12.19

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The Times’ Boeing expert offers context on ‘Flying Blind’ — and the sky-high challenges the company faces

“It’s like they want to appear like they’re doing something, but aren’t as concerned about actual impact,” said Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist.

U.S. Housing as a Global Safe Asset: Evidence from China Shocks

I think there are actually two quite distinct supply constraint stories. One is the supply chain stuff that we all talk about. And the other is the Great Resignation, the surprise drop and persistence of low labor force participation.

For example, any of us can easily access Baidu, but Chinese officials block Twitter and other U.S. social media in their own market, even as they deploy those same platforms to spread propaganda abroad. The state-owned China Daily is available right here in Washington, but private U.S. news outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are banned in China. Foreign cloud service providers must enter joint ventures with PRC firms, but Alibaba has its own data centers in the United States. Most American movies cannot be shown in Chinese theaters. These and other lopsided market access barriers have persisted for years.

Central banks first stop bond buying and then raise interest rates. Whether U.S. bond buying programs actually lower treasury yields is debatable. But there is no question that the ECB’s bond buying keeps down Italy’s interest rate, by keeping down the risk/default premium in that rate. If the ECB stops buying, or removes the commitment to “whatever it takes” purchases, debt service costs will rise again precipitating the doom loop.

The effects are long term, but the achievements are incremental and can be implemented by website owners without being dependent on anyone else or waiting for a network effect. You can do this now for your website, and that already would be a positive outcome. Like using a recycled shopping bag instead of a taking a plastic one, it’s a small individual action. This article is meant to provoke and lead to individual action, not propose a complete solution to the decaying web. It’s a small simple step for a complex sociotechnical system. So I’d love to see this happen. I intend to keep this page up for at least 10 years.

Self-identified Christians make up 63% of U.S. population in 2021, down from 75% a decade ago

Why do we so seldom see people smiling in painted portraits? Nicholas Jeeves explores the history of the smile through the ages of portraiture, from Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to Alexander Gardner’s photographs of Abraham Lincoln.

A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit: Remote Code Execution

Smartphones and on-the-go internet access have made many of our working lives more efficient and flexible. But the requirement for constant connectivity isn’t only a fact of white-collar work—it has spread to workers up and down the income ladder. And while the requirement has spread, the resources that workers need to maintain it are not evenly distributed. Today, more than a quarter of low-income Americans depend solely on their phones for internet access. Amid historic levels of income inequality, phones and data plans have become an increasingly costly burden on those who have the least to spare.

What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

Don’t Start With Microservices – Monoliths Are Your Friend – heresy 🙂

More companies are turning to remote monitoring tools to keep tabs on their employees while working from home.

Let’s talk Web3. If you skipped the Technology part, welcome back. Let’s try to summarize what Web3 actually is. Web3 isn’t a clearly defined set of technologies or protocols or workflows, but Web2.0 wasn’t either really. Just like Web2.0 Web3 has certain technological foundations and assumptions but is just as much an aspirational term, a set of overlapping visions, ideologies and goals. In a lot of ways Web3 is doing something and calling it Web3. But with all the contradictions and unclarity a few things are foundational to Web3.

In moving away from fossil fuels, some in aviation are thinking of bringing back helium-assisted flight.

What have we gotten instead of a real postmortem? An insistence that Russia stole the election, the attitude that the voters failed Hillary Clinton instead of the other way around, a remarkable tightening of the vice grip with which activists with bizarre niche politics hold the party’s messaging and values, and the utter nihilism of the widespread belief that the country’s simply too racist and thus no electoral losses are the party’s fault. That’s the tenor of the liberal position post-2016, that the country’s willingness to elect Donald Trump did not reflect any failures of Hillary Clinton or her party but rather that the electorate was full of unrepentant bigots who probably do not even deserve the wise and enlightened leadership of Democrats. Remarkable that the same people so recently laughed at the inability of their opponents to look critically at themselves.

