Why does Germany need a spaceport? “It is true for more and more industries: If you are not at the forefront in space, you will not be a technology leader on Earth,” BDI President Siegfried Russwurm said.

The year is 1518. Mexico-Tenochtitlan, once an unassuming settlement in the middle of Lake Texcoco, now a bustling metropolis. It is the capital of an empire ruling over, and receiving tribute from, more than 5 million people. Tenochtitlan is home to 200.000 farmers, artisans, merchants, soldiers, priests and aristocrats. At this time, it is one of the largest cities in the world. Today, we call this city Ciudad de Mexico – Mexico City.

In a new report, the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) examined numbers from Statistics Canada and found that the country has 100,000 fewer entrepreneurs than it did 20 years ago — despite the fact that the population has grown by more than 10 million over the same period.

For the past 25 years or so, websites, news outlets, blogs and many others with a URL that wanted to get attention have used search engine optimization, or SEO, to “convince” search engines to share their content as high as possible in the results they provide to readers. This has helped drive traffic to their sites and has also spawned an industry of consultants and marketers who advise on how best to do that.

“So that’s the difference,” he adds. “They [the Americans] were security-centric, military-oriented. The Chinese are economic centric, development-oriented.”

Elon Musk seems to agree. Earlier this week, the Tesla boss warned of “enormous challenges in reaching volume production” on the model, which was first unveiled four years ago. “This is simply normal?.?.?.?when you’ve got a product with a lot of new technology or any brand-new vehicle programme, but especially one that is as different and advanced as the Cybertruck,” he told investors. “We dug our own grave.”

Data also shows that despite billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies, companies like AT&T have long refused to upgrade low-income and minority Cleveland neighborhoods to fiber. These companies not only engage in this deployment “redlining,” but data also makes it clear they often charge these low income and minority neighborhoods more money for the same or slower broadband.

How did Wang become a literary icon in a country famed for its constraint? It helped that he was adroit at crafting narratives just oblique enough to elude the censors. But the political context was also crucial. After the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, in 1989, the Communist Party had risked falling into oblivion, behind its comrades in Moscow. It survived by offering the Chinese people a grand but pragmatic bargain: personal space in return for political loyalty. The Party leader Deng Xiaoping broke with the orthodoxy of the Mao era; he called for “courageous experiments” to insure that China would not be like “a woman with bound feet.” Soon, new N.G.O.s were lobbying for the rights of women and ethnic minorities, and foreign investors were funding startups, including Alibaba and Tencent, that grew into some of the wealthiest companies on earth. Young people were trying on new identities; I met a Chinese band that played only American rock, though their repertoire was so limited that they sang “Hotel California” twice a night. Above all, the Party sought to project confidence: Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, visited the New York Stock Exchange, in 1997, rang the opening bell, and boomed, in English, “I wish you good trading!”

Developer productivity can be a tricky concept to define. Performance metrics specialist Swarmia describes it as systematically eliminating anything that gets in the way of delivery. And, in a world where agile methods have long taught us that you can’t improve what you can’t measure, you first have to identify blockers before you can remove them. To do this, McKinsey has chosen to build on two popular engineering metrics frameworks: DORA and SPACE.

The first thing the Texts team will do at Automattic, it seems, is finish its mobile app. “To do this on mobile with push notifications, and efficient battery, and everything, is pretty tricky,” Mullenweg says. “But I think we’ve cracked it in a way that maintains all the end-to-end encryption, and where Automattic has no access to your keys, your anything.” Right now, Texts is a $15 a month power-user tool, but Mullenweg says that could change over time. “There might be some limited free version in the future,” he says. “But if you’re serious about this, you’ll want the paid — for less than like the price of one streaming service or two cups of coffee a month, you’ll get something that you’ll be able to use for hours a day.”

Over the past 5 years, we have conducted a study on public confidence in American institutions in part to answer questions like this. The American Institutional Confidence poll (“AIC”) is a nationally representative panel survey asking respondents about their confidence in different institutions, as well as their general support for democracy and various democratic norms. Over this time, we have had the opportunity to ask individuals how they feel broadly about technology’s role in their life and their confidence in particular tech companies. In doing so, we discovered a marked decrease in the confidence Americans profess for technology and, specifically, tech companies—greater and more widespread than for any other type of institution. In the remainder of this piece, we document this precipitous drop in faith between 2018 and 2021, illustrate where it came from and was most heavily concentrated, and discuss why it matters.

Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom

All these calls cost a lot of money. The rate varied, but it averaged about $4 for every 15 minutes in Connecticut during Jovaan’s incarceration. They often talked four times a day, the maximum allowed. The charges added up quickly. Every Friday, when Lewis collected her paycheck, the first thing she did was deposit money in Jovaan’s phone account. Many months, she had to pick: the calls or her other bills? “You always choose your kid,” she told me, even if it meant an empty stomach or talking to her son in the dark because her power was shut off.

Gov. Kathy Hochul reportedly authorized payment of nearly $2 million in taxpayer money for outside ghostwriters to help draft her State of the State speeches. Most of the money was paid to Deloitte Consulting and the Boston Consulting Group to help the state’s first female governor shape her vision, according to the New York Times.

Idemitsu Kosan, Japan’s second-largest oil refiner, may seem like an unlikely partner for the EV space. But Toyota says Idemitsu has been working on developing the “elemental technologies” for the batteries since 2001, five years before Toyota began pursuing them in 2006.

“The one message I want to convey today is that you will have missed the most frightening aspect of it all, if you do not appreciate that it happened in one of the most educated, most progressive, most cultured countries in the world.”

This video shows that everything Jamaal Bowman and his supporters said about this incident was a lie. Anyway, moving on…

X has released some highlights after one year of @elonmusk ownership.

• Users: 7.8B+ active minutes on X per day. Avg user spends more than 32 minutes per day on X.
• 1.5M avg signups per day
• Since mid-May, all major agencies have reversed their pause guidance against advertising on X. Last quarter alone over 1,700 advertisers returned to X, including 90 of the top 100 ad spenders from a year ago.
• Over half a billion people come to X every month
• Over 200 new products and features shipped post-acquisition with a significantly smaller team
• Paid out more than $20 million to creator community
• Community Notes now has over 100K contributors in 44 countries

Morris Chang, 92, said that cutting off China’s chip industry from the rest of the world would affect other players beyond China. “I think that decoupling will ultimately slow down everybody. Of course, the immediate purpose is to slow China down, and I think it’s doing that,” Chang said.

As the source said, there was a lot of “self-inflicted pain by the corporate defendants.” Let me quote my source again:

You could tell none of the tapes of the corporate folks and their scripts played well with them. The tape of Gino Blefari telling his story on how to script commissions played horribly in the room. It felt smarmy, with the clip they played. I wasn’t there for the Tom Ferry tape this week, which was a nightmare – and turned out not to have been admitted into evidence.

One of the more important pre-trial rulings and decisions was the one the plaintiffs made not to have over 600 telephone calls from REX introduced… except as a counter. Here’s the relevant page from the filing:

But you should also get to a jurisdiction that doesn’t have a sovereign debt crisis. And where property rights are respected.

George Soros 1998 60 minutes interview.

Nikon small world competition.

Testimony in the trial revealed that Google spent a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in multiple browsers, phones, and platforms.

The judge was hostile to the Deplorable lady, and she told the defendant to stop sharing her political views, but ultimately couldn’t find a basis to rule in favor of the plaintiffs.

What have we seen in the past few weeks? Muslim immigrants to the U.S., whose right to settle here was pushed by the ADL, rallying and pointing out that the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) is not a terrorist organization, but the Israeli government and all supporters of Israel are (video). Twitter and Facebook jammed with anti-Israel content. A young woman in a hijab in NYC and her friend giving the finger to a billboard truck advocating for the return of hostages held by Hamas (video). Depending on your political point of view, you might agree with these anti-Israel positions, but I think that everyone can agree this is not what the ADL was trying to accomplish.

The absence of a major tax is a common factor among many of the top 10 states. Property taxes and unemployment insurance taxes are levied in every state, but there are several states that do without one or more of the major taxes: the corporate income tax, the individual income tax, or the sales tax. Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming have no corporate or individual income tax (though Nevada imposes gross receipts taxes); Alaska has no individual income or state-level sales tax; Florida has no individual income tax; and New Hampshire and Montana have no sales tax. This does not mean, however, that a state cannot rank in the top 10 while still levying all the major taxes. Indiana and Utah, for example, levy all the major tax types but do so with low rates on broad bases.

In a world that seems inexorably drawn towards an all-electric future, Toyota has consistently taken a different road. The Japanese automaker remains skeptical about an exclusive reliance on electric vehicles (EVs). While it’s true that Toyota has some exciting EVs in the pipeline for the upcoming year, they are also actively exploring alternative energy sources. However, a recent development could potentially turn the tables on the EV revolution — an ammonia-powered engine for passenger vehicles. An ammonia engine is a type of internal combustion engine that uses ammonia as its primary fuel source. What makes ammonia unique is its composition, consisting of one nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms. The absence of carbon atoms in ammonia translates to the absence of carbon dioxide emissions during combustion. This distinct characteristic is why ammonia engines are viewed as a promising solution to combat pollution.

