7.3

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I decided to look into it further, and spoke to Jerome Hoffman, at UCLA. He was one of the few physicians on an American Heart Association lpanel to evaluate tPA who didn’t take any money from Genentech. Hoffman also happened to be one of the few physicians who voted against promoting tPA for stroke. The study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, but the lead author was funded by Eli Lilly, and the NIH wouldn’t give me the data to look at. So I was already aware of Eli Lilly funding that was promoting Prozac, and when I heard this episode of The Infinite Mind, I immediately realized that they had nobody critiquing Prozac. I thought, “This is just was way too rosy a picture, with absolutely no downside.” I decided to look into the financial conflicts of the speakers on the show and found that they had no one who was really independent.

We had lost nearly the entire launch market to the French, Chinese, and Russians in the late ’90s, and winning back that market share by paying [private US companies] to take cargo and astronauts to the space station was a big economic boom for the nation.

A court in Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, has sent artist Aleksandra Skochilenko to pretrial detention for using price tags in a city store to distribute information about Moscow’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

if you want me to care about your brand, you need to care about my use of your product.

A forthcoming article in the Columbia Law Review by Professors David S. Cohen, Greer Donley, and Rachel Rebouché surveys some of the new abortion “battlegrounds” we can expect to see. In this article they write:

In this post-Roe world, states will attempt to impose their local abortion policies as widely as possible, even across state lines, and will battle one another over these choices; at the same time, the federal government may intervene to thwart state attempts to control abortion law. In other words, the interjurisdictional abortion wars are coming. . . .

The article provides a useful overview of many of the legal issues that will arise in these “interjurisdictional abortion wars,” in which the central legal questions will not concern substantive due process, but the scope of federal preemption, the autonomy of federal lands and enclaves, and the ability of states to limit interstate shipment of abortion medications, constrain interstate travel, or otherwise extraterritorialize their abortion laws. As I noted here, the White House has been consulting with academics to examine some of these questions, and I expect we will see the first rounds of litigation on some of these questions quite soon. Perhaps anticipating some of these issues, it is notable that (as my co-bloggers have noted) Justice Kavanaugh made explicit reference to the constitutional right to interstate travel in his Dobbs concurrence. It may also be notable that Court’s conservative justices tend to split on questions of federal preemption (as we saw in Virginia Uranium v. Warren in 2019).

That was the first White House trip to the county in more than two decades.

But nowhere is the shift more pronounced — and dangerous for Democrats — than in the suburbs, where well-educated swing voters who turned against Trump’s Republican Party in recent years appear to be swinging back. Over the last year, far more people are switching to the GOP across suburban counties from Denver to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Republicans also gained ground in counties around medium-size cities such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Des Moines, Iowa

The foreboding image of an Iron Curtain still suggests darkness and tragedy—but from the standpoint of U.S. strategic interests (as opposed to popular American political aspirations), it was for many years preferable to a united, unaligned Germany playing Washington and Moscow against each other. What Walesa understood was that a reunified Germany would once again see itself as a “bridge” between East and West at just the moment the liberated peoples of the former Warsaw Pact were reaching for the long-awaited prize of self-determination: namely, membership in the West itself. Convinced of their own centrality to the drama, U.S. leaders can’t or won’t understand that many U.S. allies can’t and won’t stake their futures on whatever the American position happens to be at any particular moment—because according to the internal logic of American partisan warfare, that position will be reversed every few years.

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That could add to the frustration that Mitchell and others say employers have with the current health insurance system. More might try to contract with providers directly, only using insurance companies for claims processing. “We saw a lot of hospitals that just decided not to post files or make them difficult to find,” she said.

These allegations were submitted to the board by Jacquelyn Lopez of the Elias Law Group on behalf of the N.C. Democratic Party’s deputy get-out-the-vote director, Michael Abucewicz. The accusations — which include that the Green Party misrepresented itself to get some to sign and that they turned in fraudulent sheets of signatures — can be read here.