12.12

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Following his triumph over the Persians and their subjects at the Battle of Issus in 333 BC, Alexander the Great advanced south into Lebanon. The Phoenician city-states knelt to him, with the exception of Tyre. Blessed with two harbors and the love of far-away Carthage, Tyre was a threat to Alexander’s supply lines as he prepared to conquer the Persian Empire. From Tyre, the beleaguered Persians could land behind Alexander’s forces and isolate them from Greece, or they could sail to Greece and sponsor an uprising against Alexander with the restless Athenians.

“Take Her Down”: Inside eBay’s Stalking Campaign against a Natick Couple

Facebook staffer secretly advised Andrew Cuomo’s team to ‘victim shame’ accuser

These emails, just released last week, add to the evidence that many leading biosafety experts considered it plausible from the very early days of the pandemic that the virus may have emerged from a Chinese laboratory.

The inexorable rise of identity condiments has led to hard times for the most American of foodstuffs. And that’s a shame.

Global Sequencer

The Popular Family Safety App Life360 Is Selling Precise Location Data on Its Tens of Millions of Users

CIA Director William Burns said the agency has “a number of different projects focused on cryptocurrency” on the go.

I Want to See My Friend, Jimmy Lai

A climber found a trove of gems in the Alps amid a 47-year-old Boeing 707 wreck. He gets to keep half.

At the heart of it all is Apple Park. Hankey and Dye enthuse about the qualities of the space. ‘It’s been designed for serendipitous meetings as well as collaboration,’ Hankey says. ‘It’s just so quiet and calming. We never really understood what that would mean for us until we’d been here for a while.’ In Apple Park, the Apple Design Team has found the ultimate tool, a place where technology’s ever-evolving role in society is researched, dissected, developed, and designed before being transformed into physical reality. §

Leaked SoCal hospital records reveal huge, automated markups for healthcare

12.5

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Oakland police release new lead in killing of KRON4 security guard

One Target store. One huge spike in shoplifting reports. What does it mean for San Francisco?

India recently instructed citizens to refrain from signing up for SpaceX’s Starlink service.

Victor Gao Zhikai, chair professor at Soochow University and a frequent echo of Chinese government positions, two days later described USICA as a geopolitical “Tonya Harding syndrome — whacking the kneecaps of China trying to put China out of commission.” Gao warned that the blowback from USICA includes “a real possibility that down the road the China market is completely closed off for U.S. manufacturers.”

To an economist, “technology” is the efficiency in which inputs are transformed into outputs. And by that definition, we can already derive a very crude measure of technological progress in agriculture using just this data. A common measure of technology in agriculture is simply yields, which can be thought of as the rate in which one input (land) is transformed into an output (for example, bushels of corn). Technological progress is the growth rate of this efficiency, and so a transparent and simple measure of technological progress in agriculture is just the growth rate of yields. However, since agricultural output fluctuates a lot due to weather (more on that soon), we need to focus on very long-run measures of progress, where year-to-year weather effects are small relative to the overall trend. The figure below plots average US corn yields on the left and the twenty year growth rate of those yields on the right. It clearly shows there has been a dramatic slowdown in the rate of technological progress by this measure (though note progress in yield growth today remains significantly higher than the stagnation that prevailed prior to 1940).

U.S. Copyright Law has gone through many revisions and expansions since the first copyright provision was officially added to the U.S. Constitution in 1790.1 This original provision allowed authors the right to print, re-print or publish their work for 14 years, with the option to renew the copyright for another fourteen years. Today, copyrights can last well over 100 years, with the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extending copyright protection for most works to the life of the creator, plus 70 years.2

Hong Kong’s comeback queen? Carrie Lam on leadership and legacy after 2019 protests. In a wide-ranging interview with Talking Post, chief executive maintains her administration is firmly in charge of running the city.

The Flaccid Horde of Northern Virginia, gorging for decades on the largess of the American taxpayers and donor money in agencies, think tanks, panels, manels, and academia have produced nothing, progressed nowhere but the next line on their resume – intellectually vapor locked and strategically their ideas as stuck in aspic.

Of course, there is fierce debate about whether algorithms could in fact reinforce human biases rather than eliminate them. Others argue some AI products are merely digital snake oil lapped up by credulous HR departments.

