Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives

Mountain Village Town Manager Paul Wisor slammed the elder Horning as an out-of-touch owner whose resort is aging and needs major infrastructure upgrades and engaged ownership that works productively with his town, which is connected to the old mining town of Telluride by an iconic public-transit-style gondola that is aging out.

Never thought we would find ourselves needing to defend our leading technological competitor but here goes….. We remind the Governor of his own positions on EVs and by extension – Tesla – before he was beaten like a rented mule last November.

The Freebsd, gnu/Linux, Solaris, and Windows operating systems have kernels that provide comparable facilities. Interestingly, their code bases share almost no common parts, while their development processes vary dramatically. We analyze the source code of the four systems by collecting metrics in the areas of file organization, code structure, code style, the use of the C preprocessor, and data organization.

The aggregate results indicate that across various areas and many di?erent metrics, four systems developed using wildly di?erent processes score comparably. This allows us to posit that the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and fore-most the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.

The EVERY1 will be the first to ship with Rivian’s vehicle architecture and software as part of a $5.8 billion joint venture struck last year between the German automaker and U.S. EV maker. The ID.2all is based on the E3 1.1 architecture and software developed by VW’s software unit Cariad.

And memory is not the same as nostalgia. Many Azerbaijani emigrants lose their emotional connection with Baku even before they fully become emigrants. In fact, this loss of emotional connection often becomes an additional reason for their departure.

Confirmed donors to liberal Susan Crawford’s campaign, election is April 1st:

George Soros (NY) $ 4,451,000
Reid Hoffman (CA): $14,460,000
JB Pritzker (IL): $ 6,515,000
Karla Jurvetson (CA): $ 7,331,020

“You find contracts that are 10, 20, 30, $50 million and you just ask like, why are we doing this? And everyone’s just like, meh, I don’t know. And then you cancel it and then nothing happens. It’s just inertia, has just taken over.”

because those in that world collectively decided that identitarianism, not storytelling, was the most important thing

Charlie lives in Manvel, about twenty miles south of Houston, with her family. They spend almost every weekend at rodeos. Most are much larger than the Youth Rodeo Association (YRA) event in Giddings, but each one helps Charlie qualify for major competitions, including this month’s Hooey Junior Patriot, in Fort Worth, and the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. Winning at one of the prestigious events—where more than $100,000 is awarded to winners—would be a significant step toward a professional career, and Charlie has qualified for both.

Highlights

• •We use synthetic controls to assess the effect of the shale gas boom on U.S. green house gas emissions.
• •Our findings indicate that the shale gas boom reduced average U.S. annual green house gas emissions per capita by 7.5%.
• •We decompose the total treatment effect into substitution, transition, and consumption effects.

Basically, China is trying to do to AI what they always do: study, copy, optimize, and then bankrupt everyone with low prices and enormous scale.

We ate at the Four Seasons in the Seagram Building, on Park Avenue. Back then, it was Manhattan’s premier power lunch spot, also known as the Condé Nast cafeteria because so many of its editors and top executives ate there every day. The maître d’, Julian Niccolini, greeted Art effusively, and led him to his usual table. Without even asking, a waiter brought him a cocktail. Art ordered the spécialité de la maison: an absurdly expensive piece of Dover sole. I had the lamb chops. We went through two bottles of wine, and after we had settled on the financial terms, we celebrated with several glasses of cognac. When lunch was over, three hours later, Art and I staggered out without even looking at a bill. It was sent directly to the Condé Nast accounting department.

Within the span of 10 years, Rickover created an entire office dedicated to nuclear propulsion, and successfully launched the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine without cost overruns. He conclusively demonstrated the strategic importance of nuclear propulsion in a timeframe no one thought possible and helped the US beat the Soviets to nuclear propulsion for submarines by 3 years. His institutional legacy is the US Navy’s safe construction and operation of nuclear reactors.

Gasoline-powered cars generate more RFI than diesel-powered cars because they have spark plugs. That meant that NRAO had to purchase diesel cars when they bought their original fleet, and by the way, these cars are part of that original purchase.

Web SVG Images: Everything you need for your digital craft & design projects.
Find free SVG icons, SVG animations, and SVG tutorials to get you going.

We implemented an ELT stack for our new data platform, leveraging cheap storage to prioritize raw data ingestion and subsequent in-warehouse transformations. We also strategically reused existing software components where they weren’t being fully utilized, further optimizing our development efforts.

While US AID appears to pass a cost-benefit test, it does seem ripe for reform.  Based on what I have read and heard, I would focus all the more on public health programs, and forget about “trade promotion,” “democracy promotion,” and more.  I would get rid of virtually all of the consultants, and make direct transfers to worthy African and Ukraine programs, thus lowering overhead.  If such worthy programs exist, why not give them money directly?  Are they so hard to find?  And if so, how trustworthy are these intermediaries really?  What are they intermediating to?