Such innovations have propelled the family-owned toymaker to become one of Europe’s biggest corporate success stories of the past decade. Lego, with essentially just one product in endless iterations, has raced past Mattel and Hasbro — the listed US companies with stables of hundreds of different toy brands — to become by far the biggest toymaker in the world by sales, and on a different level altogether in terms of profits.

The year is 2007 and Ralph Baric of UNC Chapel-Hill is giving a presentation on the new and exciting science behind synthetically creating the SARS virus and making it more pathogenic.

Most recently, during the last two decades, the Soyuz-FG rocket launched cargo and crew missions from Gagarin’s Start, which is located on the Kazakhstan steppe near the small city of Baikonur. The final launch from the site took place in September 2019, with the Soyuz MS-15 mission carrying Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, and United Arab Emirates astronaut Hazza Al Mansouri to the International Space Station.

In recent months, according to SpaceX, its programs have had to compete with one another for reviews at the FAA. This has significantly slowed down the Starship program and put development of a Human Landing System for NASA’s Artemis program at risk. Inefficient regulation, the officials said, is decreasing American competitiveness as space programs in China and elsewhere around the world rise. The discussion with Ars was convened by SpaceX in advance of a hearing on Wednesday before the US Subcommittee on Space and Science, at which William Gerstenmaier, vice president of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX, will be one of the people testifying. SpaceX hopes that Congress will provide guidance to the FAA on how to operate more efficiently.

The result is a leaf blower that emits just 45 decibels of noise at 50 feet and full throttle. In comparison, gas leaf blowers emit between 70-90 decibels of sound at the same condition, while the quietest electric leaf blowers on the market emit around 57-59 decibels.

Windows Longhorn and the Worst Code I’ve Ever Seen: Dave Cutler

Bacteria from the genus Coprococcus, which are associated with healthy aging, were significantly reduced in Alzheimer’s patients. They also had significantly more bacteria from the Desulfovibriogenus than cognitively healthy controls, similar to past research in animal models of Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease.

Peter Easton, an accounting professor at the University of Notre Dame brought in by the prosecution, says user deposits were reinvested into businesses and real estate, used to make political contributions, and donated to charity, reports CoinDesk Thursday.

Ten years ago today, on Friday, October 18, 2013, the effort to fix HealthCare.gov began in earnest. At 7:15 A.M. Eastern time, a small group assembled next to the entrance to the West Wing of the White House. The group included Todd Park, Brian Holcomb, Gabriel Burt, Ryan Panchadsaram, Greg Gershman, and myself. Later in the day we were joined by Mikey Dickerson via a long-running speakerphone call. Some of us were from outside of government (Gabe, Brian, Mikey, and me), and the others had jobs in government at the time (Todd, Ryan, and Greg). What we all had in common was that we were experienced technologists, having been at startups or at large established technology organizations.

I do think that after decades of Iraq and Syria, financial crisis and coronavirus, inflation and deindustrialization, that the DC regime has lost the Mandate of Heaven. They inherited a hyperpower in 1991 and squandered perhaps the largest advantage in human history in just 30 years.

6) As a concrete example, Raytheon — a defense contractor! — admits that it can’t build without China.[2] That means the US military itself is made in China. And you can’t fight your factory.

We launched the widget on Android in March, which was a big engineering challenge since Android widgets can look and perform differently depending on the version and device type. And for our learners on iOS, we added a new type of widget learners can add to their lock screen that tracks their streak:

Blackmagic Camera unlocks the power of your iPhone by adding Blackmagic’s digital film camera controls and image processing! Now you can create the same cinematic ‘look’ as Hollywood feature films. You get the same intuitive and user friendly interface as Blackmagic Design’s award winning cameras

Matt Pottinger: “Courting China — as the Biden administration has done recently by sending senior officials to visit — gives “the wrong signal”. More to the point, Pottinger says, “[Beijing] treated them not all that well. [Treasury secretary] Janet Yellen was fed psychedelic mushrooms at a lunch. [Commerce secretary] Gina Raimondo — the moment she was leaving, [Huawei released a phone that] managed to subvert the export controls she’d put in place. [Climate envoy] John Kerry could barely even get a meeting. While John Kerry was in China [in July], Xi Jinping hosted Henry Kissinger for an intimate chat, but would have nothing to do with President Biden’s emissary. China is giving every indication that they view us as weak right now.” “Like President Reagan used to say, you can really get a lot done in Washington DC if you’re willing to give someone else the credit.” more.

