7.30

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Elections rarely end the way people expect them when they start. In spring 2015, everyone expected the presidential showdown to be Bush vs Clinton 3: Rise of the Megadonors. Donald Trump’s rise as a serious candidate and victory surprised everyone (especially me), showing outsiders can influence the byzantine swamp of DC. Earlier this year the general consensus expected 2024 to repeat established themes with Trump vs Biden 2: Geriatric Wars. Ron Desantis looked as though he would overtake Trump but started flaming out in March, beginning with his flip-flop on Ukraine.

It is important to note, however, that while a location like Kosovo may provide added protection, it is not a guarantee against censorship or attacks. Hosting content that is controversial or politically sensitive always carries some level of risk, and it is important to carefully consider the potential consequences before hosting such content. In practice while some internet related laws exist in Kosovo they are not enforced by lack of competent officials (that are also underpaid, and often not paid on time at all), in fact the central government in Pristina does not even have control over its Serbian majority east where militias and the Serbian government hold a tight grip on everything, heavily armed and prepared for war at any time. Serbian authorities do not cooperate with Kosovo.

By any standard, mainframes are enormous. Today’s mainframe can have up to 240 server-grade CPUs, 40TB of error-correcting RAM, and many petabytes of redundant flash-based secondary storage. They’re designed to process large amounts of critical data while maintaining a 99.999 percent uptime—that’s a bit over five minutes’ worth of outage per year. A medium-sized bank may use a mainframe to run 50 or more separate financial applications and supporting processes and employ thousands of support personnel to keep things running smoothly.

There are 1,847 Tesla Supercharger stations in the U.S. housing 20,040 Tesla Supercharger ports, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Energy. That’s roughly a quarter of all DC Fast (the quickest type of EV charger) EV charging stations in the country and nearly two-thirds of all DC Fast EV charging ports.

Their stories animate the complex relationship to place: What happens when you stay, what happens when you leave, and what of the multitude of moments in between. The stories transport readers to different parts of the state, whether stretches of roaming tumbleweeds, the parking lot of a subdued strip mall, or a coastal one-light municipality. “Just empty, windblown charm. The same tiny town I remember,” Kimberly King Parsons writes in “Whiskey Sour.”

The madness of crowds aside, it is worth reflecting on what we concretely know about LLMs at this point in time and how these insights sparked the latest AI fervor. This will help put into perspective the relevance of current research efforts and the possibilities that abound.

NASA also said that two old MD-90 airframes that will be used to build the prototype have been taken out of storage at a desert airfield in Victorville, Calif., and moved to a facility in Palmdale, Calif., for conversion. Both jets were formerly operated by Delta Air Lines.

Wait, I thought Elon built a series of tremendous blowout startup businesses to earn that wealth? Isn’t that what we are supposed to be doing? Prior to Elon, Twitter was a cesspool and worked hand in hand with the US Government to kill free speech. That’s called fascism. I bet the same professor isn’t upset with the way the Washington Post and New York Times operate. I don’t think taking class with him would be all that productive. I saw an article about how the current US Presidential administration has turned the US military academies into woke factories instead of leadership factories designed to create career officers. Not really a surprise given what they have done everywhere else in the government. My friend Jeff has a piece up on how the military falls far short of goals. I liked the military better when they had the motto “when you absolutely, positively have to blow things up.” Here is an old USMA Men’s Volleyball t-shirt. Do you think they could wear it today when we are instructing cadets to refer to their parents as guardians and not “Mom and Dad” so as not to offend anyone?

We heard some frantic voices calling out that the tow line had snapped, that the vessel was adrift and headed for the rocks,” said Beaudoin, who remembers a split second of silence on board the aircraft as the news sunk in. Bonomi doesn’t recall the exact words the Sea Tow captain shouted into his radio as he watched the Privateer being swept away by the waves and current. But he said it was something to the effect of: “Coast Guard, you’ve got to do something!”

What Ponsin didn’t know was that Tesla employees had been instructed to thwart any customers complaining about poor driving range from bringing their vehicles in for service. Last summer, the company quietly created a “Diversion Team” in Las Vegas to cancel as many range-related appointments as possible. The Austin, Texas-based electric carmaker deployed the team because its service centers were inundated with appointments from owners who had expected better performance based on the company’s advertised estimates and the projections displayed by the in-dash range meters of the cars themselves, according to several people familiar with the matter.

I am extremely concerned for you that those around you have led you to believe, or encouraged you in your own belief, that it is in any way ‘cool’ to be naked and licking sledgehammers in your videos. It is in fact the case that you will obscure your talent by allowing yourself to be pimped, whether its the music business or yourself doing the pimping.

The data also shows that eSIM technology is finding particular appeal among dual-SIM users, and is further driving the adoption of dual-SIM usage in a number of markets where the usage was previously limited or non-existent. The latter trend is particularly visible in the U.S. and South Korea – compared to a year ago dual-SIM penetration nearly doubled in the U.S. (+89%) and more than tripled in South Korea (+217%). The eSIM + physical SIM combination has opened up the door to dual-SIM usage in these two markets – among our dual-SIM users with an eSIM-capable phone, respectively 87.3% and 89.9% had an active eSIM alongside their physical SIM in Q1 2023. Taiwan’s share stood at 51.9%, but the market has an established and widespread penetration of dual-SIM usage (17.8% of all users had dual-SIM there in the same period). Indonesia, meanwhile, while having high penetration of dual-SIM usage (57.7%), is still at a very early stage of eSIM adoption, with only 2.6% of dual-SIM users with an eSIM installed, among eSIM-capable device base in Q1 2023.

On the evening of July 19th, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Sky watchers from southern California to Arizona witnessed a magnificent exhaust plume. At the San Francisco Volcanic Field north of Flagstaff, photographer Jeremy Perez saw something extra:

I find this explanation intelligent, informed, and interesting—yet unsatisfying, in the same way and for the same reasons as I find Robert Allen’s explanation unsatisfying: I don’t believe that industrialization was so contingent on such very specific factors. When you consider the breadth of problems being solved and advances being made in so many different areas, the progress of that era looks less like a lucky break, and more like a general problem-solving ability getting applied to the challenge of human existence. (I tried to get Devereaux’s thoughts on this, but I guess he was too busy to give much of an answer.)

Willie Nelson was also on the bill that night, and seeing the way O’Connor was treated, invited her to join him in the studio the next day. The song they recorded, released on his 1993 album, Across the Borderline, was a cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up.” Gabriel’s original 1986 version was inspired by the Dust Bowl–era photography of Dorothea Lange, but written and sung from the point of view of a contemporary English miner left behind by the Margaret Thatcher economy. His narrator’s despair is palpable, but he finds the resolve to carry on in a prechorus sung by his wife—in Gabriel’s case, duet partner Kate Bush—who reassures him, “Don’t give up, you’re not beaten yet . . . you still have us.”

Welcome to The Hacker’s Dictionary, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.

A new study estimates ~800,000 Americans are permanently disabled or die each year from diagnostic medical errors. Concurrently, multiple reports look at ways this may be reduced, including artificial intelligence. In this edition of Ground Truths, I’ll review the scope of the problem and prospects for improvement that are desperately needed.

7.23

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When the Vision Pro was finally announced, people working on it believed the development team would eventually be broken up and distributed across the company — matching the approach used by Apple’s other core devices. But the recent name change seems to imply that the current structure is here to stay.