In the United States, SpaceX’s historic launch competitor, United Launch Alliance, has yet to fly a single rocket this year. In fact, the company has not launched in 156 days. During that time, SpaceX has launched 64 Falcon 9 rockets. So yes, SpaceX has had some technical issues. But it is also flying circles around its competition.

“TSMC is essentially the only trillion-dollar company in the world not on the West Coast of the United States. It is this incredibly important thing in the world. It’s this unlikely success of grand scale—”. Morris Chang: “Unlikely, in your opinion…”

These pages contain a fairly brief technical history of Acorn Computers. I have decided to focus on the technology because that is where my interests lie. Only very major non-technical events in Acorn’s history have been included. If anyone finds any inaccuracies in the following pages please contact me using the link at the bottom of the page, including a correction if possible.

The bulldozer we know today took shape in the first quarter of the 20th century. In 1917, the Russell Grader Manufacturing Company advertised a bulldozer in their catalog: a huge metal blade pulled by mules that could cut into the earth and flatten the land. Other manufacturers like Holt, Caterpillar and R. G. LeTourneau were working on similar devices, technological descendants of scraping tools developed in the American West and associated with Mormon farmers. In time, animals were replaced with tractors (on either wheels or continuous tracks) powered first by steam, then gasoline and eventually diesel. The word, which at first referred only to the blade itself, started to mean the entire machine, one that was unrivaled in its ability to rip, shift and level earth.

But what we do instead, as non-strategic players, is deploy some ostentatious symbolism. When Volodymyr Zelensky walked around the table at last week’s European Council, every European leader got up to embrace him. They wanted to produce a counterpoint to that sofa scene in the Oval Office. But pointless posturing is not a strategy. I have yet to see any strategic purpose behind anything any of the Europeans, including Starmer, have done in the past two weeks. Everything they have done, including Friedrich Merz’s decision to exempt defence spending from Germany’s constitutional fiscal rules, has been as a result of Trump’s first move. They aren’t anticipating his second.

As we discussed on The Air Show recently, Southwest’s failure to change under previous CEO Gary Kelly had put the airline in a bad place that just primed it to be torn down by an activist investor like Elliott. Elliott came in pretending to be interested in improving Southwest, but everyone who saw a wolf in sheep’s clothing was right. Elliott only cares about Southwest until it can extract a nice gain on its investment. Then it’ll walk away and Southwest will be a shell of its former self.

Deciphering the dilemma: The surprising impact of QR code menus on diminishing customer loyalty.

To give you some idea of the scope of the problem I have listed a number of such truths. (Nearly all computing scientists I know well will agree without hesitation to nearly all of them. Yet we allow the world to behave as if we did not know them….) 

Kai Grünitz, Volkswagen’s technical chief, elaborated how this approach will allow for scalable software applications across different models. “The benefit of the zonal architecture is that I can put one, two or three zones in a vehicle,” Grünitz told Autocar. “Vehicles in lower price segments will just need one zone, while a premium vehicle might need three or four, depending on functions.”

Biden administration to award nearly $1.1 billion to Stellantis, GM for EV production. more

“after $9 trillion globally over the last decade spent on wind, solar, electric vehicles, energy storage, electrified heat and power grids, the the renewable share of final energy consumption is slowly advancing at 0.3%–0.6% per year.”. more.

In order to get the balls airborne, Conner came up with a proprietary mortar system — essentially truck-mounted cannons designed with an engineer’s mindset.The typical bouncy ball, originally made of the synthetic polymer Zectron and marketed under the name Superball by toy company Wham-O, has a remarkably high coefficient of restitution of 0.92 — meaning if dropped from 100 feet,it bounces back up to 92 feet. If launched from a high-enough height, one could easily clear a Victorian.

My dad is in jail for one simple reason: He and his newspaper fought for freedom and democracy in resistance to Beijing’s encroaching control of the city. He is being tried under a “national-security law” China forced on the city in 2020 to criminalize free speech and suspend civil liberties. It has played a key role in the city’s repression during the last five years.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Fiatarone ran a series of studies in which she asked residents to commit to a regimen of high-intensity strength training. To many of her colleagues, the research seemed risky. Conventional wisdom in medicine at that time said the oldest people were not capable of lifting heavy weights – it might cause cardiac events. In all of western medical literature, Fiatarone found no evidence that any doctor had ever previously tried to teach frail 90-year-olds to do this kind of training.

There is a feeling that everything depends on which chancellor you happen to draw. There are chancellors who understand their job well and those who chafe at their role of doing the predictable and expected thing. So your outcome depends on which one you draw. 10/

In the case of war, speeding up this cycle for yourself and slowing it down for your adversary allows you a more accurate model of your environment and more optimal decisions than the other side. In the software and product world, our adversaries are mainly ourselves and our environment. We’d typically focus on managing the pace at which our team and its members can run this cycle. We may have adversaries in the form of market competitors, but it’s a lot tougher to affect them directly, especially if you’re a smaller organization.