Secondly, traditional auto makers, especially in the US, have a cost accounting problem. (We recognize that most people fall asleep at the mere mention of cost accounting, but bear with us, we will be brief.) Having grown up with highly vertically integrated industrial models, they care a lot about keeping factories full to maintain utilization. Apple does not have that problem. In part, because they have offloaded much of their fixed costs to Foxconn. The mantra we often hear is that companies are what they measure. Apple has demonstrated time and again that they do not measure the same things as their competitors. Apple is not going to chase market share or factory utilization, they will chase user demand in the belief that profits will flow from that.

It needs a bandwidth buffer. It can never reach 100% utilization, at risk of inducing latency. The traffic may never exceed, for example, 90% utilization. So, if the Metaverse network is at 90% utilization, no one else can enter. This needs to be managed. Somehow.

WTA suspends tournaments in China amid concern for Peng Shuai

One of Africa’s most professional and powerful militaries has been reduced to an assemblage of conscripts, militia, and remnants of his soldiery that resembles a fighting force but is disorganized and demoralized—and no match for the TDF.”

But what if we flipped startup-creation on its head? What if you start with a mission and values — not founders? For example, at my company Hustle Fund, our mission is to democratize wealth through startups. And to that end, we are furthering capital, networks, and knowledge in startup ecosystems. Even though I’m a founder of the company, it doesn’t matter if I personally work at Hustle Fund or not. It’s the mission that’s important and the people who want to work on that mission. And if no one cares about the mission, then the organization shouldn’t exist regardless of what I, as a founder, think about it. And if you start companies with missions instead of with founders, then you start to attract people who have lived and breathed that mission before. Those people really get it. And those people are also would-be customers or users. And maybe these same people are not only working on this problem together in a cooperative way but are also investors in the problem — both through work and capital.

The goal of this article wasn’t to prove how Electron is always the best choice (it isn’t), but rather, to provide a broad overview of the areas in which it is best suited. For example, you shouldn’t use it for applications with simple UIs, or if you don’t need to go cross-platform. In such cases, choosing the native frameworks will most likely be the best choice. That said, if you need to go cross-platform and your application is sufficiently complex, then Electron is really not bad at all compared to the alternatives, especially when done right. Of course, there are some very bloated Electron apps out there and I don’t like them either, but that’s mostly due to careless developers, not Electron.

The bitter joke of the story is that in San Francisco, the mother works full-time, drains her savings, but still can’t make ends meet and is forced to move away.1 Meanwhile, her daughter has lived on the streets for nine years – in an ironically carefree and stable state.

Watch billionaire investor Ray Dalio defend China’s move to disappear citizens from the public eye by likening it to being ‘a strict parent

52 things I learned in 2021

11.28

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In a few weeks, the U.S. military went from being in control of Afghanistan to staging a frantic evacuation of troops and civilians from an isolated, vulnerable airport in the middle of Taliban-occupied Kabul. What went wrong?

Schlörwagen: The bizarre German car that was super-aerodynamic but very impractical, 1939

Apple commends groups like the Citizen Lab and Amnesty Tech for their groundbreaking work to identify cybersurveillance abuses and help protect victims. To further strengthen efforts like these, Apple will be contributing $10 million, as well as any damages from the lawsuit, to organizations pursuing cybersurveillance research and advocacy.

Dezeen Awards 2021 architecture project category winners revealed

Have we been thinking about the pandemic wrong? The effect of population structure on transmission

It’s well known that the Green Revolution dramatically increased crop yields. In a new paper, Gollin, Hansen and Wingender use a general equilibrium model to show that the effects were even more far reaching. For a given acre, the Green Revolution raised the yields of some crops by 44% between 1965 and 2010. But the total effect was even larger because higher yields incentivized farmers to substitute away from lower-yield crops into higher yield crops. Moreover, higher yields meant that less farm labor was required which shifted populations into manufacturing. When one takes into account all of these knock-on effects the authors find substantial effects on GDP. Indeed, the authors estimate that if the Green Revolution never happened GDP per capita in the developing world would be half of its current level.