The point is, it’s hard to say with any certainty whether this will truly be the moment when Hayao Miyazaki steps away from feature animation for good (he’ll likely never step away from animation entirely, directing a new short for the Ghibli Museum during his last retirement, Boro the Caterpillar). Until a few days ago, it was also hard to say what this mysteriously titled final film would actually be about, following a bold PR strategy of, well, not doing any PR. Only a single poster for the film featuring a heron was released before its theatrical debut, without so much as press or preview screenings, trailers, screenshots, or even a synopsis. Ok

At the wave pool, which is lined with an artificial beach and ringed by cabanas and a small hotel, the Floridians ripped oceanlike swells for six hours before coming landside. They then congregated at the hotel’s mezzanine bar overlooking the waves to rip righteous tequila shots. “It’s nice to do something fun and then go out and drink,” one partyer told me, “rather than just drink.”

So, what has NASA abandoned? Late last month, the agency pulled the plug on the X-57 electric airplane before the first flight. NASA concluded that the electric and battery technology for the X-57, a small airplane, is too dangerous. NASA wouldn’t even authorize test flights.

The idea seems to be that the MLS is so important, so critical, and an institution that drives equality and social justice that it should be left alone. But what we’re likely to get is the exact opposite of being left alone.

Now, the proof is getting stronger that a lack of flexibility can hurt in the long term. Companies with flexible work policies are growing more quickly than those that require people to be in the office full-time, according to The Flex Index, released July 18, which collects office requirements on more than 4,500 companies with 30,000 locations and that employ more than 100 million people globally.

The Selway is a storied river to whitewater enthusiasts, though not many have floated it due to the limited access the US Forest Service allows. The water is only high enough for rafts to embark confidently in late May through early August, and because it’s such a coveted river with a National Wild and Scenic River distinction attached, only one group can launch per day. Obtaining a permit is among the most difficult in the Forest Service system; entry into the yearly lottery yields odds of under 1% as over 10,000 people seek around 60 spots.

“Dark Side” represented the culmination of the group’s struggle to extricate itself from the long shadow of original leader Syd Barrett, the textbook case of a 1960s rocker who went the chemical distance and never returned. As the new documentary makes clear, The Pink Floyd (as they were originally called, fusing the names of Barrett’s favorite American blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council) was very much a product of Barrett’s visionary acidhead whimsy, with bassist Roger Waters, keyboardist Rick Wright and drummer Nick Mason supporting the leader’s singing, songwriting and lead guitar. The magic lasted through the group’s eclectic first singles, but as early as the tour for the 1967 debut album “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” an LSD-addled, mentally ill Barrett was staring into the middle distance and playing one note for entire sets. He was barely present on the follow-up, “A Saucerful of Secrets” (1968), and got jettisoned from the band shortly thereafter, with guitarist David Gilmour already drafted to take his place. Fellow musician John Etheridge later remembered thinking that Gilmour should “enjoy it while it lasts, because without Syd that band’s going nowhere” — one of the great wrong calls in the history of popular music.

Investigations suggest that, in some fields, at least one-quarter of clinical trials might be problematic or even entirely made up, warn some researchers. They urge stronger scrutiny.

Microsoft still doesn’t know — or want to share — how China-backed hackers stole a key that allowed them to stealthily break into dozens of email inboxes, including those belonging toseveral federal government agencies.

Statistical arbitrage (stat arb) is a pillar of quantitate trading that relies on mean reversion to predict the future returns of an asset. Mean reversion believes that if a stock has risen higher it’s more likely to revert in the short term which is the opposite of a momentum strategy that believes if a stock has been rising it will continue to rise. This blog post will walk you the ‘the’ statistical arbitrage paper Statistical Arbitrage in the US Equities Market apply it to a stock/ETF pair and then look at an intraday crypto stat arb strategy.

“We are seeing for the first time what a megaconstellation means to the world,” Dickinson said. “That provides such resiliency and redundancy in terms of maintaining satellite communications in this example. That is powerful, and the department is moving in that direction.”

Satellite reconnaissance emerged as an irreplaceable source of U.S. intelligence during the Cold War. The vast resources required to build intelligence satellites quickly transformed space reconnaissance into an industrial-scale activity. Though satellite reconnaissance primarily served policymakers in Washington, two of its critical nodes for research, development, and operations were in Sunnyvale, California and Rochester, New York. In both places, a coalition of scientists and engineers in corporations, universities, and intelligence agencies collaborated to create satellites designed to penetrate the Iron Curtain. These technical experts were critical not only for the development of satellite reconnaissance systems, but also for their operation.

At United, bids for 978 captain vacancies, or about 50% of the vacancies posted, have gone unfilled in the past year, United pilot union data shows.

The leading companies are now profitable without subsidies. Protectionists, unions, and car makers that still aren’t good at making battery cars drive lobbying for subsidies.

Bundle a model’s weights, configuration, prompts, data and more into self-contained packages that run anywhere

The purpose of a Series A pitch is to show investors why they should invest in your business. It should provide a clear and concise overview of the business you’ve built, and then paint a picture of where that business could go and why raising money will help you get there.

Spending time in China is essential to avoid surprises. Its political environment may not be as welcoming to foreigners as previously, but that means more, not fewer, foreigners should travel there. Analysts, journalists, businesspeople and students need to be in China to plumb the complexity and nuances of the country and its politics.

ExxonMobil staked out its vision for its transition to a lower-carbon business model when it spent $4.9 billion to acquire Denbury, a smaller Texas oil and gas company with the U.S.’s largest network of pipelines designed to carry carbon dioxide. The acquisition signals the momentum growing behind “carbon management” as an enterprise that fits better with the traditional strengths of oil and gas companies than renewable energy.

Britain is suffering a decline in productivity and income which isn’t fully reflected in nominal GDP statistics. This could be because it’s expressed in a declining pound, rather than in declining nominal wages/profits. I don’t know enough economics to feel like I have good intuitions about declining currency values. It could also be partly because post-recession economic growth happened more in new employment than in higher wages for the already-employed. Potential causes are Brexit, a dysfunctional real estate market, and underinvestment in R&D – but low confidence in all of these.

iCloud is descended from a long series of features in older versions of Mac OS, going back to iTools in January 2000. It’s currently divided into two main functional services: CloudKit to handle databases, and iCloud Drive for storage of files. These appear to be implemented in the same vast distributed databases served by Apple’s own data centres and those of third-parties including Amazon’s AWS. macOS also includes some specialist tasks relying on iCloud such as the Find My service, and App Store apps are able to synchronise small shared dictionaries of key-value pairs such as preferences in an Ubiquitous Key-Value store.

Hun­dreds of doc­tors across the U.S. have en­trusted record­ings of their pri­vate talks with pa­tients to a startup promis­ing to turn the con­ver­sa­tions into us­able med­ical records through ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence. The tech­nol­ogy makes mul­ti­ple er­rors while pro­duc­ing the re­ports, such as fail­ing to use cor­rect med­ical ter­mi­nol­ogy and adding med­i­cines a pa­tient isn’t tak­ing, ac­cord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer work­ers.