With any database architecture the goal is to ensure that nothing hits your database if you can help it.

The idea for this classic Bugs Bunny short came about after producer Eddie Selzer said, ‘I don’t want no gags about bullfights. Bullfights aren’t funny’; which left Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese no option but to make one.

China’s message to global automakers was crystal clear. If you want to sell cars in China, you will need to manufacture them inside China. And to secure an approval to manufacture inside China you must first marry up with a Chinese partner. And, by the way, the Chinese partner will own no less than 50% of the joint venture. 

Dear Reader: You might be wondering what right-minded global automaker CEO would go along with terms that so heavily favored the home team, China. 

As it turns out, practically every one of them. 

Over the next three decades, Japanese, American, German, French and Korean automakers invested tens of billions of dollars to form manufacturing joint ventures in China. By 2000, China was building one million cars a year. By 2010, that number exploded to 16 million.  In 2024, China produced 31 million vehicles, three times more than the United States. The tariff and non-tariff barrier regime never relaxed. During that 35- year sprint to automotive manufacturing supremacy, China never permitted car imports to exceed 6% of the total market. 

Looking back, I realize I wasn’t the best of managers, and I have learned from that by becoming more open and by listening more. Failure taught me the necessary empathy towards other founders, mostly because in the end (unless they are psychopaths), they are trying their best in an imperfect situation for a perfect outcome. 

Some really interesting data from Kirkland & Ellis. Never quite seen data like this. First slide, earnouts are up and happen in 27% of deals. Not surprised that they are up given the value expectation gaps. Surprised at 27%.

In a book published this week, Why I Would Never Fight for My Country, the 27-year-old argues ordinary people should not be sent into battle on behalf of nation states and their rulers — even to fend off an invasion. Occupation by a foreign power might lead to a “shitty” life, he told the Financial Times. “But I’d rather be occupied than dead.”

The truth is, software development — hell, any complex endeavor — doesn’t work that way. It’s messy, it’s unpredictable, and it requires actual thinking. But that’s too much for these simpletons. They’d rather play scrum master and feel important moving sticky notes around a board.

What Kasia designed is a perfect Kanban system. It relies on visual signals, which are put in the context. Even better, unlike most Kanban boards I see across teams, the system is self-explanatory. Everything one needs to know is written on the index card.

Between November and the end of February, Madison building inspection issued eight notices of violation for excessive salting compared with only three last winter. None of those notices resulted in a fine, though, as the city tries first to get compliance from residents. Salt enforcement is complaint-based, too, which means residents have to contact city building inspection to have a sidewalk checked for a violation.

What’s even crazier is that there is a clear political story behind all of this. The 1980 Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, signed by Jimmy Carter, gave judges the power to police themselves through an obfuscated multi-layer system where chief judges dismiss almost all the complaints and judicial councils choose confidential sanctions in most of the cases where they even admit wrongdoing occurred.

“500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend them against 140 million Russians. […] Europe today lacks the belief that we are truly a global force.”

“whose site the NYT calls “independent,” is actually being bankrolled by… George Soros”. Real shocker!

In 2014, Senator Chris Murphy bragged about the United States successfully overthrowing Ukraine’s government: “I think it was our role, including sanctions and threats of sanctions, that forced, in part, Yanukovych from office.”

Because the G7 is in relative decline. Until you understand this, you’ll be confused.

They were also incredibly beautiful. Another import that had become available in the wake of World War II was incense cedar, the material of choice for high-quality pencils. Most of the pencil industry’s incense cedar comes from California, and Tombow quickly restarted its imports of the aromatic red wood. HOMO’s design takes full advantage of the material upgrade, with a subtle transparent lacquer that highlights the cedar’s color and grain.

Restaurants with very many neighbor nodes (nodes connected to it) are restaurants whose alumni go on to create and work in other prestigious restaurants. This is the case of Ducasse (ok, not a restaurant but a placeholder for all the restaurants in the Ducasse brand), Mandarin Oriental (technically the restaurant is called Sur Mesure) or Septime. To visualize and analyse this network, I combine information contained in reviews of restaurants across France by LeFooding.com’s critics. Most reviews contain information about the staff and their CV.

Sigma is the closest thing we have to that. Their disclosure that they can only make nine (!) of their new bf cameras a day is the way things should work. That’s probably about 2500 cameras a year when all is said and done.

the Bifurcation of the Global System along two centers of power with their alternative supply chains, critical infrastructure and networks. You may not want to see it but it’s there.

I was thrilled to learn that, like me, Wolfe was an only child, wound up getting a doctorate in American studies, hated stuffy institutional rules, ignored boring injunctions to “write what you know,” and took a big pay cut to buy himself more freedom. Alas, the similarities ended there. His style was fresh, bold, and inimitable (Lord knows we all tried). As a kid, he had longed to be related to Thomas Wolfe, to have that literary pedigree. Alas, the connection was only a phonetic coincidence, so he satisfied himself by stealing literary devices and sneaking them into journalism.