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6.26

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Khodorkovsky is ambivalent about Alexei Navalny, the charismatic Putin critic who was recently moved to a maximum-security prison. “We have absolutely no differences as far as this war is concerned or the need for regime change. But we disagree quite a lot on the future of Russia, which is normal.” Khodorkovsky argues that Navalny sees himself as a future tsar. “I think believing in a good tsar is a very dangerous idea for Russia today” — because any tsar-like figure needs an external enemy to govern. Instead the next government of Russia “should be put together by the regions, because the regions, unlike the tsar, don’t have any vested interest in foreign aggression.”

It takes mountains of money and many years to even get through the process of permitting and approval to being a project in the US. Furthermore, while these policies intend to protect the environment, they actually don’t. They simply slow down the process and increase costs.

This reality should be a concrete warning to Western countries, who have scaled down military industrial capacity and sacrificed scale and effectiveness for efficiency. This strategy relies on flawed assumptions about the future of war, and has been influenced by both the bureaucratic culture in Western governments and the legacy of low-intensity conflicts. Currently, the West may not have the industrial capacity to fight a large-scale war. If the US government is planning to once again become the arsenal of democracy, then the existing capabilities of the US military-industrial base and the core assumptions that have driven its development need to be re-examined.

Europe on brink of gas crisis as Russia squeezes market

Central banks try to block attempts by poor countries to use digital currency to upend monetary norms.

For example, in my own apartment building, I once asked the front desk if I could leave my dry cleaning with them, so a cleaner could pick it up while I was traveling. They said no. It was too much of a liability. When I told the story to an Irish friend, he chuckled and mockingly replied: “That would never happen in my country.”

This same lack of imagination makes it difficult to understand the primacy of foreign policy in understanding the world on a day-to-day basis. If you lack imagination, you will tend to assume that the current configurations of countries, alliances, and so on are simply going to last.

The second principle of our long-term development is a reliance on entrepreneurial freedom. Every private initiative aimed at benefiting Russia should receive maximum support and space for implementation. (Putin)

Try searching for a product on your smartphone and you’ll see that what was once a small teal barfeaturing one “sponsored link” is now a hard-to-decipher, multi-scroll slog, filled with paid-product carousels; multiple paid-link ads; the dreaded, algorithmically generated “People also ask” box; another paid carousel; a sponsored “buying guide”; and a Maps widget showing stores selling products near your location. Once you’ve scrolled through that, multiple screen lengths below, you’ll find the unpaid search results. Like much of the internet in 2022, it feels monetized to death, soulless, and exhausting.

The US Department of Agriculture estimates that wheat fields statewide will average roughly 39 bushels per acre this year, down sharply from 52 bushels per acre last year. But many farms in the western half of the state will produce far less than that.

In August last year, a friend of Mo’s named Shiu Ka-chun received a letter from her, which he shared excerpts from on social media. Mo said she had been teaching English to other prisoners and that her Christian faith was helping her. She thanked Cardinal Joseph Zen, the 90-year-old retired bishop of Hong Kong, for visiting. “I may be stumbling but not falling,” she wrote. In January this year, Zen gave her Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazovto read. Two months ago, to the shock of many, Zen himself was arrested under the national security law, though not remanded into custody. (He is still in Hong Kong.) Apart from the odd letter, Mo and many other former prominent politicians have ceased talking to the press. In rare cases where activists have been released on bail, they have had to agree to forgo public commentary altogether. Mo was denied bail partly due to WhatsApp messages she sent to international reporters.

Those deliverables might not add up to a big fat bank account. But they create a healthy culture. So the Long Tail does have a role for us—but it should be built on our wisdom and generosity, not our business plans.

6.19

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But inherent in the focus-on-upgrade customers is this: your target customer ages over time.

Now, an important disclaimer. This post does not represent a doxxing of anyone. It will not include any private information about any of the indexed Good White Men. I will link only to the publicly-available social media accounts and publication pages of the offenders and include photographs culled from professional sources. I insist that you not do anything to facilitate the harassment or doxxing of these Good White Men in response to their inclusion here, and if you engage with them on social media I hope that you will be respectful.

Musk said he has voted for Democrats “because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.”