The Lotus team showed Jobs an early prototype. “Steve Jobs thought it was the coolest thing ever,” Salas, now a professor at Brandeis University, tells Quartz. Jobs then convinced Lotus to develop the pivot table software exclusively for the NeXT computer. The software came out as Lotus Improv, and though the NeXT computer was a commercial failure, Lotus Improv would be hugely influential. The “flexible views” aspect of Improv would be built into both Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel (the latter was the first to actually use the term “pivot table”).

Nearly a decade after the selling of the Iran deal, it’s much easier now for Americans to see that it was the origin point in a series of hugely consequential lies that have shaped our country at home as surely as they have shaped the lives of people in the Middle East. They lied about Obama’s successor being a Russian spy to delegitimize the government and divide the country, in the hope of removing an elected president from office. They lied about an “insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021, to justify designating one half of the country as domestic terrorists, in order to put their political opponents in jail. They’ve lied about so many things because they’re certain that their communications infrastructure—where intelligence officers direct big tech and censor what was once America’s independent press—will shape the “information space” on their behalf, effectively controlling what we see, hear, and read. They first built their echo chamber to sell the idea that the Iran deal would stop Iran from getting a bomb; now the echo chamber is everywhere—a high-tech version of how the press is run in countries like Egypt, or Iran.

Photographer Christopher Dodd gets accidentally locked inside Tempelhof Airport…

Want to hear a new Steely Dan song? Well, it’s actually a 50-year-old song that was recently uncovered. And it’s not so much a “song” as it is an extended jingle. Oh, and that 109-second composition is about Schlitz. Still want to hear it? Of course you do.

The hardest thing about night photography is that you can’t see anything you’re shooting until after you’ve shot it. If there is a mountain in the distance that you want in the shot, you have to know where it is ahead of time. Our planet is always rotating, so if you’re wasting darkness time getting a perfectly composed foreground, the night sky will have moved by the time you’re ready. Preparation in daylight is essential.

For someone of his wealth, it’s unusual to not have myriad of estate planning done to avoid probate, keep affairs private, and to help out with incapacity. I can only suspect that because of his networth, his lawyers, associates, friends and family had inquired and encouraged estate planning, but that he made the decision to not put any plans in place. Nobody knows when they will die, but they nonetheless likely have the knowledge that their assets are well beyond the federal estate tax exemptions.

Home Assistant is disappointed that Mazda has decided to take this position. We’re also sad that Mazda’s first recourse was not to reach out to us and the maintainer but to send a cease and desist letter instead.

In this context, what distinguishes Banks’s work is that he imagines a scenario in which technological development has also driven changes in the social structure, such that the social and political challenges people confront are new. Indeed, Banks distinguishes himself in having thought carefully about the social and political consequences of technological development. For example, once a society has semi-intelligent drones that can be assigned to supervise individuals at all times, what need is there for a criminal justice system? Thus in the Culture, an individual who commits a sufficiently serious crime is assigned – involuntarily – a “slap drone,” who simply prevents that person from committing any crime again. Not only does this reduce recidivism to zero, the prospect of being supervised by a drone for the rest of one’s life also serves as a powerful deterrent to crime.
This is an absolutely plausible extrapolation from current trends – even just looking at how ankle monitoring bracelets work today. But it also raises further questions. For instance, once there is no need for a criminal justice system, one of the central functions of the state has been eliminated. This is one of the social changes underlying the political anarchism that is a central feature of the Culture. There is, however, a more fundamental postulate. The core feature of Banks’s universe is that he imagines a scenario in which technological development has freed culture from all functional constraints – and thus, he imagines a situation in which culture has become purely memetic. This is perhaps the most important idea in his work, but it requires some unpacking.

Jeffrey Paul:

Please take the time to go to Berlin, and visit the Stasi museum, if you think my warnings about the potential for abuse by the FBI when they are not constrained by the need for probable cause or search warrants are overblown.

This is the same FBI that wrote Martin Luther King Jr. anonymous letters telling him to kill himself.

Presently, the US government is accessing the full content of around seventy thousand(!) Apple accounts per year (as of 2022) without a search warrant, per Apple’s own transparency report. The numbers are much higher when you include warrants issued with probable cause.

Francesca Block:

One sentence in a blog post almost ruined Thomas Smith’s career.

“If you believe that the coronavirus did not escape from the lab in Wuhan, you have to at least consider that you are an idiot who is swallowing whole a lot of Chinese cock swaddle,” commented Smith, 65, a law professor at the University of San Diego.