Other chal­lenges are more ad­min­is­tra­tive. Fum­ble-free au­to­matic billing is one of the glo­ries of the Su­per­charger net­work. Tes­la’s Su­per­charg­ers haven’t pre­vi­ously needed in­put screens or card read­ers. Last year Tesla an­nounced a deal with the White House to open 3,500 new or ex­ist­ing Su­per­charger sta­tions to the pub­lic along ma­jor high­ways. How­ever, in or­der to be el­i­gi­ble for fed­eral in­cen­tives, pub­lic Su­per­charg-ers need to have some point-of-sale in­ter­face. Apart from charg­ing, con­sumers’ big­gest is­sue with EVs has been af­ford­abil­ity. In a Cox Au­to­mo­tive sur­vey, 51% of re­spon­dents said they were in­ter­ested in buy­ing an EV. 43% said they were hold­ing off due to high prices. Mean­while, a fleet of highly hyped mass-mar­ket EVs (Ford Mus­tang Mach-E, Ford F-150 Light­ning, VW ID.4, Cadil­lac Lyriq) are nailed to the show­room floors.

The history of the Citroën dealership in Moulins thus follows the evolutions of National Road 7 which gradually bypasses, site after site, the hearts of the villages. However, the intimate history of this family also unfolds in the shadow of the Holiday Road. Accidents, often fatal at a time when the seat belt did not exist, directly affect the family. Marie-Madeleine Dubois and Guy Dallois, died, together, in the car, in 1983.

7.16

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Following months of oversight work by the Ways and Means Committee, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Daniel Werfel informed employees in a new memo on Friday of their constitutional and statutory right to make protected disclosures to Congress. Previous communications by the agency to employees may have had a chilling effect on whistleblowers, as they failed to inform them that their rights included sharing concerns directly to Congress. A recent letter from attorneys for Hunter Biden may have had a similar effect for calling into question whether it was appropriate for these employees to come to Congress with their concerns.

But Elon Musk is not one to trust someone else’s knots. He’s made his fortune by disregarding other people’s work and rethinking things from first principles. To his credit, he’s worked miracles in categories most entrepreneurs would never dream of tackling, from electric cars to rockets to satellite internet service. There may be only a handful of people who could’ve pulled off Tesla and SpaceX, and maybe only one who could’ve done both. When the game is man versus nature, he’s an obvious choice. When it comes to man versus human nature, on the other hand…

Sotomayor’s staff has often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children’s books, works that have earned her at least $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009. Details of those events, largely out of public view, were obtained by The Associated Press through more than 100 open records requests to public institutions. The resulting tens of thousands of pages of documents offer a rare look at Sotomayor and her fellow justices beyond their official duties.

When Peter Thiel emerged as the right’s potential heir to Sheldon Adelson during the ’22 midterms, a highly connected Democratic operative launched a guerilla opposition research campaign to chill his political influence. What happened next was sordid, and ultimately tragic, but also a telling reflection of a new era in political combat.

The layout of the Disney parks may not be something you think about except for at the end of the day when your feet are aching and sitting feels like the best ride ever. Or when you’re hiking around the Epcot World Showcase in the blazing sun and afternoon heat. But the ways the Imagineers have creatively designed the parks influence your experience more than you think, and in ways you might not have considered before.

The AD-BASED internet is DYING, and it’s getting WORSE in the process

We only include firms where we received 100 or more comparisons to other firms. We changed this from our first release where we had included firms with over 25 comparisons. To learn more about our change and the rest of our methodology, please view our FAQ here.

The free movie.

Cancer cells-to-be accumulate a series of specific genetic changes in a predictable and sequential way years before they are identifiable as pre-malignancies, researchers at Stanford Medicine have found. Many of these changes affect pathways that control cell division, structure and internal messaging — leaving the cells poised to go bad long before any visible signs or symptoms occur.

The late-night liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites on Sunday set a new record for the most flights by a SpaceX launch vehicle, with a first-stage booster flying for a 16th time. SpaceX now aims to fly its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 20 times, double the company’s original goal.

IN 1943, BRITISH NAVAL INTELLIGENCE and MI5 devised a cunning plan to fool German command into thinking that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia instead of the actual objective; Sicily. All the plan required was a floating corpse and a fake identity.

To me, though, it is a fascinating feat. It feels magical when a machine solves an abstract problem like that, with minimal input from me as a user! I was, therefore, delighted when the nice folks at Prefix.dev hired me to create an open-source dependency solver for the Conda package ecosystem. Not that I am an expert in the topic (far from it!), but I do know my Rust and I’m a quick learner. In fact, after 5 weeks the new solver is finally available as an experimental option in the rattler1 project!

Since July 2022, health insurance companies have been required to publish how much they pay healthcare providers for nearly all health care services. In the past, these negotiated prices were kept secret, leading to wide differences in payments between providers. Patients and even doctors had very little idea how much was actually being paid for healthcare.

San Francisco institution Anchor Brewing Co., the godfather of steam beer, is shutting down after 127 years. The brewery was “losing millions of dollars a year,” said Anchor spokesperson Sam Singer. “Economic pressures have made the business no longer sustainable.”

The legacy press is doing just that and will likely continue to do so, handing politicians free rein to defame the whistleblowers. The question, then, is whether the House Ethics Committee will curb Goldman to send a message that whistleblowers aren’t political pawns.

In 1997, Wired magazine published an article called The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020 (archived). The subtitle reads: “We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?” As you might expect, the piece makes interesting reading here in the actual future, particularly the sidebar of “10 Scenario Spoilers”:

Pulling my site from Google over AI training.

Crouching in the shadows of the much larger Süleymaniye Mosque, the Rüstem Pasha Mosque is like a cave filled with hidden treasure. Built by the famous Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan for the extremely influential – and somewhat controversial – Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha, the mosque is unique in a number of ways.

Judicial Watch announced today that a Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit forced the release of anorganizational chart from the U.S. State Department Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, which shows that the office employs at least 45 people. Judicial Watch uncovered the record thanks to a FOIA lawsuit filed in September 2022, against the State Department for records related to travel costs, calendars, and organizational charts for the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:22-cv-02844)). The Biden agency is releasing responsive records in batches to Judicial Watch every six weeks.

In any event, she cites King once: “An individual has value because he has value to God. Whenever this is recognized, ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ pass away as determinants in a relationship and ‘son’ and ‘brother’ are substituted.” Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? 102–03 (Beacon Press 1968). Funny because the sort of quote I remember from that book is “White Americans must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.”

The AP separately queried more than 100 private colleges, universities and charities that have also hosted justices or organized events for them, requesting that they provide the same information that was asked of public institutions. Some confirmed basic details of the visits, but few provided substantive information.

Two paragraphs later, Microsoft said that Storm-0558 used the forged token to gain access to Exchange email accounts through a programming interface for Outlook Web Access (OWA). The researchers wrote:

Despite having four cylinder banks, the INNengine (depending on its configuration) actually has eight pistons. This is because the engine is an opposed-piston motor, meaning that each piston’s compression stroke is performed against a second piston placed in the same cylinder bank rather than a static cylinder head. It still only has four combustion chambers, though, which means it sounds similar to a four-cylinder engine.

Yesterday, a friend sent me a screenshot of an Instagram storyfrom mordlustderpodcast asking for an intuitive explanation of the Monty Hall problem (which, as I found out, is called the “Ziegenproblem“, or “goat problem”, in German). The basic problem is this:

The box of sweets was given to a schoolgirl to celebrate the 1902 coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra and has remained untouched for more than a century.