With 6 kilowatts of solar capacity and 30 kilowatt-hours of battery storage, the system can typically meet the center’s power needs. Occasionally, members cut the lights and fans during the day to save electricity for an evening dance class. Still, Robles says it’s better than running expensive, polluting diesel generators or depending on the island’s electric grid — which, despite years of post-hurricane repairs, remains prone to routine outages, sweeping blackouts and frequent voltage surges that fry people’s appliances. In early April, the entire island lost grid power for three days after an aging electric breaker caught fire on the southern coast.

Sixty-eight congressional Republicans voted against the latest round of Ukraine funding. Sure, it was partly an anti-Biden play—but much more is going on.

A hot-headed coder is accused of exposing the agency’s hacking arsenal. Did he betray his country because he was pissed off at his colleagues?

This article has been amended since publication to clarify the ACLU’s position was in a tweet rather than their statement

“No one emptied the bank accounts,” he says. “The fact that no one has screwed it up in 500 years is impressive, and I will work hard not to screw it up in my generation.”

The audio analyses of the gunfire that likely killed Abu Akleh point to one person shooting from an estimated distance that nearly matches the span between the journalists and the IDF convoy. Based on video The Post filmed in Jenin, Abu Akleh and other journalists identified as press would likely have been visible from the IDF convoy’s position, which was roughly 182 meters (597 feet) away. At least one soldier in the convoy was using a telescopic scope, the IDF said later in a news release. A live stream on TikTok filmed seven minutes before the shooting shows a relatively calm scene with people milling about. Distant single gunshots are heard on occasion but there are no signs of a firefight.

There’s a lot of work to be done across the imaging industry to boost support for true HDR stills. We need editing tools to let us fine-tune Raws into HDR stills, just as we’re used to doing when produce our own JPEGs. But above all, we need wider support and cross-compatibility so that we can share and view 10-bit files without having to connect our camera to the display. Until this is resolved, the ability to shoot 10-bit stills is of disappointingly limited use.

6.12

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Arcades, Churches and Laundromats: A Trucker’s Haven on the Precipice of Change

Political donations from the sector surged to more than $26 million during 2021 and the first three months of this year. That influx of cash is outpacing spending by internet giants, drug makers and the defense industry — providing a fresh pool of financing for candidates heading into November’s congressional elections.

Before dropping out, Resnick had already done internships at McLaren, the Formula One race car company, chaperoned in England by his parents; then at Elon Musk’s Tesla; and at the Silicon Valley office of the world’s leading commercial drone-maker, DJI Technology of China — now his main competitor.

Meanwhile, Apple has stepped into advertising in a bigger way, filling the data void it created. Apple has a measurement platform called the SKAdNetwork, which apps use to pull some data from iPhones to track ad performance. Apple also is developing its own ad products, particularly in search advertising. Apple helps app developers place ads when consumers browse the App Store, showing ads in results similar to how Google and Amazon return ads in their search properties. Apple’s critics have even accused the company of leveraging privacy concerns to benefit its own advertising ambitions. Apple does not reveal how big its ad business is, but a recent report from Toni Sacconaghi, a Bernstein analyst, estimated Apple’ ad revenue grew from $300 million in 2017 to $4 billion in 2021. That’s only 2% of Apple’s total yearly revenue, which mostly comes from device sales and services.

Yet amid a malaise that afflicts much of the city, entrepreneurial energy remains evident. Central Avenue’s sidewalks crowd with the brightly colored booths of street vendors, selling a broad range of food, clothes, and other products—more like Mexico City or Mumbai than the South L.A. of the past. Some new apartments are rising to replace the decrepit ones, and the street-level liveliness seems more Washington Heights than car-centric Los Angeles. Despite its troubles, Central Avenue does not exhibit the deathly sense of abandonment of places like the South Side of Chicago or other inner-city communities, where the spirit of enterprise has all but disappeared.