Requiring consent pretty much eliminates street and most documentary photography as a genre. For some people that would be an absolutely fair price to pay. For many others, myself included, that would be a very unfortunate world to live in. I fell in love with street photography because of its vital place in our culture, reflecting our fragile reality back to ourselves. For that purpose, I allow photography the possibility of sometimes making someone slightly uncomfortable.

If Allison’s thesis was correct, then tensions between the two powers should have grown commensurate with growing Chinese capabilities, rather than risen and fallen according to actions.

In Garfield Heights, Ohio sits one of the most toxic shopping centers constructed in the United States. After nearly 2 years of construction, City View Center opened in 2006 as a power center, containing big-box stores such as Walmart, Giant Eagle, Circuit City, PetSmart, Jo-Ann Fabrics, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Bed Bath & Beyond, Office Max and Marshalls. Issues arose due to the center being built atop a landfill. One tenant after another moved out over the years due to health concerns and structural issues, and the center was eventually abandoned. So how exactly did all of this arise, and why was the center built here anyway?

The Canadian group Quebec Maple Syrup Producers recently announced it was releasing about 50 million pounds of its strategic maple syrup reserves — about half of the total stockpile. Quebec produces nearly 70% of the world’s maple syrup, with the US being its biggest client for the sweet stuff. However, this year producers weren’t able to keep up with worldwide demand, which jumped 21%, according to Bloomberg.

California port truckers ‘drowning’ in supply chain inefficiencies.

On May 28, 2015, the archaeologists excavating in Pylos, southwestern Greece, discovered a Bronze Age tomb with a skeleton surrounded by rich artifacts, suggesting it belonged to an important man.

The head of the South African Medical Association told the BBC that the cases found so far in South Africa – where only about 24% of the population is fully vaccinated – were not severe, but said investigations into the variant were still at a very early stage. “The patients are mostly complaining about a sore body and tiredness, extreme tiredness and we see it in the younger generation, it’s not the older people… We’re not talking about patients that might go straight to a hospital and be admitted,” Dr Angelique Coetzee said.

11.21

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I am convinced that more awareness and thought can contribute to anyone’s photographic journey, and creating something new and exciting is a certain path to that. I’d like to encourage you to seek originality as a deciding and paramount factor in your process. Don’t be afraid of it. but rather embrace it and the freedom it brings.

Peloton Blocks Users From Using #LetsGoBrandon Hashtag

Proponents of communism often say it’s never really been tried. Progressivism can no longer make that excuse. Its doctrines are being widely implemented by earnest practitioners with wide establishment support. The results have come in with astonishing speed. Mayhem and misery at an open national border. Riot and murder in lawless city neighborhoods. Political indoctrination of schoolchildren. Government by executive ukase. Shortages throughout the world’s richest economy. Suppression of religion and private association. Regulation of everyday language—complete with contrived redefinitions of familiar words and ritual recantations for offenders

Well, here is the SF Chronicle’s Director of News posting the piece about Boudin on his Twitter feed, and getting retweeted by DA Boudin himself. Is this propaganda…?

“In many ways, you are already in the authoritarian state. You just don’t know it.”

Little known fact: Huge banks have natural immunity against Covid. Only the very huge ones though.

How 12th-century Genoese merchants invented the idea of risk

This is one of the toughest questions in medicine. It comes up again and again. You have some drug. You read some studies. Again and again, more people are surviving (or avoiding complications) when they get the drug. It’s a pattern strong enough to common-sensically notice. But there isn’t an undeniable, unbreachable fortress of evidence. The drug is really safe and doesn’t have a lot of side effects. So do you give it to your patients? Do you take it yourself? …. So they incredibly reasonably assume anything could be a lie. And if you don’t know which statements about pharmaceuticals are lies, “the one that has dozens of studies contradicting it” is a pretty good heuristic!

Zillow Offers tick tock confirming what we knew. It was a conscious decision by management to override their pricing algorithms in order to buy more homes.

New Statesman writers and guests choose their favourite reading of 2021.

The state has far more money than anyone. But they are behind SpaceX, because tech isn’t capital-limited, it’s competence-limited. After all, who knows more about rocket science — politicians or Musk?