AI search engines and AI summaries on results pages are taking a bite out of clickthrough traffic.

As promised,Here are the Bingo Cards for @ChicagosMayor ‘s testimony tomorrow. These are all HIS words . No prize if you win but save your card and send it into City Hall to demand his immediate resignation.

Interestingly, AI workstations have been one of the strongest categories in the PC industry. A LOT of AI software is developed on Macs. Mac Studio with M3 Ultra will position itself nicely in AI workstation. Also, most RAM ever given to a GPU in a workstation!

Out of 12,000 North Korean soldiers sent to Russia to fight against Ukraine, only two have been captured alive. They have recently been telling their stories to American and South Korean journalists, providing a unique perspective on the war.

Perhaps the single most important thing they could build would be mass-produced Tesla humanoids, which (if successful) could in turn build everything else.

“It’s quite evident that we’re being governed by idiots in Ottawa… there’s a number of us in Alberta that have had enough.”

And if “amateurs talk about strategy, but experts think about logistics”, SpaceX has created exactly what’s needed.

So many commentators are stunned that Democrats are clinging to the idea of boys in girls’ sports, even though the idea is opposed by 82% of the public, and they are equally stunned that Democrats more broadly make the transgender movement a central component of their policy agenda, despite popular opposition.

We’re going to put an action plan on those things, and I think they’re going to be brutal to leadership, quite frankly,” Ortberg added.

About half of the US population does not own any retirement assets, see chart below.

Denmark’s state-run postal service, PostNord, is to end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century. The decision brings to an end 400 years of the company’s letter service. Denmark’s 1,500 post boxes will start to disappear from the start of June.

Great software design looks simple because it eliminates as many failure modes as possible during the design stage. The best way to eliminate a failure mode is to notdo something exciting (or if you can, not do anything at all). Not all failure modes are created equal. You want to try hardest to eliminate the really scary ones (like data inconsistency), even if it means making slightly clunky choices elsewhere.

Sobering facts but all is not lost. The Houthis are not ten feet tall and can be defeated cost effectively. Just like the intervention done in 1965 by David Stirling and his team, give the private sector a chance. This can be solved for less money than Egypt loses per month in Suez fees. ($800m)

Among the findings: the research estimates the median YouTube video has been watched just 41 times mostly by machines.

Gillian Tett:

Four decades ago, the swanky Plaza Hotel in New York became famous in finance lore. On September 22 1985, the US government persuaded Britain, Japan, Germany and France to jointly devalue the dollar, to boost America’s industrial competitiveness.

Could this happen again? The idea is sparking endless gossip among financiers. Or as the Aberdeen investment group recently told clients: “There has been speculation about a new Plaza Accord — dubbed the ‘Mar-a-Lago Accord’ — to depreciate the US dollar.” Indeed, some traders expect it this year.

Ah, the “Plaza Accords”. Who can forget? Certainly not me!

While backpacking in Europe – post graduation – and living on fixed funds, the Accord occurred mid journey and put a substantial dent in my budget for the remaining 5 weeks dealing with marks, franks and so on….

Chastened, a few years later I attend a Galbraith lecture. I asked him what an individual could do about such events? He replied “nothing”, there is nothing you can do about it, so don’t bother yourself with such concerns….

And, so it remains.

“The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” – A “Study”

So, interestingly enough, the restaurateur came before the restaurant, and there was never an n to drop.

This cultural divergence also explains why it’s difficult to name successful German startups on par with Airbnb, Uber, or Stripe—let alone tech giants like Google, Facebook, or Amazon. And there’s little indication that this will change anytime soon.

A French official said there was “no definitive agreement” on the nature of US back-up in Ukraine given the discussions were at a preliminary stage. But the official added: “There is no objection from President Trump to the Americans giving security guarantees.”

Trump, surprisingly, announced that President Vladimir Putin would accept the presence of European troops in Ukraine, although the Russian leader had not said so publicly. “I’ve specifically asked him that question, and he has no problem with it,” said Trump. The Kremlin on Tuesday denied any such concession. /p>

Honestly, my last year in politics changed that. Learning just how far some will go to inflict atrocities on innocent Americans has shocked me awake. Other unexplainable events have also forced me to reconsider whether we are waging a war not merely with flesh and blood but with spiritual forces. Many people shy away from acknowledging the reality of spiritual warfare. But anyone who has seen addiction up close or lived through deep trauma and witnessed how evil takes hold in this world knows that the battle of good versus evil isn’t just theoretical—it’s real and all around us.