“We still have potential,” insists 63-year-old Rick Caruso, a billionaire running what once seemed a quixotic campaign for mayor. On June 7, Caruso will be a candidate in the city’s open mayoral primary, facing off against, among others, the race’s early frontrunner, long-time congresswoman Karen Bass. (The top two finishers will meet in a run-off general election in November if no candidate wins a majority of the vote.) Without any press, but for me, Caruso spent a recent morning at the Beehive, a new Southside business incubator located amid the detritus of the city’s industrial past. The youthful activity of the startups seemed to energize him. “I want to get on the phone and get investors to come back here—but they won’t if they see instability, the homeless camps, and the crime. That has to change.”

Though he has discarded his designer suit, Caruso cannot help but appear natty with his coiffed hair and monogrammed white shirt. The grandson of Italian immigrants, and son of an entrepreneur who founded Dollar Rent a Car, he started his real estate business here in 1987 and made a fortune worth more than $4 billion by developing shopping complexes, most notably the Grove, adjacent to the iconic Farmer’s Market. A key Caruso theme is restoring the promise that made L.A. the premier urban growth center of the last century, during which the city’s population grew from barely 100,000 in 1900 to nearly 4 million. Now, Los Angeles’s populationis in decline and its appeal has faded. The city peaked at a population of 3,983,000 in 2019, and fell 134,000 to 3,849,000 by 2021, with a 41,000 loss in the last year.

They argued that an upgrade to the crew alerting system would have triggered additional pilot training on simulators and Boeing would then have had no reason to minimize and hide MCAS as it did to avoid extra pilot training. If MCAS had been subject to such scrutiny during certification, the report suggests FAA engineers could well have flagged its design flaws. “The additional training would have likely removed the incentive for Boeing to limit disclosure of the MCAS system, thus making its existence part of the pilot training process and possibly identifying and removing MCAS’s dependence on a single angle-of-attack indicator,” the report states.

Perhaps the biggest impact from the Boudin recall — both politically and practically — is the loss of the most popular scapegoat for frustrations over crime in San Francisco. Removing an easy target of blame could lead to more scrutiny of the San Francisco Police Department, which “solves fewer crimes despite larger staffing per city resident and costs per area patrolled” compared with other California jurisdictions, according to a March report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Boudin repeatedly argued during the campaign that district attorneys can only bring charges when police make arrests. The San Francisco Police Department’s arrest rates have been decreasing for years.

“Were the alliance similarly tested, nato armed forces could find that they, too, have many of the problems Russia has had in Ukraine. It follows that the alliance should not take a dismissive attitude towards Russia”

These patent licenses need transparency. The NIH doled out $32 billion in government grants last year alone, understanding how those grants benefit patent holders, including the NIH itself, is a critical next step in untangling the complicated nexus between pharmacy companies, research institutions, and the federal workforce. 

6.5

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A disaster and a metaphor. What is presented by the government as “controlled” goes wildly out of control.

In a hilly city like Hong Kong, as Cheung points out, the class hierarchy can be literal: “the higher the altitude, the more expensive the apartments”. Both Lim and Cheung struggled with finding affordable housing in the city. The real issue is not how much land there is in Hong Kong but who owns it: the city’s real estate, as well as key sectors such as transportation and telecommunications, are controlled by a handful of family-owned conglomerates. The oligarchical system originated under British rule. Now Beijing relies on the tycoons to advance its agendas, and in turn provides policy conditions favourable to their businesses.

Near-term risk reduction through weapon procurement will provide a significant cost advantage to U.S. and allied forces. An Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyer costs approximately $2 billion to build, not including its weapons or operating costs.12 It could be damaged, disabled, or sunk by a range of Chinese antiship cruise missiles or ballistic missiles. Conversely, a Chinese Type 52 or Type 55 destroyer could be disabled or sunk by a U.S. Long-Range Antiship Missile (LRASM) or a Naval Strike Missile costing approximately $2 million. The math for mines and torpedoes is of the same order of magnitude. While delivering these weapons requires costly assets, surface vessels are among the most cost-ineffective options.13

The time on pilot Norman Schwartz’s Rolex read just before midnight. He had slowed to just above stall speed, and was flying as low as possible over the pitch black forests of northern China, north of the Korean border at the Yalu River. On board his C-47 were CIA officers John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau. Their mission that night: pick up Li Chun Ying, a CIA agent. The CIA was then recruiting agents from anti-Communist guerilla forces, and training them in the use of small arms, radio operations, and demolition, and then sending them into the field to sow as much mayhem as they could.