One day, the man said, two workers were sent to the bottom of the Bravo’s leg to investigate a leaking pipe. At that point, there were many leaking pipes on the platform. Many grazes and abrasions in its fabric. The bottom of the leg was a stinking, horrible place. Poorly lit and dank. The men had to stand on a metal grate above a stagnant pool of bilge and patch the leak up with a piece of neoprene and a hose clamp. What they didn’t know was that the clear, scentless substance leaking from the pipe was liquid hydrocarbon, which is deadly when inhaled. As it hit the grating below it began to evaporate, swelling back around them in a doughnut cloud.

I would sooner live under the capitalist system than in the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,”

Michèle Mouton’s trailblazing rallying career shocked male-dominated sport

It’s time to revisit the coverage of Kyle Rittenhouse.

11.14

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If the scale of the fraud that was Russiagate did not cause you to fundamentally change your attitude about US media, either you were not sufficiently attituned to the scale of its fraudulent impact — OR you participated in the fraud. Hence the dividing line it still represents

“The GPS in my car sometimes wants to veer off into off-road travel. Before I make a long trip, I always check the route on my cell phone map…”

Behind NATO’s ‘cognitive warfare’: ‘Battle for your brain’ waged by Western militaries

According to Durham’s indictment, Dolan, while an executive at the PR firm Ketchum, was hired by the Kremlin “to handle global public relations for the Russian government,” as well as its state-owned energy company, Gazprom.

Edit: I might not have underlined this point enough – I sincerely am asking for a better term and would happily use one if offered. If woke, political correctness, identity politics, etc, are inflammatory terms, I’d be happy to substitute something that’s not. But surely something is happening in our politics, and we have to be able to talk about it. So I’m asking for a name.

Last month, the Investigative Unit broke news that organizers hoping to oust Boudin submitted more than 83,000 signatures to election officials in hopes of holding a recall election during next June’s Primary – that was roughly 32,000 more signatures that what is required to put the issue on the ballot.

If it were simple to produce strategic thinkers, the world would be full of them. Certainly, the wealthiest and most stable nation states could develop systems of education, coupled with practical experience, to serve the greater good. Except this is not the case. Indeed, it is a safe assumption that few institutions in human history have unvarnished track records of making strategic thinkers. Why?

Second, dissent is squashed. Earlier this year, as Responsible Statecraft reported, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Leanor Tomero was fired from her job overseeing the NPR because she insisted the process consider Biden’s views on changing nuclear policy and slowing down programs.

1/7 If you worry the $1.2 trillion for infrastructure will be squandered on consulting contracts while nothing gets done, then don’t think about NASA’s way way way over budget return to the moon.

An outstanding challenge is that individuals don’t always know where their data live, and it’s not easy to find out.

Request access to a deceased friend or family member’s account

Perhaps the fatal blow was, in fact, self-inflicted. Zillow expanded its i-buying business aggressively. Opendoor expanded gradually. It offered i-buying services in only six markets after three years, taking its time to refine its algorithms. It is now operational in 44 markets. Zillow added almost as many markets in half as much time. A former Zillow employee told Business Insider that management had been hellbent on catching up with Opendoor, the front-runner. In order to compete, the employee alleged, the company pushed to offer generous deals to potential clients. It called this “Project Ketchup”. Now it has its own fake blood on its hands.

Arrest of Steele dossier source forces some news outlets to reexamine their coverage

This is phenomenal work! There are some great ideas in here for what anyone can do to improve and bring true polish to the #accessibility of their app!

Porch Cameras and Facebook Groups Are Turning Streets into Surveillance States

The root cause is the convergence, or I should say divergence in the business models, from when you had quality and engineering excellence, which has been replaced by concentrating on market share, profits, free cash flow, dividends, and bonuses. I saw it starting to happen in the 1990s.

Pollster: ‘I blew it.’ Maybe it’s time to get rid of election polls.

“I just took [my son] to our local Walgreens to buy him a toy. While there, a man shoved past me so firmly that he sent me into the shelving. Then he proceeded to fill a brown paper bag with Halloween candy and waltzed out of the store. This is one of five Walgreens stores in SF that will be closing in the next two months, in part because of rampant theft. And our city leaders all keep insisting crime is down.”