From defence secretary Ben Wallace to historian Tom Holland, our panel selects the greatest war movies to mark the release of Oppenheimer

Sending a thumbs-up emoji may now be considered the agreement of a legally binding contract, a Canadian judge has ruled. The thumbs-up emoji proved pivotal in a case involving farmer Chris Achter of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and a 2021 deal to sell 87 metric tons of flax to grain buyer Kent Mickleborough. Mickleborough signed the contract for the deal and texted a picture of it to Achter and wrote “Please confirm flax contract,” according to court documents. Achter responded to with a thumbs-up emoji.

After nearly five decades working at Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman department store, Betty Halbreich has helped a range of generations. Here, she reflects on what’s different—and what isn’t.

7.9

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Growing support for the Farmers-Citizen Movement forces Mark Rutte to think twice about his plans to close farms in EU nitrogen crisis

The organizers of Thursday’s protest, the Farmers Defense Force (FDF), have said the state of emergency is a way to quash their democratic rights and freedom of assembly

And here’s the key point: hydrocarbons are prevailing despite staggering amounts of spending on wind and solar. According to a January report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, some $6.7 trillion was spent on alt-energy globally between 2004 and 2022, with the vast majority of that, some $4.8 trillion spent on renewables. And the vast majority of that $4.8 trillion — about $4.1 trillion — was spent on wind and solar.

Here are 5 common Chinese tech terms, along with explanations and examples of usage in a sentence.

Perhaps you think you can avoid the above problems by … not telling anyone about what you’re doing. After all, if people don’t know that you’re using these metrics, they won’t game them, right? Call me naive, but I think transparency is the best policy and such tactics are bound to leak and backfire. Just see the various discussions around such topics on anonymous forums, such as the following thread:

2024 will be a good news / bad news year for The Walt Disney Company and its favorite mouse, Mickey. The copyright that has prevented others from using Mickey Mouse on their products, and media runs out in 2024. That means that you, me, and the rest of the world can begin using the world’s most recognized rodent without getting permission or paying licensing fees.

It’s actually easy to name things. The hard thing is naming them well. Maybe if it were harder to name them we’d spend longer choosing good names.

The news’s obsession with having a little bit of information on a wide variety of subjects means that it actually gets most of those subjects wrong. (One need only read the blatant errors reported in the corrections page to get some sense of the more thorough-going errors that must lie beneath them. And, indeed, anyone who has ever been in the news will tell you that the news always gets the story wrong.) Its obsession with the criminal and the deviant makes us less trusting people. Its obsession with the hurry of the day-to-day makes us less reflective thinkers. Its obsession with surfaces makes us shallow.

Discarded milk represents a massive amount of work wasted on the farm, including planting and harvesting crops, raising livestock and milking cows. Generations of farm families and their communities are at risk when milk markets collapse and milk has to be dumped.

The study tested for 32 individual PFAS compounds using a method developed by the USGS National Water Quality Laboratory. The most frequently detected compounds in this study were PFBS, PFHxS and PFOA. The interim health advisories released by the EPA in 2022 for PFOS and PFOA were exceeded in every sample in which

And while only one person can win the $545,000 first place prize, there are still many other ways to win money throughout the 3-week-long competition.

For example, the King of the Mountains (Polka Dot Jersey) will take home $28,000. The best young rider and the most aggressive rider will take home $22,000. And the teams themselves can win between $55,000 and $22,000 for a podium finish in Paris.

Days later, catching up on my diary on Route 11 south out of Greenville, North Carolina, I wrote: Arlington National Cemetery – on my 1964 map the road there was called “Avenue of the Heroes” but this is now changed to “Memorial Drive” – pretty wet, huh? America’s general lack of zip and loss of self-confidence since Vietnam have been huge. Someone who gave me a lift here said, ‘Vietnam was just another big decision for America, and they were wrong. Now they’re afraid to make any decisions about anything.’ Seems true to me, I concluded, with 21-year-old certainty.

For centuries, a trove of letters lay unidentified in an archive. Then a patents expert, a music professor and a software engineer set to work

“The 2001 AUMF has served as the legal rationale for nearly every global entanglement in the nebulous ‘War on Terror’ under four different Presidents. This is far beyond what the American people imagined this authority would be used for. Congress is constitutionally bound to take responsibility here — any overseas military campaign should have specific and limited authorizations, and those in favor of them should make that case. The American people are tired of forever wars and deserve to know where their representatives stand,” Bishop said in a statement to the Daily Caller.

7.2

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Chinese nuclear power plants have been releasing into the ocean water containing tritium at levels up to 6.5 times higher than the annual amount scheduled to be released from Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, Inc.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, according to a document the Japanese government compiled for other countries ahead of TEPCO’s discharge.

“If the functioning of the Bundesbank is endangered by an inadequate or even negative net equity, the Federal Republic of Germany can be obliged to inject capital,” it said. “Depending on the extent and probability, the risks arising from monetary policy could, in the worst case, endanger the budgetary autonomy of the German Bundestag”.

Google vi­o­lates those stan­dards about 80% of the time, ac­cord­ing to re­search from Ad­a­lyt­ics, a com­pany that helps brands an­a­lyze where their ads ap­pear on­line. The firm ac­cused the com­pany of plac­ing ads in small, muted, au­to­mat­i­cally-played videos off to the side of a page’s main con­tent, on sites that don’t meet Google’s stan­dards for mon­e­ti­za­tion, among other vi­o­la­tions.

It should be apparent by now that the Ukraine war is an enormous disaster that is unlikely to end anytime soon and when it does, the result will not be a lasting peace. A few words are in order about how the West ended up in this dreadful situation.

With plummeting ridership yet budget increases, BART has transformed from a transit system into an employment agency

The Biden administrationis “slow-rolling” enforcement of hospital price transparency requirements and fighting to hide thousands of related documents, according to a new report. Despite the Biden administration’s messaging in favor of price transparency, records from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services show inconsistent and often lengthy enforcement time frames for hospitals not in compliance, according to a Foundation for Government Accountability report obtained exclusively by the Washington Examiner.

She said they would need to deploy “hand-to-hand combat” — persuading big brands in person rather than from behind their desks — as part of the effort, the person said.  “I do believe that they’re going to have superior ad product instantly [under Yaccarino],” said Lou Paskalis, an advertising veteran and chief executive of AJL Advisory. “The issue is content moderation. And it exists in two dimensions. For everybody else. And for Elon.”

Other lights are flashing. Hopper says the number of price checks in advance of booking has risen by between 25 and 50 per cent in the first quarter of 2023 versus 2019. More travellers are also looking at flying on Monday to Wednesday, when fares tend to be cheaper. 

Some people who sought jobs at billionaire Bill Gates’s private office described going through an extensive screening process that included being questioned by a security firm about their sexual histories, past drug use and other parts of their private lives that might indicate they were vulnerable to blackmail. 

A bit of research into the generic pharmaceutical industry.

Eight teenagers, recently arrested for a string of more than 35 robberies in Oakland, are all back out on the streets Wednesday. The robberies included an attack on a 63-year-old woman in Rockridge last Sunday and the lack of punishment is prompting concern and frustration from residents. 