In the early ’50s, China didn’t have radar-controlled anti-aircraft weapons. This gave covert operations pilots like Schwartz a big advantage because, on a dark night, their planes were largely undetectable. Pilots like Schwartz were accustomed to performing reconnaissance overflights, in addition to dropping propaganda leaflets, using the darkness of night as cover, but this recovery operation was by no means a routine observation mission. 

The C-47 was completely unmarked aside from the tail number, B813. This was a civilian plane. The tail number would identify it, to casual observers, as an everyday airplane, but everyone on board knew exactly who they were working for. Downey and Fecteau were on the CIA payroll, while Schwartz and co-pilot Robert Snoddy were hand-picked out of a crop of civilian pilots recruited to fly for the CIA. The pilots indeed had day jobs, ferrying cargo around Asia for Civil Air Transport (a civilian airline) but sometimes the cargo happened to be anti-Communist guerrilla units or nationalist agents. And you wouldn’t find the landing sites on any commercial aviation map.

The world’s cargo ships, which transport around 90% of global trade, do not always make it to their destination without incident. According to the Safety and Shipping Review by insurance company Allianz, 27 cargo vessels were lost in major incidents during 2021, and 357 during the past decade. They catch fire. They hit rocks, reefs and sand bars. They malfunction. But they don’t always sink. Whenever there’s a chance to rescue a large ship, their owners almost always take it because these vessels can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Italy Is Held Back by 2.6 Million People Who Have Given Up on Work

XEROX PARC’S ENGINEERS ON HOW THEY INVENTED THE FUTURE—AND HOW XEROX LOST IT

Court upholds $573,000 penalty against East Sacramento homeowner who worked on cars in yard

Statistics Norway wants to receive several million daily receipts from food stores, signalling a new era in state data collection. Privacy advocates and the supermarkets themselves are unhappy.


Doug Hitchcox, the staff naturalist at Maine Audubon, gets dozens of emails a day asking him to identify birds: What’s this bird? Can you tell me what this is? “And they’re robins. They’re almost all robins,” he says.

5.29

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Parmigiano Reggiano Makers Are Embedding Tiny Trackers in the Rind to Fight Cheese Fraud

Shortly thereafter, he formally brought one of his top political aides from the campaign onto the DOT payroll. …..But recent federal filings show that Klobuchar, Booker, and Warren are all still spending heavily on digital investments or fund-raising consulting. ….whose associates launched a second political nonprofit for him in February but remain wary of the Chris Christie precedent of overinterpreting state-level success.

Walmart expands its drone-delivery service to reach 4 million households

There were three restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the permanent war economy that no longer exist. The first was the old liberal wing of the Democratic Party, led by politicians such as Senator George McGovern, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator J. William Fulbright, who wrote The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. The self-identified progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress today, from Barbara Lee, who was the single vote in the House and the Senate opposing a broad, open-ended authorization allowing the president to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else, to Ilhan Omar now dutifully line up to fund the latest proxy war. The second restraint was an independent media and academia, including journalists such as I.F Stone and Neil Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour Melman, author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War. Third, and perhaps most important, was an organized anti-war movement, led by religious leaders such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil and Dan Berrigan as well as groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They understood that unchecked militarism was a fatal disease.

An open source (before people really used the term regularly) kit for building a multitasking operating system. Plus a VMS clone and UNIX clone for IBM compatible PCs.

Have a Beginner’s mind. As the new joiner, you get to play the “I’m new here” card. I would take advantage of it and ask as many questions as needed. It’s cliché but it bears repeating that there are no stupid questions. Your fresh perspective is valuable and your questions may nudge the team into better ways of doing things.

So, if you want to increase your chances at success, remember the advice of the late Patrick Winston: Don’t go into battle without your weapon. Practice speaking, writing, and thinking, and use the process above to help you do so.