Advising both Chinese state companies and the Pentagon, McKinsey & Co. comes under scrutiny

Viral Lincoln Project Ads Did Little to Sway Voters, Study Shows

All they wanted was to open a noodle shop. Their tangle with S.F. bureaucracy has them regretting they tried

Monopolies Slowly Destroying the Pentagon

Chinese embassy lobbies U.S. business to oppose China bills-south May

I mention this issue because it’s important to understand that a major problem like port congestion can’t be approached in the same way as something like optimizing the layout of a chemical plant. There is no unified, global objective. All these different actors are trying to make money and shield themselves from having to pay for any extra costs. While there are usually detailed contracts regulating many corner cases, in practice the cooperation between these entities is often done informally, based on long-term relationships between organizations and even between individual people at those organizations.

11.7

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Whatever else happens, it’s pretty amazing that 10,000 workers struck a Fortune 100 company and got an immediate 10% raise and saved the pension for all new hires.

Private jets flying to COP26 in Glasgow will blast more CO2 than Scots pump out in a year

Buck the system: In Italy, old towns eager for new blood sell homes for about $1

Fortress, Wichita State U ensnared in Mammoth-Sequoia trade secret theft lawsuit

Google’s ad exchange handles more than 60% of display ad inventory sold in the U.S. The company’s own ad buying tools also win more than 80% of auctions hosted on its dominant exchange, unredacted passages state.

A structural change in the plumbing of the banking system is dampening the impact of monetary policy and may even make rate hikes inflationary. Rates hikes now directly increase the asset returns of banks while leaving their funding costs unchanged – effectively encouraging credit creation. This is because banks have shifted their funding structure away from rate sensitive money market funding to rate insensitive retail deposit funding. The shift is due both to Basel III raising the regulatory costs of money market funding and also the superabundance of retail deposits from pandemic fiscal spending. On the depositor side, the public is also unlikely to see the increases in deposit rates that would arise from a competition for funding. This means the opportunity cost of holding cash will remain low well into the hiking cycle. In this post we review the transition to an asset return implementation regime, show how it changes the incentive structure of banks, and suggest that rate hikes may not be effective in slowing down economic activity.

Chicken Checker See how often salmonella was found at the plant that processed your chicken or turkey

Crypto Cities

Google’s Street View helps us navigate the world, but it’s also a portal on forgotten places and secret moments

Generator-maker Generac set to buy smart thermostat startup Ecobee

The company recently said it would stop making new offers in its home-flipping operation for the remainder of the year. The decision came after the company tweaked the algorithms that power the business to make higher offers, leaving it with a bevy of winning bids just as home-price appreciation cooled off a bit.

Silicon Valley wants to power the U.S. war machine

Danish @Maersk orders 2 @BoeingAirplanes 777Fs. They will join subsidiary Star Air and are the first triple sevens in the 767-fleet.

Rumble setting up US headquarters in Florida.

The whole Payroll Support Program idea was to have the government pay employee salaries to enable some level of continuity once the pandemic finished. For 18 months the airlines didn’t have to worry about payroll costs, but they certainly did anyway. They all put out early retirement and voluntary leave programs and dramatically slashed employee numbers, and that upset is what is causing so much pain now.

“I have lived here all my life. I have been a commercial truck driver for last 25 years. I consider myself to be ‘blue collar,'” Durr’s campaign website reads. “I believe in God. I am hard working, trusting, and very loyal. I believe in fiscal responsibility, transparency, and lower taxes. I also support the Second Amendment. I am not a polish politician who is looking for a career; instead, I would like to see government return to the hands of the people.”

TLSNotary A new kind of auditing – cryptographic proof of online accounts

1/ The established order makes foresight taboo Every known political order in the past died off Yet the current order pretends to be “the last word…perhaps the only word” If people start thinking why and how the current system might expire, they’re less likely to play ball

1/ Zillow made the same mistake that every new quant trader makes early on: Mistaking an adversarial environment for a random one.