Ahead of Trump’s first Cabinet meeting today and the “controversy” over Elon Musk participating, in September 2024 Jill Biden attended Biden’s Cabinet meeting, the first he held in a year, and ran it (for obvious reasons)

Indeed all these Western movements defending the weak & the underdog are rooted in Christianity. BTW the same applies to Shiism. My essay “On Christianity”, foreword to Tom Holland’s book…

Perhaps Ray Dalio has different data, but Grok thinks US, Europe & Japan manufacturing output is significantly higher than China

Why does this matter?
The New Testament is unique in all of antiquity—it can be largely reconstructed entirely from quotations in contemporary writings. By comparison, the earliest surviving manuscript of The Iliad dates to the 10th century AD despite being written in 8th century BC, yet it is still considered the second most well-attested ancient text in history.

The Stuttgart-based investment vehicle has recently bought stakes in long-distance coach company Flix, which owns the Greyhound brand in the US, as well as drone maker Quantum Systems and Waabi, which develops software for self-driving trucks.

When your invoice wants to get paid as much as you want it to be paid, when your sales opportunity is as motivated to close as your sales rep, when your data entities can find and utilize information regardless of organizational boundaries—that’s when enterprise software truly changes.

Designed by North Macedonian architect Janko Konstantinov, who had previously worked with the legendary Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, the modernist building was relentlessly avant-garde and futuristic. The structure was built in two stages: the main building and tower, inspired by a nearby fortress across the city’s Vardar river, was built in 1974, while its central circular element, described as a brutalist flower or insect, was completed in 1982. Inside, underneath the dome, the building featured Cubist murals by Macedonian artist Borko Lazeski, depicting the horrors of the earthquake and posterior rebirth of the town.

By this time my dad had spent six years working on the XB-70 project. So this is the story of my dad’s brush with the Cold War and, as best as I can piece together, the story of my dad before he was my dad.

Wang’s key insight? Stop trying to create perfect mathematical models. Instead, design adaptive feedback loops using real-time sensor data to make continuous micro-adjustments. This shift to practical adaptation formed the cornerstone of DJI’s future technical advantage.

NEW: Meet couple running Indivisible’s anti-DOGE agitation op targeting GOP townhalls & flooding Hill phonelines: Leah Greenberg+Ezra Levin who have $11.7m warchest thx to $7.26m from Soros. Greenberg’s parents worked for Obama. 501(c)4 Indivisible pays a “DEI director” $155,163.

The Military Aviation Museum is making strides toward returning its Messerschmitt Me 262 replica to the skies, with hopes of debuting the aircraft at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2025

The new test, developed by EDX Medical Group, based at Cambridge Science Park, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse blood and urine samples, looking for more than 100 biological markers. These markers, including specific genes and proteins, have been clinically validated as having a connection to prostate cancer in previous trials. The test is the first to combine them into one tool. It aims to provide a comprehensive assessment of a man’s overall risk of prostate cancer, discover whether the disease is present and assess what stage it has reached.

It’s not that building a working commercial jet engine itself is so difficult. It’s that a new engine project is always pushing the boundaries of technological possibility, venturing into new domains — greater power, higher temperatures, higher pressures, new materials — where behaviors are less well understood. Building the understanding required to push jet engine capabilities forward takes time, effort, and expense.

X users can choose between two content feeds, called For You and Following feeds. The default feed is the For You feed. Both feeds rank content algorithmically, but the Following feed contains posts exclusively of users followed by the feed owner, prioritizing recent content. By contrast, only 20% of posts shown in the For You feed are from the users they are following.

Robert Fico of Slovakia has released a powerful statement about the Trump-Zelensky meeting. Finally, a realist. Europe must take note.

To wallow in the idiocy, watch Lauren Sanchez do TikTok:

As you know better than most, during the long Lend Lease discussion with FDR, it was excruciating for Churchill as Britain was losing the war but never once did the great man reduce it to barbs and gripes. He had to grind it out and wait for a change of facts, which finally presented over Pearl Harbor that December morning in 1941.

The U.S. does not just pay 16 percent of NATO’s budget but also puts up with asymmetrical tariffs that result in a European Union trade surplus of $160 billion, plays the world cop patrolling sea-lanes and deterring terrorists and rogues states that otherwise might interrupt Europe’s commercial networks abroad, as well as de facto including Europe under a nuclear umbrella of 6,500 nukes.

the activists and left-leaning media members were in town for a private meeting to discuss how the left’s well-funded digital media ecosystem failed in the 2024 election.

I spent two years following Barrows and some of those she calls her “clients”  to better understand what it takes to unstick someone who’s been stuck on the streets — or in a park – for a long time. A welter of problems can make someone chronically homeless: addiction, mental illness, disabilities, trauma, poverty, not to mention failures of the system. None are easily or quickly solved, even after the person is housed. To do more than just clear a person off the sidewalk demands persistence, patience, coordination of services, and intense personal engagement. Which raises the difficult question: If this is what it takes to help one person, can the city find the resolve to help the thousands living rough? 

Your enjoyment of a trip will be inversely related to the weight of your luggage. Counterintuitively, the longer your trip, the less stuff you should haul. Travelers still happy on a 6-week trip will only have carry-on luggage. That maximizes your flexibility, enabling you to lug luggage up stairs when there is no elevator, or to share a tuk-tuk, to pack and unpack efficiently, and to not lose stuff. Furthermore, when you go light you intentionally reduce what you take in order to increase your experience of living. And the reality of today is that you can almost certainly buy whatever you are missing on the road.