5.22

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As far back as 1955, county officials tried to get rid of the community at Waldo Point, passing targeted ordinances and harassing the residents. The most common complaint was that the boats discharged raw sewage into the Bay. In 1959, the county attempted to evict 120 boats, but the community fought back. One unnamed houseboater told the San Francisco Chronicle, “We represent one of the last vestiges of the Sausalito that was. The Hill snobs have always fought the Wharf Rats, but I never thought they would go this far.” But that was just the beginning.

Between 1998 and 2021 prices for “Medical Care Services” in the US (as measured by the BLS’s CPI for Medical Care Services) more than doubled (+132.2% increase) while the CPI for “Hospital and Related Services” (data here) more than tripled (+230.4% increase), see the bottom two rows of the table above. Those increases in the costs of medical-related services compared to only a 66.2% increase in overall consumer prices over that period (BLS data here). On an annual basis, the costs of medical care services in the US have increased 3.6% per year since 1998 and the cost of hospital services increased annually by 5.1%. In contrast, overall inflation averaged only 2.1% annually over that period. The only consumer product or service that has increased more than medical care services and just slightly less than hospital costs over the last several decades is college tuition and fees, which have increased nearly 5.0% annually since 1998 for four-year public universities.

Kevin (KAL) Kallaugher Talks Cartooning With Fellow OPC Best Cartoon Winners Rob Rogers And Patrick Chappatte

What explains record U.S. house price growth since late 2019? We show that the shift to remote work explains over one half of the 23.8 percent national house price increase over this period. Using variation in remote work exposure across U.S. metropolitan areas we estimate that an additional percentage point of remote work causes a 0.93 percent increase in house prices after controlling for negative spillovers from migration. This cross-sectional estimate combined with the aggregate shift to remote work implies that remote work raised aggregate U.S. house prices by 15.1 percent. Using a model of remote work and location choice we argue that this estimate is a lower bound on the aggregate effect. Our results imply a fundamentals-based explanation for the recent increases in housing costs over speculation or financial factors, and that the evolution of remote work is likely to have large effects on the future path of house prices and inflation.

Every day Kaspersky automatically processes over 320,000 new malicious files. Only one percent of these need manual work from a security expert, and only a tiny fraction of that 1% go to the company’s top-notch Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT). Those chosen few samples belong to the rarest, most menacing new APTs (advanced persistent threats). Kaspersky Lab’s Targeted Cyberattack Logbook chronicles all of these ground-breaking malicious cybercampaigns that have been investigated by!

So, you see, Ms. Malik, the Texanist can relate to your footgear fanaticism. And while he has no way of knowing exactly where you choose to sport your current boots, he can tell you that the various occasions and events and undertakings for which he might slip into a particular pair of his own boots are wide-ranging: scooting around a dance floor, striding around out in the field, puttering around the house, sitting in the conference room, attending a football game, or socializing at all manner of informal gatherings and soirees.

Rosero’s ghostwriters — known in the industry as chatters — will act as the model in private messages with the customers who pay to talk to her. These chatters work in shifts, responding to incoming messages and reaching out to new subscribers, trying to coax them into buying expensive pay-per-view videos. They tell particular subscribers that a video was recorded just for them; in fact, the same clip might be sold to dozens of people.

Thursday’s release did not break down by demographic traits how good a job the 2020 census did at the state level, but a national report card released in March showed the Black population in the 2020 census had a net undercount of 3.3%, while it was almost 5% for Hispanics and 5.6% for American Indians and Native Alaskans living on reservations. Those identifying as some other race had a net undercount of 4.3%. The non-Hispanic white population had a net overcount of 1.6%, and Asians had a net overcount of 2.6%, according to the results.

Hailing from an archipelago of 7,641 islands in the South China Sea, Filipinos are historically a seafaring people, and their ties to North America date back to before there was even a United States. In 1587 a Spanish galleon landed in Morro Bay, California, with a party that included “Luzon Indios.” In the mid-1760s, Filipino castaways from the Spanish galleons—called Manila men—established a village in the marshlands of Louisiana; Saint Malo was likely the first Asian American settlement in the U.S. Even today, Filipino men and women are employed as sailors and staff in the world’s cargo ships and cruise liners worldwide, more than any other nationality.