Here’s Why Rapid COVID Tests Are So Expensive and Hard to Find

In footage obtained by Human Events, the FBI appears to have taken aerial footage of Rittenhouse and the other participants involved in the shooting. Some of the footage, which is black-and-white and grainy, was shot from an FBI surveillance drone.

Why Your Car Will Become Even More Like an iPhone

All of this has caused deep concern within the profession. “I am a danger to the public working for CVS,” one pharmacist wrote in an anonymous letter to the Texas State Board of Pharmacy in April. Public officials and corporate executives have been hearing the complaints for years. But when things get really bad, the typical response from higher-ups for flagging morale is to… buy their pharmacists pizza. And that condescension from corporate executives and human resources officials is what finally lit the spark.

This paper examines the relation between CEO’s individualistic cultural background and corporate innovation. Using hand-collected data on birthplaces of US-born CEOs, we provide robust evidence that CEOs born in frontier counties with a higher level of individualistic culture promote innovation performance. Firms led by such CEOs increase both quantity and quality of innovation outputs, measured by the number of patents, citation-weighted patents and the market value of patents. Besides innovation performance, we further show that CEO’s individualistic background causes a change in the innovation style, leading the firm to focus more on breakthrough innovation. Our extended analysis suggests that CEOs’ individualistic background promotes corporate innovation through building an innovation-orientated corporate culture and accumulating human capital by increasing the inflow of inventors.

A new indictment continues the slow unraveling of a 2016 political scandal.

Individualistic CEO and Corporate Innovation: Evidence from U.S. Frontier Culture

Re-Organizing the World’s Information: Why we need more Boutique Search Engines

A series of under-the-radar local races signal where the country is really headed.

10.31

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There was a time not so long ago when the vendors would bring the products to you. The Watkins Man was in my mind a panel truck that carried dry goods to the folks who lived in the country or didn’t have transportation to go to a store. They specialized in baking goods and medical supplies of its time along with items of this and that. As a matter of fact that truck would carry over four hundred items that the house wife just couldn’t do without and thanks to him they didn’t have to.

The Federal Aviation Administration is prohibited from creating safety regulations for private spaceflights until October 2023. Initiatives like AstroAccess are aiming to guide the way that government agencies think about accessibility on spaceflights.

Data from the mobile-app research firm Flurry indicates that only 15% of U.S. consumers opt into tracking when offered the choice—no surprise, given that the only advantage for consumers is that the ads they see are more targeted. In August, Flurry noted that at least 80% of iOS devices had been updated to versions of the software with the new tougher ad standard.

We can see this secular move as a kind of Christianization of society—a fulfillment of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. And yet, in thinking we can make good on the sermon simply by redistributing wealth or legally enforcing “equity,” however defined, is to make light of the paradox and dissonance of Constantine’s Sword.

At the point at which we all had an iPhone in our pocket, we expanded greatly into bricks and mortar

Haiku thread follows. If a pandemic caused by a new bat-derived sars-like virus breaks out in a city and The city has no similar viruses in its local bats and Has no sars-like antibodies in its people and Has no infected animals in its markets and…

Comparison of damages (in %) when shipped in raffia baskets vs plastic crates, accounting for stacking layers; Source: Babarinsa et al 2018

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

The eviction moratorium hit mom-and-pop landlords hardest.

Clement and Tribe nailed it. Catastrophic delays, with disastrous consequences for patient care is exactly what happened.

Location Data Firm Got GPS Data From Apps Even When People Opted Out

Imagine if Zuck picked the next CEO of Facebook by appointing his smartest-seeming son rather than whichever executive was most capable. Do that for five generations and you’d have the NYT.

Policies should incentivize employment; not discourage it.

YouTube is about to pull its apps from Roku, and the fight is going all the way to Congress

Today, about 400 MAXs are back flying. But Boeing’s business and reputation have not recovered

A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore, causing freight to pile up because trucks are stuck sitting on empty containers, thus causing a cascading failure that destroys supply lines and brings down the economy. That certainly sounds like something that was in an early draft of Atlas Shrugged but got crossed out as too preposterous for anyone to take seriously.