One of the federal prosecutors who allegedly declined to charge Hunter Biden with tax fraud donated to President Joe Biden and the other gave money to Vice President Kamala Harris while working in the private sector, Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show.

“If you end up in a world where you can now force commodity exporters to accept your currency for those commodity imports and not the US dollar, you basically have gained sovereignty from a monetary perspective,” Pozsar says. “And so again, you will not have to run with as much FX reserves. And so you know, this is going to have feedback effects on demand for Treasuries in general and on the margin.”

The first seconds of Friday’s 90-minute set foreshadowed the powerful lighting and overwhelming bass that was to come, and has become mandatory for the EDM big leagues. A brief white flash left me momentarily blind, while a quick bass rumble pulsated through my entire body and clothes.

Between his jobs serving beer at American Family Field, working as a machinist and staffing the front desk at a local dry cleaner, Strnad estimates he works an average of 70 hours each week. He believes his work experiences set him apart from other potential candidates

Thursday photos.

6.25

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For the US, the slowdown is mainly a story of labor force particiation, demographics, and hours. The decline in productivity growth in the US is minor by comparison. In Fully Grown I zeroed in on the demographics, in part because I was combining the LFP and Aging components. The data in the table here is also a little different than what I used in Fully Grown (Penn World Tables versus national accounts) so there are going to be slight discrepancies. In contrast, the story of the slowdown in Europe is about productivity growth and aging, but with substantial offsets coming from LFP and hours. Changes in labor market activity, in general, prevented the slowdown in Europe from being even more devastating.

“This is not your pop’s Republican Party,” Van Orden told GOP activists at the convention, which was broadcast by WisconsinEye. “We’ve got tattoos, piercings. Some of us who have hair decided to color it purple. We’re the working men and women of this nation.”

The French carmakers can say what others are thinking due to their minimal Chinese market exposure,” said Matthias Schmidt, an independent auto analyst. “The Germans have their mouths taped as they are petrified of a retaliation from their cash cow market where they are heavily — or now even potentially dangerously — exposed.”

Jack Dorsey may have left Twitter’s troubles behind, but he’s still getting into trouble onTwitter, where he has been incessantly replying to random posters and retweeting his support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist and Ukraine war crank. I have learned that the endorsement hasn’t gone over super well inside Block (formerly Square), Dorsey’s publicly-traded payments company, which he runs as C.E.O. Indeed, the R.F.K. issue came up last week during a skeptical exchange at an all-hands meeting, according to a video I’ve seen, in which Dorsey was asked how endorsing Kennedy is “in line with Block’s mission of economic empowerment” and how he could “reconcile that against his track record of conspiracy theories.”

2018: “A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years,” said Thunberg in a since-deleted tweet. 

The fallout could be a major storyline over the next year. Asked for comment, an Omidyar spokesperson first downplayed the conversations as merely preliminary. But the following day, in a rare, unsigned blog post—the Omidayars’ first substantive post since April 2021—the organization all but confirmed, in the typical Omidyarian word-salad style, that they “are now shifting into even deeper modes of collaboration and diversifying support of our work.” Describing the pivot as “a necessary step in our evolution,” the statement went on to say that “collaboration can take many forms” and that some Omidyar teams will indeed need to partner with new funders to continue their work. “For others, collaboration may be more heavily rooted in advocacy campaigns in coalition with trusted partners, community members, and activists,” the message continued. “There are many other models we are exploring and dynamic learning conversations around this approach are underway. This exploration will take time.”

The prompts are exactly the same for each. In Photoshop, a single prompt gets three results, Dalle-2 outputs 4 results, and OpenJourney generates only one. Each image’s caption indicates where it was generated.

Of 12,331 companies that met this criteria, Stanford University topped the list with 941 companies founded by alumni of Stanford University (including Stanford Graduate Business School). Then came MIT, with 637 of companies founded by its alumni (including MIT – Sloan School of Management).

IBM and some other vendors made lots of different typeballs, but most of them are 40-50 years old and no one has been making new typeballs for a long time. 3D printing is a natural fit for making new typeballs, but most printers still don’t have the ability to produce the sharp details necessary on a sufficiently-resilient material. So it’s understandable that no one made a really functional 3D-printable typeball. Until now, that is!

In this post, I’ll explain how to style RSS feeds and educate readers at the same time.

The Wisconsin antenna consists of two lines, each about 14 miles long. The Michigan antenna uses three lines, two about 14 miles long and one roughly 28 miles long.

Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present (V 13.4.0)

Research on the human modification of channels along the main Nile has primarily focused on the impacts of dam and canal construction in the modern era (e.g., Bunbury et al., 2023; Stanley, 1996; Woodward et al., 2022) or on ancient canalisation and harbour infrastructure (e.g., Boraik et al., 2017; Quirke, 2009). To date, river groynes in the Nile Valley have been subject only to localised examinations (e.g., Tahir & Sadig 2014; Vercoutter, 1966; Wolf & Gabriel, 2008) and, to our knowledge, none have been independently dated. Some were built within the living memory of the region’s present-day inhabitants to trap fertile Nile silts for cultivation (Figure 1), a practice already noted by European travellers to Nubia in the early 19th century C.E. (Cailliaud, 1826). However, similar structures situated within ancient palaeochannels indicate construction over much longer time frames, whether for the same or other purposes.

They have robbed alike the cradle and grave to get their present force.” Intended for public consumption and liberally quoted in the press, Grant’s letter aimed to bolster Union morale at a politically crucial moment. But the document’s influence outlasted the election, seeding a claim that grew into conventional wisdom by the late nineteenth century: the notion that the Confederacy had mobilized a much higher percentage of underage boys and youths than the United States.

Ranking the US cities.

Blue ocean strategy

These are owner-occupied homes up to 355,000 euros, the AD writes. These will no longer be allowed to be sold to everyone. Instead, the council can force a house below this price to go to a buyer with a middle or low income.

Prices here have been steadily climbing since January, reaching $4.91 per gallon of regular gas on average this week, surpassing the Golden State, the longtime national leader at the pump, according to a Seattle Times analysis of retail prices compiled by AAA. The average price in King County exceeded $5 a gallon on Wednesday.

In the second of a three-part series which delves deeper into the Boeing Archives and the company’s history with a chat with Lombardi.

Lombardi, 63, is only the third person holding the post of company historian and running Boeing Archive since 1994. Just recently, Lombardi and his team moved to new premises from their previous location in Bellevue, Washington in the Seattle area to Auburn, 40 km away, originally started as a Boeing factory built in 1966 for the Boeing 747 program. The multi-million-dollar new Boeing Archive facility stores and preserves documents and artefacts going back all the way to Boeing’s founding days in 1916. Airlineratings was given unprecedented access and started with an interview with Michael Lombardi.

Prices for things like police enforcement, park fees go and supplies like t-shirts, bibs, stickers, food and drinks have only gone up over the past few years, said Ryan Richards, the Paddle and Portage event director for the past two races and for four years in the early 2000s. At the same time, participation numbers fell during the COVID-19 pandemic, making running the event this year too expensive for most people, he said. 

“While we have historically operated with W-2 employed drivers, we have found it difficult to maintain this model in the highly competitive food delivery business,” the company said in a statement Thursday. Switching to third-party delivery services “puts us in a better position to compete in the future and allows us to offer expanded delivery hours and broader coverage for our restaurant partners.”

a book list.