In this op-ed, AI researcher Louis Rosenberg argues that as conversational AI agents become more interactive and personalized, they will surpass human influencers in their ability to shape our decisions without us realizing it.

The reason, according to multiple sources at the agency when the Gateway was conceived, is that the lunar space station would offer jobs to the current flight controllers operating the International Space Station, which is due to retire in 2030.

Wahlin purchased the remaining assets of a small, bankrupt business in 1961 and founded Stoughton Trailers. Over the course of the next four decades, the company became one of North America’s largest trailer manufacturers.

Generators are installed to protect WPR’s systems for backup when they lose utility power and when those generators attempted to kick in, the transfer switch that transfers from utility power to generator power failed, Hargrove said.

The dollar’s supremacy, already shaky in a world of rising digital currencies, gets a blockchain-powered second wind. AI Killed The Tech Interview. Now What?
How can we do better interviews in the age of AI

Option four and five are likely the only answers in the long term. A lot of companies are doing RTO, but even companies that are 100% in-office still interview candidates from other cities. Spending money to fly every candidate out without an aggressive pre-screen is too wasteful. One of the things we can do, however, is change the nature of the interviews themselves. Coding interviews today are quite basic, anywhere from FizzBuzz, to building a calculator. With AI assistants, we could expand this 10x and have people build complete applications. I think a single, longer interview (2 hours) that mixes architecture and coding will probably be the way to go.

Additionally, if your employer will sign off on you working in Spain, Spain has a 1 year digital nomad visa, renewable every year. After five years, you can apply for permanent residency. If you apply while in Spain on a tourist visa, it’s good for 3 years (one renewal gets you to permanent residency).

When the peace was finally won in 1991, the minor functionaries started hatching new villains, disputes, and even viruses just so they could fight them. Washington turned into a Cold War LARP. The result:  Ukraine is destroyed. The Taliban is governing Afghanistan and ISIS has taken Syria. The pipeline that supplies Germany’s energy supply has been blown up, tanking its economy. And you know what happened last time the West’s guardian of democracy project tanked the German economy. Just sayin’. Ancient Christianity has been expelled from every place in the Middle East where American soft power has meddled. They have set their sights on destroying Catholic-Lebanon (by law, the president of Lebanon must be Catholic – did you know that?) in a proxy war with Iran.

In the winter, Yosemite has 451 people directly employed by the National Park Service, according to government records. In the summer, it has 741. But they fired the only locksmith. Grand Canyon National Park has 382. But they couldn’t find anyone to work the most popular entrance. This is intentional infliction of harm on the public in order to gin up opposition to staffing cuts.

NEW: “This case presents the question whether @WisDOJ is for sale.” Lawsuit – and ethics complaint – filed against AG Josh Kaul for taking Michael Bloomberg’s money to prosecute environmental cases against dairy farmers

The most striking aspect of this situation is that every major branch of the U.S. military is in crisis at the same time. All major branches are struggling with recruitment and retention targets, and the problem is particularly acute for the Army and the Navy. All major branches have serious sustainment and maintenance issues due to a combination of aging equipment and general rust inside the industrial base. All major branches are arguably also facing real problems trying to adapt and update institutionalized twenthieth-century thinking to experiences from twenty-first century battlefields (though the Marine Corps is at least undergoing a serious and controversial restructuring in an attempt to alleviate this). Looming over all of this, of course, is the big elephant in the room: the budget contraints resulting from America’s massive fiscal deficts. Interest payments on the federal debt are devouring an increasing share of total federal revenues with each passing year. America is already running a World War II–style wartime fiscal deficit in what is officially a peacetime, near-full-employment economy. Though it’s a common refrain to bemoan waste and fraud inside the DoD budget, the simple reality is that a fifty-plus-year-old aircraft carrier hull like the USS Nimitz cannot be maintained forever. The carrier, just like every other military platform, requires somewhat regular replacement due to mechanical wear and tear over time.¹ The U.S. military now has a massive backlog of such aging platforms, and there is simply not enough money to replace them.

I used to work at FICO in the behavior scoring division and this kind of transaction pattern would have totally flipped the fraud switch. So, the question is, do they have their own processing and if so, it should be terminated due to fraud. If not, who are they using, and why aren’t they reporting and stopping the fraud? AND how many of these transactions resulted in a charge back? If not many, then smurfs were used for names but not credit card numbers, so whose numbers were used, and if it was their name, what account was attached…. This should be one of @Kash_Patel first investigations. If we want to clean up elections before midterms we need to get all this unravelled and get back to individual human citizens supporting individual human candidates and that is all.