On Thursday the bureau published the results of its post-enumeration analysis, which it does after every Census to identify errors in the count. Its study found that 14 states were over- or under-counted by statistically significant margins. Compare that to 2010 when the bureau’s post-hoc analysis found that all the state population counts were more or less accurate. States with large over-counts include Hawaii (6.8%), Delaware (5.5%), Rhode Island (5.1%), Minnesota (3.8%), New York (3.4%), Utah (2.6%), Massachusetts (2.2%) and Ohio (1.5%). Those under-counted by big margins include Arkansas (5%), Tennessee (4.8%), Mississippi (4.1%), Florida (3.5%), Illinois (2%) and Texas (1.9%).

Instead of following the incessant, anti-science groupthink that became part of a virus-induced political religion, Sweden chose instead to not impose the strict lockdowns that Dr. Fauci recently claimed were not tried in the US. Sweden never mandated masks be worn in indoor public spaces, correctly identifying the lack of evidence supporting their use. They kept schools open in defiance of teacher’s unions and politically motivated “experts” in the United States who advocated for a policy with zero benefits and tremendous harms. Essentially, Sweden followed the actual science and not The Science™, with the requisite trademark and capital letters. That would include the guides that were prepared prior to the panic, inaccurate modeling, political motivations and crisis obsession took over.

Robots Are Writing Poetry, and Many People Can’t Tell the Difference

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Carmine Starnino:

When a book of brazenly surrealistic poetry and prose was published in 1984, attributed to a mysterious figure named “Racter,” it was hard to know what to make of it. The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructedwas a fever vision of weirdness. “I need electricity,” declared the poet in a signature moment. “I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber.?/?I need it for my dreams.” That same tone, at once charming and confounding, charged Racter’s aphorisms, limericks, fictional riffs, bits of dialogue, and odd attempts at nursery rhyme (“There once was a ghoulish sad snail”).

Reviews were mixed. Most conceded that nothing like The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed had ever been seen before. But Racter’s patter didn’t always impress. While the strange skips in logic gave off an idiosyncratic energy, the verse also made readers feel like they were eavesdropping on the rantings of a somniloquist. One critic called the 120-page collection “metaphysical poetry as interpreted by William Burroughs and William Blake, with a dyspeptic dash of Rod McKuen and Kahlil Gibran thrown in.” Another critic insisted that Racter’s inscrutable ingenuity revealed not a literary maverick but a “coffeehouse philosopher who knew a great deal once, but whose mind is somewhere else now.” With its bright-red cover, the volume attracted a cult following. Copies soon became scarce, which only added to Racter’s mystique.

5.8

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The Steamboat Inventors: The First Generation

If countless companies are going to benefit from tracking my internet activity, why shouldn’t I?

Much ado has been made about the legality of Florida’s Senate Bill 4C purporting to dissolve Disney’s Reedy Creek Improvement District: whether it was retaliation prohibited by the First Amendment, whether it was passed with sufficient formality, and so on. But there’s a much more basic reason Florida can’t dissolve Reedy Creek—it promised bond purchasers that it wouldn’t.

It’s obvious from this year’s congressional hearings on the defense budget that challenging the Pentagon on core national security issues is a thing of the past. Instead, boosterism is rampant at all levels of seniority, ideologies and parties. This mentality was on display when the Senate Armed Services Committee held its annual review of President Biden’s budget request. In response to Biden’s budget of $827 billion for total national defense spending, a new post-World War II high, a conservative Republican from North Dakota named Kevin Cramer echoed the senior Members when he told Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley that “we hope we can give you a lot more than you asked for.”

Build the political support necessary to free Twitter with the largest airdrop in history.

I don’t know who would enforce the NDAs for Zelensky’s bunker, should loose or treasonous lips give him away. Any perpetrator may well pass with their comrades, under the same fateful bomb, eating the same fateful salo. Presumably, no one without credibility even gets as far as the NDA. But I understand its purpose. It’s beyond my jurisdiction.