The Postal Service reports that complaints of mail theft doubled in 2021, and banks report that check fraud jumped to 680,000 reports last year, up from 300,000 the year before. So, who is stealing these checks? It’s not entirely clear; it could be workers at postal distribution centers who recognize a check in an envelope or, perhaps more likely, thieves who fish envelopes out of mailboxes.

If none of this seems to make sense, it is because it doesn’t.

The aggressive meritocracy which allowed Cortés to rise to power at such a young age is nearly unfathomable today, in our age of bureaucracy and corporatism.

With the current geopolitical challenges between China and the United States, as well as the ongoing supply chain issues affecting manufacturers and consumers, there’s been much talk about moving global manufacturing out of China. But despite the talk, US-China trade reached a record level in 2022, with no signs of any slowing in the near future.

“we need a stable energy system.” The Swedish decision is an important step in the right direction, implicitly acknowledging the low quality of unstable wind and solar, and is part of a general collapse of confidence in the renewable energy agenda pioneered in the Nordic countries and in Germany.

The story behind the shot: My wife and I were on a road trip in Iceland, and we took a ferry to the Westman Islands where we’d heard there was a puffin colony. We pulled over at a beautiful spot to stretch our legs. There we saw a lone bird perched on the most amazing lava rock cliff, which was covered in colorful lichen and blooming wildflowers. It was raining and the sky was dark, creating a moody tone. I knew this moment was special: It was the first Atlantic Puffin I’d seen, let alone been able to photograph.

6.18

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Convenience stores, on average, carry around 3,000 products and their inventory is updated with dizzying frequency. Store managers can order things from a catalog of ~8,000 items that the franchise headquarters constantly updates, and have it delivered the same day. On top of that, the scale of their operation enables them to strike deals with manufacturers to make “konbini only” variants of their products that further drive traffic and consumption.

Searchable and sortable H1B salary database

After the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War in Europe, many countries abolished compulsory military service. But in the wake of the war in Ukraine, several are considering bringing it back.

Every single thing that is not written down equals wasted resources in the future and a potential for headaches. Your headaches. And I don’t know about you, but I’d like to make sure I don’t have any headaches; that’s why I enjoy building systems that work without me. Now imagine how much stuff you haven’t written down yet, and that’s your current potential to drown in unexpected issues. For example, your continuous deployment broke because of some package updates. Coincidentally only Bob from Department X knows how to fix this issue. Oh, and they’re on vacation this whole week.

The problem is that there are only a few operators of the Antonov An-124. Antonov Airlines operates a handful of An-124s, but as a Ukrainian airline they certainly won’t be flying to Russia. Maximus Air Cargo and their single An-124 also fall into that category.

BBedit

For instance: Nichols speaks about the “predictability” of waves crashing on a beach, how that sound (familiar, gentle, a little hypnotic) can induce a relaxed state. There’s a reason it’s easy to do nothing at the beach. Once cortisol drops, we find it easier to lean into our brains — to think without fretting. If it helps, try dismantling the “event nature” of heading to a body of water. Think affordability and accessibility: what’s the closest body of water you can get to on a bike? Can you go alone for a half hour? Can you leave your phone at home?

Last year, Kansas produced 244 million bushels of hard red winter wheat. “This year, they’re projecting the yield to be 30 bushels an acre on average,” said Hayden Guetterman, a farmer. “That kind of estimates out to 178 million bushels a week. That’s down substantially from what we normally produce. It will have an affect.”

Some of her (Louise Perry) tale is anthropological — this is how the male thinks, beware! — and some of it is just delivering the harsh facts of life. This was a good zinger: OnlyFans is to the marriage market as a criminal record is to the jobs market.

Again, this is just one of many possible “conveniences” that I see that just don’t exist in the offerings from Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, Sony, et.al. Things that would make the move from smartphone to camera more attractive, and potentially start to regrow the camera market again. Something’s that necessary before all us old fogeys with those giant neck hangers all die off. More.

One of the dirty little secrets of the electric vehicle boom is that many of its workers are paid less and enjoy fewer benefits than those who manufacture the nation’s gas guzzlers. But if unions have their way, that won’t be the case for long.

Zlochevsky allegedly told the CHS he was dismayed by Trump’s victory, fearing an investigation would reveal his payments to the Biden family, which included a $5 million payment to Hunter Biden and a $5 million payment to Joe Biden. According to the CHS, the Burisma executive bemoaned the situation, claiming the Bidens had “coerced” him into paying the bribes.

Under the bill, wedding barns that host more than six events a year would have to obtain a Class B liquor license, which would allow them to serve beer and wine.

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin was quick to criticize potential Republican opponent Eric Hovde as being an “out of state multimillionaire” after it was disclosed he paid nearly $7 million in 2018 to buy a luxurious hillside estate in Laguna Beach, California. But, as it turns out, Baldwin isn’t doing so badly herself. In 2021, the second-term Democratic senator and her partner bought a “luxurious” $1.3 million Washington, D.C., rooftop condo just steps from the U.S. Capitol. The pad cost more than three times what a buyer paid for her old Washington digs and four times as much as the median sale price for Wisconsin homes in April 2023. The “penthouse residence” — in the words of the real estate agent — has three bedrooms and three full bathrooms with soaring ceilings and a private roof deck “with monument views like you cannot believe!”

“6 Reasons DOJ’s ‘Get Trump’ Documents Case Is Seriously Flawed.” This is a concise article at The Federalist, written by Will Scharf who is a former federal prosecutor and currently a Republican candidate for Missouri Attorney General.

To promote transparency, the Federal Reserve Board on Friday published a database of financial institutions with access to, or requests to access, Federal Reserve Bank master accounts and services. The database is consistent with the requirements set forth in legislation enacted last year and will be updated on a quarterly basis. A master account is an account in which a Reserve Bank receives deposits for a financial institution, such as a bank or credit union. The Reserve Banks provide financial services to financial institutions much like those that banks and credit unions provide to their customers. These services include collecting checks, electronically transferring funds, and distributing and receiving cash and coin.

At the start of the survey, electric owners were paying on average 10p a mile for charging in public, while at the pumps they handed over between 15-16p depending on whether they were buying petrol or diesel. Between October 2021 and April 2023 the cost of charging an electric car in public has more doubled to 20p per mile.

This is the first of a two-part series looking at how Arizona was chosen as the US state to host the latest semiconductor wafer fabrication plant from TSMC, the world’s leading chip foundry, in a move that is redefining geopolitical boundaries in the global chip industry.

Fitzgerald stayed on four years longer, but said he also witnessed the culture shift as the company matured. For instance, he said Google stopped promoting its transparency report to the media, free expression advocates were replaced by more traditional business-focused executives, and then there was Project Maven – the controversial Department of Defense drone project that Google signed on to build artificial intelligence for, and later succumbed to employee pressure to back out of in 2018. “There was a slow erosion of a lot of these things that Google had said they cared about,” said Fitzgerald, who has since founded The Worker Agency, an advocacy and communications firm that counts a Google worker union among its clients.