While America is battling exhaustion and political polarization at home, it is now facing something it’s never faced abroad: it is locked into a security competition against multiple opponents who, when taken together, are in fact vastly superior to America in terms of industrial capacity. This on its own would be an incredibly tough row to hoe, even at the best of times. The times, however, are not particularly good: the U.S. military currently finds itself in a state of acute crisis, beset by a number of intractable problems that neither the political nor military leadership have been able to solve. The most striking aspect of this situation is that every major branch of the U.S. military is in crisis at the same time. All major branches are struggling with recruitment and retention targets, and the problem is particularly acute for the Army and the Navy. All major branches have serious sustainment and maintenance issues due to a combination of aging equipment and general rust inside the industrial base. All major branches are arguably also facing real problems trying to adapt and update institutionalized twenthieth-century thinking to experiences from twenty-first century battlefields (though the Marine Corps is at least undergoing a serious and controversial restructuring in an attempt to alleviate this).

To put it bluntly, the military was given a deeply ideological mission, one that would assuredly result both in failure and damage to or destruction of limited logistical assets. Military leadership, knowing which side their bread was actually buttered on, complied: the mission duly failed, and the limited equipment was damaged and destroyed.

The calculus for joining government is radically changing. The promise of gaining control of enormous dark money government slush funds and routing them to your friends who stand up totally vague and nebulous NGOs that then launder the money back to you and your other friends, is disappearing before our eyes. People who go into public service will actually have to be motivated by public service, not by kleptocratic, self-enrichment schemes. If they want to get rich, they will have to write a book or “produce” some show or documentary for Netflix that no one watches.

The company’s deliveries in Europe reached 3.8mn vehicles a year — a drop of nearly 1mn compared with when Merkel visited in 2019 — driven by lukewarm interest in its EV line-up.

The human users no longer interact directly with these tools; instead, agents seamlessly work behind the scenes to complete tasks. 

Steve is saying that the knowledge of the backdoor had to have come from Apple (assuming they implemented the backdoor, which again is the only logical conclusion). Whether knowledge of the backdoor was a leak, or intentional, is unknown.

The company planned to sell circuit modules before attempting to sell complete computers, and Olsen had largely worked out the technological side of that. The real first step then was to create the financial plan for the company. Olsen and Anderson did so, and they presented that plan to AR&D who provided them with $70,000 which would be around $786,000 in 2025 dollars. With that money, the infant DEC of three men bought the equipment they would need, made some silk screens, etched boards and dipped them in solder. Everything. They were extremely careful with their money, and they learned quite a bit. While they did learn how to handle accounting and business operations, they chose to spend some of their limited funds on secretaries, accountants, and other supporting roles.

We have reviewed our writings with respect to Silvergate’s broadly deficient BSA compliance regime, including the anti-moneylaundering (AML) errors it made. We stand by the entire analysis, most particularly the conclusion, which we did not articulate lightly.

The Index’s initial report provides first-of-its-kind data and analysis based on millions of anonymized conversations on Claude.ai, revealing the clearest picture yet of how AI is being incorporated into real-world tasks across the modern economy. We’re also open sourcing the dataset used for this analysis, so researchers can build on and extend our findings. Developing policy responses to address the coming transformation in the labor market and its effects on employment and productivity will take a range of perspectives. To that end, we are also inviting economists, policy experts, and other researchers to provide input on the Index.

Fifty years ago, during the Battle of the Bulge, Bragg drove a stolen German ambulance twenty miles to get the wounded Martz to an Allied hospital in Belgium. The story of Bragg’s heroic drive is recounted in The Bitter Woods, a book written by John Eisenhower, son of former president General Dwight David Eisenhower. “I’m forever grateful to Roland Bragg for saving my life,” said Martz, now 74 and living in Oceanside, California.

The premise of The High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup’s 800-page magnum opus, is as simple as it is provocative: parking is nearly always too cheap. An unfortunate fact about cars is that they occupy a lot of space. Worse yet, they only spend about five percent of their lifespan in motion. The remaining 95 percent of the time, we must find a place to put them. When Americans first started buying cars en masse in the early twentieth century, the solution seemed obvious: park them along the curb. In the most radical shift in city planning in human history, urban streets—once the site of gathering, selling, and playing—were redesigned around moving and storing cars.

A complete list of the top 100 most watched talks of 2024 ordered by the number of views.

While the Jacquard loom gets all the attention for being the first code, the punch card knitting machine transitioned from being a Jacquard attachment on lace and knitting machines in industrial textile production to the kind of local, DIY code that a lot of people in textiles interacted with—many of whom were women. By the 1970s, they were used by people knitting for themselves and their families, for take-home piece-work, and in textile factory settings. The punch card machine was eventually replaced in commercial and, if you can afford it, home contexts by machines that could control individual needles, instead of depending on a punch card’s repeat—but the machines are still in use in a number of hobbyist workshops (like my own!) and are even still in  production (albeit much-reduced). 