He wrote it back in 2021, in a piece questioning the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic on his personal legal blog, which usually received only a few hundred visitors per day. 

But the backlash was swift. Smith estimates 60 students submitted a formal complaint to the administration and accused him of being racist, using derogatory language, and promoting conspiracy theories with “detrimental consequences.” Smith later updated his post to clarify that his ire was directed at the Chinese government, not its people.

A week later, Robert Schapiro, the dean of San Diego’s law school, announced an investigation into Smith in an email to the student body, stressing that “University policies specifically prohibit harassment, including the use of epithets, derogatory comments, or slurs based on race or national origin.”

Newsweek has also reviewed secret FBI and Department of Homeland Security data that track incidents, threats, investigations and cases to try to build a better picture. While experts agree that the current partisan environment is charged and uniquely dangerous (with the threat not only of violence but, in the most extreme scenarios, possibly civil war), many also question whether “terrorism” is the most effective way to describe the problem, or that the methods of counterterrorism developed over the past decade in response to Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups constitute the most fruitful way to craft domestic solutions. “The current political environment is not something that the FBI is necessarily responsible for, nor should it be,” says Brian Michael Jenkins, one of the world’s leading terrorism experts and senior adviser to the president of the RAND Corporation.

I am not envious of the team designing Apple’s Camera app. It has to be one app that does everything, and with every new iPhone that adds even more capabilities, that camera app runs the risk of getting heavier and more complex. However, this year they managed to integrate the new 28mm and 35mm quite well.

According to the report, when adjusting for inflation, tech salaries plunged to their lowest point in the past five years, decreasing 9% from $141,000 to $129,000 from 2022 to mid-2023. Additionally, salaries experienced their most significant year-over-year decline, dropping by 3% from $161,000 to $156,000. However, despite economic volatility, job seekers in the U.S. maintained their salary expectations at around $146,000.

Insurance companies acknowledged challenges in maintaining their directories, saying they struggle to get providers’ help in updating listings. Some support creating a national directory to ease the burden and give insurers and providers a single place where they can update and verify information.

In this paper, we study the relationship between stock fund managers’ facial attractiveness and fund outcomes. Utilizing the state-of-art deep learning technique to quantify facial attractiveness, we find that funds with facial unattractive managers outperform funds with attractive managers by over 2% per annum. We next show that good-looking managers attract significant higher fund flow especially if the funds are available on Fintech platforms where their photos are accessible to investors. Good-looking managers also have greater chance of promotion and tend to move to small firms. The potential explanations for their underperformance include inadequate ability, insufficient effort, overconfidence and inefficient site visits.

Now is the opportunity to be creative and explore divergent UIs.

Herzog lives with his wife Lena, a photographer, in Los Angeles, but at a remove from Hollywood—both conceptually and literally. When he is not traveling for his films, he teaches a kind of guerrilla filmmaking at his roving Rogue Film School, launched in 2009. He says that it is easier than ever to work on the cheap—“you can make a 90-minute cinema-quality documentary for $20,000”—and argues against taking office jobs. “Work in a slaughterhouse, work as a guard in a lunatic asylum, work where real life is happening, at its densest,” he says. “The only thing I teach is how to open a safety lock with a set of surgical tools, or how to forge documents like shooting permits, without which many of my films would not have happened.”

Claire Bryan:

Next to an atrium filled with historic airplanes at the Museum of Flight, Boeing celebrated hiring more than a thousand Washington high school graduates from the Core Plus Aerospace program on Tuesday morning.

The thousandth graduate milestone comes at a time when demand for Boeing’s jetliners is highafter the pandemic, said Scott Stocker, vice president of manufacturing and safety for Boeing commercial airplanes, who spoke at the event. 

And across the state, Boeing and other companies are hungry for new employees as the baby-boom generation leaves the workforce, said state Superintendent Chris Reykdal. 

The two-year program teaches high schoolers how to build airplanes. For eight years, it’s been training students on their high school campus or at a nearby skills center how to drill, counter sink, install rivets, read blueprints, do precision measurements and more.

These jobs pay a good wage — the first thousand students are collectively making about $100 million in salary and benefits annually, said Reykdal. That works out to an average of $100,000 per graduate.

“It turns out we still have to build stuff,” said Reykdal, who came up from Olympia for the event. “We still have to create, we still have to fabricate and connect. We’re still living in a physical world. … It doesn’t fly without assembly, it doesn’t roll without assembly.”

The program gets state support. The Washington Legislature passed a law in 2015 that budgets funds annually for schools to launch and expand Core Plus programs. School districts can apply for money for equipment for the classes and to train teachers on the Core Plus Aerospace curriculum.