6.11

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Riddled with confusion and guilt, Americans are handing out perfect Uber and Airbnb scores; ‘Don’t have to earn it anymore’

What neither Cohen, who also famouslypushed for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, nor The Atlantic acknowledge in the article is that most of the weapons Cohen mentions in the article — including long-range missiles, F-16s, and even F-35s — are made by funders of Cohen’s employer, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Thousands of early-career researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) have kick-started the process of forming a union. They are calling on the agency — the world’s largest biomedical funder — to raise pay and improve benefits, as well as to bolster its policies and procedures on harassment and excessive workloads.

Historic Desktop User Interfaces (UX)

Soon after, Ken Thompson, together with me and others, first started work on Unix. Also soon after, AT&T, which still owned most of the Bell System, updated its logo (I doubt the events were related). The new logo just updated the image; corporate structure remained the same. The material published by us during the period up to 1984 used this Bell logo and the name “Bell Laboratories.”

But Ben Southwood has convinced me that France is rich because it gets the big things basically right. Housing supply there is freer: the overall geographic extent of Paris’s metropolitan area roughly tripled between 1945 and today, whereas London’s has grown only a few percent. Infrastructure is better: 29 French cities have trams, versus 11 here (likely one reason its second-tier cities are much more productive than Britain’s). It has nearly 12,000km of motorways versus around 4,000km here – and French motorways tend to be smoother and better kept (and three quarters are tolled, making congestion much less of a problem). Childcare is cheaper: about half the price per month, in part because they require half the staff. Energy is more abundant, as shown above. Because it gets those big four things right, it can afford to get a lot of other things wrong.

What are the best defunct products and overlooked innovations?

The AI firm that conducted ‘state surveillance’ of your social media posts. Logically won government contracts worth millions of pounds to monitor and flag items deemed to be false

But the Valley has slowly left the industrial battlefield – it has lost over 160,000 manufacturing positions over the past two decades. It bought into the idea that the unique genius of its financial and corporate culture would be enough for it to thrive and profit as production headed first to Japan, then China and, more recently, to other parts of North America. This is a familiar story. Consider, for example, how British industry lost its edge: the Industrial Revolution created a new class of tycoons; then the tycoons’ sons sought a return to the aristocratic past, eschewing dirty factories for elegant postings in the City or a relaxed life in their country estates. More recently, Detroit’s world-beating automotive industry squandered its technological and manufacturing advantages in a rush, pushed by Wall Street and its own financial managers, to earn easy profits from inferior products.

Virginia-based REIT Park Hotels & Resorts has opted to cease payments on a $725 million loan, as the SF Business Times reports today, essentially surrendering over 2,900 hotel rooms and hospitality facilities to its lender. This includes the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square, which is San Francisco’s largest hotel, occupying an entire city block, and one of the country’s largest hotels outside of Las Vegas.

Discover some of the most significant changes to Apple Watch since its introduction as we tour the redesigned user interface and the new Smart Stack. Learn how Apple designers approached the design of watchOS 10 as we explore layout, navigation, and visual style, and find out how you can apply them to create a great app for Apple Watch.

I think the reason I keep writing these blog posts encouraging people to blog is that I love reading people’s personal stories about how they do stuff with computers, and I want more of them. For example, I started using a Mac recently, and I’ve been very annoyed by the lack of tracing tools like strace.

One of the most expensive aspects of any cybercriminal operation is the time and effort it takes to constantly create large numbers of new throwaway email accounts. Now a new service offers to help dramatically cut costs associated with large-scale spam and account creation campaigns, by paying people to sell their email account credentials and letting customers temporarily rent access to a vast pool of established accounts at major providers.

The agency had advised people to ventilate indoor air before, but this is the first time a federal agency has set a target – five air changes per hour – for how much rooms and buildings should be ventilated.

Anything created using Firefly’s text-to-image generation tool will be fully indemnified by the company “as a proof point that we stand behind the commercial safety and readiness of these features,” Alexandre says. I am a sceptic…. words are one thing, firing up. The litigation team is quite another. ?

The agency revealed on June 2, 2023, that members of its enforcement staff had gained illicit access to confidential adjudicative documents and downloaded them in far more cases than originally reported, exposing rot in a hopelessly compromised in-house adjudication regime. SEC publicly admitted in April 2022 to the existence of a so-called control deficiency within its administrative adjudication system. It said the agency’s Chair had launched an internal review of the issue (using a contractor dependent on staying in SEC’s good graces for its other agency business). At that time, the agency specifically divulged that SEC Division of Enforcement personnel had accessed adjudication material in the SEC v. Cochran case, temporarily making the material available to everyone in the Division, including attorneys who prosecuted Ms. Cochran on SEC’s behalf. Now it turns out agency personnel had done the same thing in dozens more cases.

My first moment with Vision Pro seeing the physical room viewed through the headset’s display in passthrough, I looked down at my own hands and it felt as if I was looking at them directly. This was a powerful moment, more powerful than any previous “first” I’d experienced in VR. I feel the need to reiterate. I was looking at my own hands reconstructed by a headset’s sensors and it felt as if I was looking at them directly.

Learn how to design great interactions for eyes and hands. We’ll share the design principles for spatial input, explore best practices around input methods, and help you create spatial experiences that are comfortable, intuitive, and satisfying.

The trend, partly because of smartphones and their small image sensors, is towards huge depth of field. I often get asked how to put everything up through infinity in focus with full frame cameras. Others ask me how to use focus stacking to put everything from one foot away through infinity in focus. I’m reluctant to answer either question because you basically take a 3D subject (reality) and make it even more into a very flat 2D construct (photo on wall). You’re erasing 3D cues if you keep trying to put everything in focus. 

Hollande is visibly keen on dessert but claims that he is indulging me by ordering his own chocolate tart. “I’m not letting Madame eat on her own.”

Arm created something that was “too convenient, too reliable and too cheap” for users to bother looking for an alternative.

The European Commission is proposing to hand them access to our sensitive, private medical records! The new law plans to streamline the sharing of medical records and information. For example, making it easier to share an MRI scan from a holiday injury with your GP at home. But as part of the same law, the EU plans to forfeit our right to privacy and undermine trust with our doctors.

Reflecting on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq earlier this year, Colby quoted Talleyrand: It was “worse than a crime: It was a blunder.” Like many other realist thinkers, such as Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, he regards the last several decades of idealist liberal foreign policy as one long chain of catastrophic blunders.

6.4

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

SAR mobile opine values.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DRAKON is a visual language from the aerospace industry for representing algorithms, processes, and procedures. The goal of DRAKON is to make procedures easy to comprehend.

Some context is warranted. First, the statement that SVB and SBNY were the second and fourth biggest bank failures is only true if we do not adjust for inflation or scale the failures relative to GDP. Once we take inflation into account and also the size of the bank’s deposits relative to GDP, we find that Depression-era failures were substantially bigger.

The former Union Bank building in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district, located at 350 California Street, was auctioned off last week. The winning bid was $65 million, roughly 75 percent less on a per-square-foot basis than comparable building sales from just before the pandemic.

Behind the scenes is China’s reluctance to forgive debt and its extreme secrecy about how much money it has loaned and on what terms, which has kept other major lenders from stepping in to help. On top of that is the recent discovery that borrowers have been required to put cash in hidden escrow accounts that push China to the front of the line of creditors to be paid.