Hospital Prices Are Arbitrary. Just Look at the Kingsburys’ $100,000 Bill.

10.24

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What every software engineer should know about search

mRNA Inventor on COVID Response: “Is This Really About the Vaccine or Is It About Something Else?”

These are the deadliest national parks in the U.S.

The Distorted Market for Woke Capitalism

SAN FRANCISCO CLOSES IN-N-OUT BURGER AFTER DEFYING CITY’S VACCINE RULE

“The strategies we previously turned to for safety are risky.”

Most Americans do not recognize that Beijing and Washington are following the same playbook, because they believe the United States is a noble democracy that acts differently from authoritarian and ruthless countries such as China. But that is not how international politics works…

1) Executive order effective immediately over riding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high instead of the current limit of 2. Make it temporary for ~120 days.

Antitrust battle latest: Google, Facebook ‘colluded’ to smash Apple’s privacy protections

10.17

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The Shocking Immaturity of JavaScript

Another major expense will be batteries. Bray said a three-person landscaping crew will need to carry 30 to 40 fully charged batteries to power its equipment during a full day’s work.

Farm equipment security at DEF CON 29

The State Of Web Scraping in 2021

“If eight submarines won’t be fully operational until, say 2038, will that really matter to the strategic balance in the Western Pacific?” Spending this kind of money on aircraft – even, say, B-21s – would get something fielded, and relevant, way before then.

Thank OpenSecrets, too, for noting that the historic $1 billion that outside groups spent in “dark money” in 2020 “largely boost[ed] Democrats,” especially Biden—who raked in six times more “dark money” contributions than President Donald Trump.

A higher fidelity social product would automatically nip and tuck our social graphs over time as they observed our interaction patterns. Imagine Twitter or Instagram just silently unfollowing accounts you haven’t engaged with in a while, accounts that have gone dormant, and so on. Twitter and Facebook offer methods like muting to reduce what we see from people without unfriending or unfollowing, but it’s a lot of work, and frankly I feel like a coward using any of those.

“It’s game over for the existing launch companies,” says Peter Diamandis, a US space entrepreneur. “There’s no vehicle out there on the drawing board that could compete.”

Firstly, we need to create companies much like reputable brands. Smart contracts, by nature, should be, and are, open-sourced. Theoretically, this means anyone can then copy-paste all the code and create clones. But just like fake CryptoPunks and forks of popular open-source repositories, if the branding isn’t there, it’s worthless. Imagine the U.S government started incorporating this global ledger to account for home ownership — automatically, they have a reputable brand. Since the code itself is out in public, it can be trusted and audited. Take this idea further and imagine the UN starts to keep track of land ownership for the entire world! Same deal — brand and trust, both satisfied.

The prosecution agreement, criticized for the way it let Boeing executives off the hook, was filed by the then-U.S. Attorney in the northern district of Texas, Erin Nealy Cox. Cox left the Department of Justice after the agreement and in June joined Kirkland & Ellis, Boeing’s lead corporate criminal defense law firm. On Kirkland’s website, she was welcomed to the firm as a partner by Mark Filip, who had signed the DPA on behalf of Boeing. Forkner’s indictment was filed by her replacement, acting U.S. Attorney Meacham.

On Election Day, the consultant would drive Beren to the polling place and tell her how to cast fraudulent votes. She then allegedly engaged in multiple illegal activities such as advising in-person voters to support a certain candidate, casting votes herself in other people’s names and encouraging voters to cast additional votes for family members who were not present.

Delicious. Christopher Steele, the single most discredited actor in the entire Trump Russia Collusion Hoax, is set to be interviewed Monday by George Stephanopoulos, the single most pompous of all the brood of lying, self-important talking heads that spent more than four years trashing Donald Trump.

That’s ours to figure out. But people are dying because we haven’t come up with an answer to that question. The healthcare system now tells people: “Start to die and then we’ll deal with you.”

The carbon footprint of household energy use in the United States

Every day there r American University students smoking weed in the park next 2 our house. Whenever I see them I tell them they r not in dc they are on federal park land and if park police catch them they will have big hassles. Every1 thinks weed legal everywhere in dc @AmericanU