The U.S. has sent more than $70 billion worth of aid to Ukraine since Russian troops crossed its border last year. But now a battle is brewing in Washington over the Biden administration’s request for over $20 billion more.

This “relocate or resign” policy bears an uncanny resemblance to AT&T’s June ultimatum to its employees, which has raised several eyebrows and suspicions of a covert layoff strategy. It’s not uncommon for corporations to use intricate and complex language to obscure their actions and intentions. In this case, the seemingly straightforward phrase “relocate or resign” could be a smoke screen concealing an attempt to shrink workforce numbers without the accompanying negative press that mass layoffs invariably attract.

Obviously, text editing on mobile is possible as millions do it every day. My point isn’t that “it’s impossible” but a much more subtle “it’s much harder than we think”. Many of you will just say “get a grip grandpa, it’s not that bad” and dismiss my concerns. But keep in mind that most text created on mobile is short and low effort, usually messages and social media comments. Editing is rarely needed so this friction doesn’t matter so much. I’ve also had many people tell me of students writing entire papers on their phone. That’s right, it’s possible! Lots of people run marathons too, that doesn’t mean everyone is able to.

It’s too bad, because I’d like mobile to grow and be even more productive than desktops are today. But the way we’re going, we’ll be editing text this way for the next 20 years at least. Do we really want this? Too bad text editing is an invisible problem no one appreciates.

But not everyone is as bullish about AlphaFold revolutionizing drug discovery — at least, not yet. In a paper published in eLife the day before Recursion’s announcement¹, a team of scientists at Stanford University in California showed that AlphaFold’s prowess at predicting protein structures doesn’t yet translate into solid leads for ligand binding.

Finally, on the flip side, when in doubt about the legality of an image posted online, it never hurts to ask the creator before lashing out or making unsubstantiated claims in a public forum. In real life, calmly ask rather than accuse someone of operating illegally in front of a ‘No Drone Zone’ sign. A little civility goes a long way. Hopefully, all this information clears up the misconception of the ‘No Drone Zone’ sign for both sides.

Upon my return to the United States from a trip to Japan, I was directed to a secondary inspection room where I was presented with a Grand Jury subpoena by officers from the IRS-CI and DHS. The subpoena required me to appear in New York to provide testimony for wire fraud. ?

While they’ve seen some beautiful places, it’s the people they met that they said they would remember the most. “Some of the towns we stopped in weren’t that interesting, but the people we met are what is most important to us,” Michael said. “A handful said we must be crazy for going on a trip like this,” Martina said. But then others asked if they could come along with them, she added.

“A medieval university city such as Oxford had a deadly mix of conditions,” says criminologist Manuel Eisner, lead murder map investigator and Director of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology. “Oxford students were all male and typically aged between fourteen and twenty-one, the peak for violence and risk-taking. These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild, and thrust into an environment full of weapons, with ample access to alehouses and sex workers.”

The Skype team concluded that they needed the protection of a bigger partner and sold the company to eBay for $2.6bn in 2005. Zennström made even more money a few years later by participating in an investment consortium that bought Skype back from eBay and flipped it to Microsoft for $8.5bn in 2011, making him a billionaire.

Maximalism can be seen as the inverse of wokeness: a cultural movement in the form of an economic movement. It’s about owning guns, lifting weights, and eating steak as much as it’s about Bitcoin.

The charge was filed in a document known as an information, a type of document that prosecutors usually use if a defendant is expected to plead guilty to the charges. Littlejohn and his lawyer, Lisa Manning, declined to comment.

It’s still far too hard to learn what many hospital procedures cost. Laws can help, but public pressure is also necessary.

Over the past 40 years, betting against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been a fool’s game. But today, China’s development model faces its most formidable test. During Xi Jinping’s ten years in power, he has overseen major economic and political changes that threaten to undermine the key drivers of China’s success during the “reform and opening up” era. Instead of an open, pragmatic, and experimental approach to development, Xi has turned to national security, ideology, and top-down directives to realize his “China Dream” of national rejuvenation.

What are the rules of the rules-based order?

Some key takeaways from Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk:

1. The only unbreakable rules are the laws of physics. Every other rule or restriction was put in place by a person, and people are idiots. Progress means questioning every rule and seemingly arbitrary guideline. If you aren’t re-writing the rulebook, then there’s no hope of ever beating the status quo.

The government passed a law, so they buy your software, (Epic) they get money. It’d make it a lot easier.