Kinzer wrote that commentary for The Boston Globe; I suspect The New York Times, his old employer, wanted no part of his heresy. You can commonly find that sort of thing on Substack or Twitter, but only rarely does it slip past the goaltenders of our national media. Which brings me to the full-page advertisement just published in the print New York Times — print only! — that calls on the United States to work to end the war as quickly as possible through diplomacy.Signatories include several high-ranking U.S. military officers, Ronald Reagan’s former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, and the ubiquitous Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs.

“We are still training Ukrainians how to fly our F-16s that will be shot down by Russia as soon as they get into the war zone. The mainstream press is dedicated to Biden and the war and Biden is still talking about the Great Satan in Moscow while the Russian economy is doing great. Putin can stay where he is”—in power—“despite his failure to wipe Ukraine off the map as an independent state. And he thought he would win the war with just one airborne division”—a sardonic reference to Russia’s failed effort in the first days of the war to seize a vital airport by parachuting in an attack force.

The changing legislative landscape of the U.S. wine market provides a scenario to examine the effect of regulation on the size distribution of firms. Using the variation across states and time in the sum of in-state and out-of-state adult populations between 2002–2017, and a difference in difference-style empirical model, I examine how restrictions on Direct to Consumer (DTC) sales impact the number of establishments and the employ- ment at wineries. I find that the expansion of the potential wine market by 10 M adults caused about a 3.5% increase in the number of wineries. While reduced DTC restrictions explain growth in the number of wineries, I find no effect of lessened restrictions on the number of winery employees, though there is evidence of a lagged effect. Additionally, I find that the growth of smaller wineries substantially outpaces that of larger wineries when regulations are lessened. These results suggest that regulatory barriers in particular indus- tries may allow states to maintain an artificial size distribution.

Flynn that year hired Fenn, who earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience and was working in consulting at McKinsey. They recruited other industry pricing and marketing specialists to build a nine-person team. Flynn invested in computer servers to warehouse reams of data. Data scientists collected prices for individual items across Flynn’s restaurants, then layered on variables that could impact sales, such as bad weather or a change in restaurant hours. They began regularly monitoring prices for competitor restaurants within a three-mile radius of their stores.

The problem for Scott is that while Ellison is very driven by genuinely held beliefs and cultivated relationships, it’s not clear whether he has a broader strategy with these big bets. After all, why did Ellison give $1 billion to finance Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter? Because “it would be lots of fun,” as he texted Musk at the time.

Illinois and the other Great Lakes states fought for decades over how much lake water should flow through the backwards river. And in 1967 the Supreme Court set a daily water limit of 2.1 billion gallons per day, which since then has lowered water levels of Lakes Michigan and Huron by 2.5 inches.

Sort of like the old Star Trek episode “The Ultimate Computer” on massive steroids, Colossus is genuinely gripping as the coldly analytical Dr. Forbin begins to break down from the strain of trying to get his all-powerful technological genie back in the bottle, with terrifying results. Briskly directed by Joseph Sargent and written by James Bridges, Colossus was based on a novel by D.F. Jones. Pity we never got to film versions of Jones’ two sequels, in which a cult grows around Colossus, who is eventually deactivated and then rebooted when the Earth is threatened by an invasion from Mars.

Using pull requests for code changes by your own team members is like having your family members go through an airport security checkpoint to enter your home. It’s a costly solution to a different problem.

“Bien,” the stockman whispered. “I am a cattle buyer. I have to have my funds in gold.”

Not Even a Recession: The Great German Gas Debate in Retrospect

In fact, it’s about everything. Look at the world from the vantage point of car paint and you begin to see various strands of the 20th century storyline unfurling: the early days of mass production and the modern factory, the ascent of mass consumption, the rise and fall of economic growth, all the way through to today’s “productivity puzzle” economists are trying to get their heads around.

On Reddit, Saudis laughed at anxious American tourists asking if their social media would be audited upon arrival (“lol u think KSA is a police state?” one user retorted, “we don’t care about some random american, just have fun”). On TikTok, middle schoolers showed off trendy sneakers and weekend trips to Al-’Ula, an ancient Arabic oasis city near Medina, occasionally coming into the camera’s view to ask their audience which international school they thought was the most toxic. European expatriates, mostly women, vlogged from big cities like Jeddah and Riyadh about how moving to Saudi Arabia had liberated them.

The company is mining flight data to assess and identify accident risks before anything goes wrong. And it’s preparing an internal education campaign for employees — from the executive suites to the engineering design offices to the factory floor — about lesson learned from the crashes.

Kids and adults of all ages have been folding and flying paper airplanes for more than 150 years. National Paper Airplane Day is an unofficial holiday celebrated every May 26th to bring some attention to this enjoyable pastime. We want you to have a ton of fun on this day, so please continue reading for suggestions of paper airplane activities and games that you can play with your family and friends.

Scout dates back to the late 1950s, when Ted Or­nas, an auto de­signer for In­ternational Har­vester, de­signed the com­pa­ny’s first Scout, a four-wheel-drive recre­ational ve­hi­cle, some­thing that didn’t ex­ist at the time. A month later, South Car­olina law­mak­ers ap­proved $1.3 bil­lion to help VW build the plant.

In many ways, the Twit­ter event was clas­sic Musk. It was hugely hyped, not fully baked and the talk of the in­ter­net af­ter­ward.

A critic of the en­vi­ron­men­tal, so­cial and cor­po­rate-gov­er­nance, or ESG, move­ment, Ra­maswamy wants to re­scind a Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion rule that al­lows re­tire­ment-plan man­agers to con­sider cli­mate change and other ESG ac­tors when they choose in­vest­ments. He is push­ing to cut more than 90% of the staff at the Fed­eral Re­serve and to pre­vent it from is­su­ing a digi­tal cur­rency. He op­poses reg­u­lat­ing bit­coin as a se­cu­rity and taxes on bit­coin min­ers.

In this context, the next iteration of the global security, political and economic system will not be framed by the United States alone. The reality is already something else. It is not an “order,” which inherently points to a hierarchy, and perhaps not even a “disorder.” A range of countries are pushing and pulling in line with their own priorities to produce new arrangements. We in the transatlantic community may need to develop some new terminology as well as adapt our foreign policy approaches to deal with horizontal networks of overlapping and sometimes competing structures. We have entered what Samir Saran, President of India’s Observer Research Foundation, has dubbed the age of “limited liability partnerships.” The regionalization of security, trade and political alliances complicates our national security strategies and policy planning, but it may also intersect with our priorities in useful ways if we can be flexible and creative—rather than simply resisting and responding when things go in directions we don’t like. As British security expert Neil Melvin has suggested, we should embrace the idea of “mini-lateralism.”

Mr. Kissinger leaves no doubt that he be­lieves in a Pax Amer­i­cana and in the need “to de­fend the ar­eas of the world es­sen­tial for Amer­i­can and de­mo­c­ra­tic sur­vival.” But the abil­ity to “ex­e­cute it po­lit­i­cally,” he says, “has de­clined sharply, and that is our over­rid­ing prob­lem now.” He as­cribes this po­lit­i­cal weak­ness to a de­cline in be­lief in the U.S. in its own his­tor­i­cal am­bi­tions and in­sti­tu­tions. “There’s no ele­ment of pride and di­rec­tion and pur­pose left,” he laments, as Amer­i­can lead­ers grap­ple with angst gen­er­ated by events of “300 years ago.”