When I disclosed my metastatic prostate cancer in Jun-2020, I didn’t expect to live as long as I now have – the 5-year survival (which I am now approaching) is about 30%. However, after exhausting 4 lines of therapy and resorting to experimental treatments that are only available overseas, I have now reached the point where outcomes are measured in months rather than years and my symptoms and side-effects are making it harder to function. I hope to reach 60 in August and all I want for my birthday is another one, but before I become more dysfunctional, I need to make plans for the orderly conclusion of this pro bono, loss-making work rather than leave managing it as a burden for my family. One of the few benefits of knowing that you’re dying is being able to plan the end on your own terms.

The goal of this article is to make clear that the large scale engagement of corporations in open source has happened and is continuing to happen, that it is fueled by natural incentives, and that it must be treated seriously because it is having and will continue to have negative consequences even if every individual involved is participating in good faith.

We were inspired by 9-year-old Memphis’s passion for farming at Evers Dairy with his motorized wheelchair and Radio Flyer wagon. Now, he has a custom-built CLAAS wagon, designed to meet his needs. Memphis shows there’s no barrier to making an impact on the farm. We’re proud to support his dedication to agriculture! More.

Madigan built a system that rewarded his public union cronies with unaffordable benefits, including pension systems so overly generous that taxpayers will eventually need to infuse another $143.7 billion to keep them from failing. The system that paid him nearly $600,000 in a little less than four years is in the worst shape of the five statewide pension systems, with only 24.6% of the money it will eventually need and well beyond what experts see as the point of no return.

The Irvine office will close by 2029, the company said in a release. Snyder said that some of the corporate workers there will move to Baldwin Park, while others will make the cross-country jump to Tennessee, where the company is currently building a new corporate office that’s slated to open next year.

China is ready, following these three principles, to build stable, sound, and sustainable bilateral relations with the US and find the right way for these two major countries to live alongside each other on this planet. Of course, we hope that the US will work in the same direction with us. However, if the US is not willing, if it is bent on suppressing and containing China, then we have no choice but to ???? play along to the end. We will resolutely uphold China’s sovereignty, national dignity, and our legitimate development rights, and we will resolutely respond to unilateral bullying practices of the US. We do so also to maintain international fairness and justice and to uphold basic norms of international relations. The Chinese people ???????have never been swayed by fallacies or deterred by intimidation. The People’s Republic of China has grown by overcoming various difficulties and obstacles.

So thrilled to see Xiaomi SU7 Ultra set a lap record at the Shanghai International Circuit, outpacing the Porsche Taycan Turbo GT!

EPA said it is sending Biden’s waivers that green-lit the mandates to Congress for approval. That means the mandates are effectively dead.

What is that “history of use of Nazi language”? The link on that phrase goes to another NYT article, from last May, “German Court Fines Far-Right Leader for Using Nazi Phrase/Björn Höcke, a state leader of the nationalist Alternative for Germany party, used the phrase ‘Everything for Germany,’ a slogan of the Nazi paramilitary wing, during a campaign stop.” Excerpt:

Liberals in 2010 weren’t the same as liberals in 2020. They just weren’t. They changed in comprehensible and expressible ways. And this absolutely dogged insistence that no such change occurred is one of the weirdest, most obviously dishonest political claims of my lifetime. It’s a record of a political and intellectual tendency defined by its powerlessness and directed by people who think that asking them to defend their ideals is a kind of crime. And, just… why? 

the attitude of the US itself to European security was the most ambivalent it had been since before the second world war.

The IMF estimates that Europe’s internal barriers are equivalent to a tariff of 45 per cent for manufacturing and 110 per cent for services. These effectively shrink the market in which European companies operate: trade across EU countries is less than half the level of trade across US states. And as activity shifts more towards services, their overall drag on growth becomes worse…

To be clear, the primary culprit here isn’t the U.S. or Trump: any student of history knows that we live in a deeply unfair world where, as ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote 2,500 years ago, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” As such the blame lies almost entirely on us Europeans, or more precisely on our immensely incompetent leaders. And I want to stress this last point: they are literally incompetent on a millennia scale, given that they’ve managed to reduce Europe to a position that lacks any historical parallel, where it’s expected to simply accept and implement whatever security arrangements others decide for it. Trump himself does what’s best for the U.S. – “America first”, remember? – and to be fair to him the Biden administration left him with a pretty bad hand. It’s crystal clear that Russia won in Ukraine, despite all of NATO’s efforts, and as such the U.S. very much risked coming out of it looking like the loser that it objectively is.

In what can only be described as a campaign platform, Damian Williams wrote a lengthy column in Jan 2025–shortly after launching his campaign style website and less than 4 months after announcing the indictment against Eric Adams–for a NY publication.

I’m remembering this today because there are times and places when it is made clear to unwilling and horrified participants that the world they are used to, and the assumptions they allow themselves in that world, no longer apply. They have so suddenly been stripped from them. Vice President JD Vance delivered just such a moment in his speech to the collected European great and good at the Munich Security Conference on Thursday 13th February.