All right, two really good stories. You might not even believe them, because they’re so outlandish. Does everyone know who Epic is? It’s hard to know, because they’re not public. It’s a very large private company in Wisconsin that is the largest player in EHR software, medical records. And this is their CEO, Judith Faulkner. Now, in, get the year right, 2009, Obama put her on his Health IT Council. She was the only corporate representative. Should not surprise you that she’s a major donor to Obama.

Now, Obama passed the American Recovery Act, that was his big piece of stimulus, kind of like Biden’s inflation act that happened recently, and tucked underneath that, easy to hide in this big bill, is an act that was, the acronym’s HITECH, it’s this health information technology thing. And then they created an agency called ONC that oversaw it. Now, this is the part you’re not gonna believe. They came up with a brilliant idea. I have to assume she helped encourage this. Doctors would receive $44,000 each if they bought software. $38 billion. This is true, you can look it up. I’m not making it up. $44,000, give it to a doctor, implement some software. For many of you who run companies, that’d be pretty cool, right? The government passed a law, so they buy your software, they get money. It’d make it a lot easier.

Now, you may be thinking, Are doctors needy? But here’s the catch. You remember, this happened because of the mortgage meltdown. Doctors own multiple homes, so they have multiple mortgages, so they probably needed the assistance. Now, there’s two more things about this act that are also unbelievable. First, there’s a flaw. If someone said you’re gonna pay people to buy software, most people would be like, Well, you’re gonna have a problem. They’re gonna buy it and they’re not going to use it, right? Well, they thought of that. So guess what? The second phase, doctors got paid 17,000 more dollars to prove they were using it. It was called Meaningful Use. Plastered all over the website of all the EHR vendors at the time. It gets even better! So the the ONC decided the threshold of features you would need for your software to comply with this mandate. And I’m assuming they kind of took Epic’s feature set and plowed it into this spreadsheet. But they got the Department of Justice to enforce people that didn’t have the feature set that were getting the payments.

And you had three record fines. 155mn, 57mn, 145mn, against the lesser competitors of Epic. Unreal.

If you’ve studied the innovator’s dilemma, the way startups disrupt is they come in with lower feature products, but a feature that really matters to the customer in a simpler product, and they move up.

They put a brick wall there, so you couldn’t come up. It’s just amazing.

Obama, in an interview with Ezra Klein, said this was the most disappointing part of Obamacare. I mean, I think if any of us were in the room when they scratched this thing out, I could have told him it would have failed. I mean, paying people to do stuff is just… it’s not going to work.

Now you may ask, am I am I unhappy with Judith? I’m disgusted with it.

But, but, if I were a judge in the Olympic regulatory capture competition, I’m giving her a 10! This is fantastic. Fantastic!

In another way, though, the Replicator initiative is a radical departure from business as usual in the Department of Defense. It is meant to accelerate the invention of military technology in order to change the way the United States fights wars and practices deterrence. Replicator, Hicks declared, would “field attritable autonomous systems at scale of multiple thousands in multiple domains within the next eighteen to twenty-four months.” As she envisions it, there will be “constellations” of these systems “flung into space, scores at a time”; pods of small, solar-propelled boats outfitted with sensors, trawling the ocean and relaying real-time intelligence; and “flocks” of aerial drones, some conducting surveillance and others carrying weapons. Instead of concentrating Defense Department resources on exorbitantly expensive and complicated equipment, which would have to be operational for decades to justify the cost, Replicator aims to deploy equipment with a much shorter shelf life, allowing for constant reinvention of technologies.

No matter how slick and stylized you make it, and no matter what your experience ultimately is, your resume is just a handy little cheat sheet you’re going to need for different reasons. Applying for a job on an employer’s website amounts to transcribing everything — top to bottom, line by line, everything—from your resume over to their application form. Yep, that’s right: you have to re-type everything on your resume nearly every single time. I don’t know about you, but when you do that once or twice in a row, I’m sure as hell not in a French-accent mood.

This boy, orphaned and mutilated on a savage morning in 1382, would by 1405 become the second most powerful man in the world’s largest and most advanced nation, the commanding Admiral of the Western Seas who strides through the Ming scroll photocopy that sits on my desk as I write. He would become the greatest seafarer in the 5,000-year annals of China.

Frog season in Louisiana runs year-round, with the exception of April and May, when it closes to allow the amphibians to breed undisturbed. While it’s possible to catch frogs all year, Jody says late winter and early fall are best. Late winter is good because the lilies haven’t greened up yet and it’s easy to spot the frogs. Late summer and early fall are good because the water in the Atchafalaya Basin falls, concentrating the frogs. Ideally, you want days that are warm but not too warm, followed by nights that are cool but not too cool. “Frogs feed on the crawfish under the lilies right after dusk,” Jody explains. “When they’re full, they float to the surface and kind of lie there.” Today we had a daytime high in the mid-eighties, which should drop to the mid-sixties after dark. Jody reckons we should have excellent frogging. A friend of his caught more than two hundred the other night and sold them for two dollars apiece.