The Met Gala is metaphor for all out-of-touch entertainment/media

Next: We’ll dig into the origins of the (dangerous) moral framework used by the swarm and how this swarm might collapse in the future.

ISPs are quietly distributing “netflow” data that can, among other things, trace traffic through VPNs.

“If one party gives a round number, it gives the signal that the party doesn’t really know what it’s doing,” Keloharju says.

By using a reused booster, we were able to move coasts, and we didn’t have to spend a dollar to do it,” he said. Under most circumstances, the government would have had to pay the contractor for the integration work that had already been done, he added. “So I think that when we talk about benefits of a reused booster, we’re talking about taxpayer savings on one end but specifically on this mission, we were able to get a priority of the director of the NRO done while spending zero taxpayer dollars to do it.”

Apple, Google and Microsoft are some of the more active contributors to a passwordless sign-in standard crafted by the FIDO (“Fast Identity Online”) Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), groups that have been working with hundreds of tech companies over the past decade to develop a new login standard that works the same way across multiple browsers and operating systems.

5.1

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We study changes in intergenerational income mobility over time at the local level in the U.S., using data on individuals born in the 1980s. Previous research has found no change in mobility at the national level during this time period, but we show that this hides substantial increases and decreases in mobility at the local level. For children from low-income families, there is convergence in mobility over time, and average differences by region become much smaller. For children from high-income families, the geographic variation in mobility becomes much larger. Our results suggest caution in treating mobility as a fixed characteristic of a place.

The state had the best economic performance of any in the pandemic up to that point, and its students, according to available data, appear to have suffered little to no learning loss. Whereas many states saw a trade-off between health and wealth in the pandemic — often corresponding to more-restrictive Democratic leadership and less-restrictive Republican leadership, respectively — Nebraska also scored above the national average for health outcomes POLITICO evaluated last year (20th of 50 states). Nebraska was the first state to accumulate a 120-day stockpile of PPE in the nationwide scramble for supplies; was a national leader in opening schools; and was among the quickest getting federal aid to small businesses. As of now, its cumulative pandemic death toll per capita is near the lowest of all 50 states, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. This, however, is grading on a hideous curve in a country that hasn’t managed the pandemic well in general: More than 4,000 Nebraskans have lost their lives to Covid. Lawler of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, who helped design the state’s early Covid response but has since grown critical of Nebraska’s approach, notes that South Korea has 14 times lower per capita Covid mortality than Nebraska. “Nobody,” he told me via text, “should be patting themselves on the back for doing 14 [times] worse.”

“My subscriptions went up massively. That’s what’s crazy,” said Joe Rogan. “During the height of it all, I gained 2 million subscribers….”

Every few months, like clockwork, hundreds of videos promising tips and tricks to “hack” your gut flood TikTok. In March, influencers pushed shots of aloe vera juice: “My digestive system, like my gut health? Never been better,” one gushed in a video with one million likes while tapping on a purple bottle of the drink. Another, with the username “oliveoilqueen,” advocated drinking extra virgin olive oil every day in a video viewed more than 3.5 million times, claiming that doing so cleared her skin, made her periods less painful and fixed her frequent bloating. Videos tagged with #guttok have garnered nearly 400 million views. They’re crammed with suggestions for cucumber-ginger juices and boiled apples, bone broth in the morning and sludgy sweet potato soups at night.

Vance recently told an interviewer, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine,” a flick at the fact that he thinks the American-led global order is as much about enriching defense contractors and think-tank types as it is about defending America’s interests. “I do care about the fact that in my community right now the leading cause of death among 18- to 45-year-olds is Mexican fentanyl.” His criticisms of big tech as “enemies of Western civilization” often get lost in the run of Republican outrage over Trump being kicked off Twitter and Facebook, though they go much deeper than this. Vance believes that the regime has sold an illusive story that consumer gadgets and social media are constantly making our lives better, even as wages stagnate and technology feeds an epidemic of depression.