As companies grow and as they go public, a consolidation of this information happens. Still, engineers still have access to business data for their organization that helps guide their decision making.
At traditional companies, much of this does not exist. Engineers get the spec, and the higher ups will know why something is decided – at least, that’s the idea.

Overall, the results from both empirical strategies suggest that tea was associated with larger declines in mortality rates in areas that had worse water quality to begin with. To provide further support for the mechanism behind these relationships, namely, boiled water, I use cause-specific death data from London to show that higher tea imports curbed deaths from water-borne diseases such as dysentery, but did not significantly affect deaths that were not directly linked to water quality . Thus, the totality of the results point to the importance of tea, and in particular the boiling of water, in reducing mortality rates across England during this important period in economic development.

According to Appelbaum: “Many journalists who have worked on the Snowden archive know significantly more than they have revealed in public. It is in this sense that the Snowden archive has almost completely failed to create change: many of the backdoors and sabotage unknown to us before 2013 is still unknown to us today.”

That’s because the Universal Product Code (UPC) — the barcode used on every product in grocery and retail stores all over the globe — changed everything 50 years ago. Barcodes are scanned billions of times each day, and award-winning engineer Paul McEnroe, who spent more than two decades in leadership roles at IBM, assembled and led the team that transformed the technology from an idea into the reality that endures.

Months after Ángel García Padrón fixed a German journalist’s MacBook Pro in his small Havana repair shop, she sent him an email. García Padrón had mended her waterlogged laptop after her home in Cuba flooded, but when the journalist took it to an official Apple Store in Berlin, the authorized repair person had expressed disbelief, saying there was no trace of any water damage at all. “Then my Cuban repairman must be a magician,” she recounted telling the Apple worker. García Padrón is used to conjuring these sorts of tricks on a daily basis — the skills required to deal with Apple products in Cuba require a special sort of magic.

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.

Over the past 40 years of American politics, college-educated white voters have defected from the Republican Party, while the white working class has become a reliable source of Republican support. I study the issue basis of this realignment. To do so, I generate over-time estimates of public opinion on four broad issue domains from 1984 to 2020 and develop a theoretical framework to understand how issue attitudes translate into electoral coalitions. Using this framework, I find that both economic and cultural issues have contributed to the observed realignment. College-educated white voters have become increasingly liberal on economic issues since the mid-2000s; college- educated voters now express more liberal views than working class voters on every issue domain. Over the same time period, cultural issues have become more important for the voting decisions of the working class. The increasing weight placed on non-economic issues means that the conservative cultural attitudes of white working class voters translate to Republican support at a higher rate than in the past. Together, these findings suggest a nuanced role for economic and cultural issues in structuring political coalitions. Educational realignment has deep roots across issue domains, suggesting that the new coalitions are likely to be stable into the foreseeable future

SpaceX launched its 67th rocket of the year on Tuesday night, a staggering total for the company and its workhorse booster, the Falcon 9. At this pace, a clip of one launch every four days, the company is likely to launch 90 or more rockets during this calendar year. This Starlink satellite launch was notable for a couple of other reasons. It marked the first time SpaceX has reused a Falcon 9 first stage 17 times. This booster, serial number 1058, had previously flown 11 previous Starlink missions along with GPS III-3, Turksat 5A, Transporter-2, Intelsat G-33/G-34, and Transporter-6.

Moreover, even if a Republican *could* recapture the presidency, they’d be stuck with the flaming bag of dog poop that is DC’s financial position — $33T+ of debt and counting[1]. And you actually don’t want to be at the helm when this thing crashes.[2]. So, if Republicans were smart, they’d understand what areas they’re strong on, and focus there, rather than putting all their hopes on Hail Mary passes for national control.

In 1940, only five years after Dukas’s death, Walt Disney and Leopold Stokowski collaborated on a short animated film starring Mickey Mouse as the mischievous apprentice who, weary of toting water buckets through his master’s underground workshop, waits until the master has retired for the night, then dons his magical cap and enchants a humble broom to do the job.

Our updated generative AI market map is below. Unlike last year’s map, we have chosen to organize this map by use case rather than by model modality. This reflects two important thrusts in the market: Generative AI’s evolution from technology hammer to actual use cases and value, and the increasingly multimodal nature of generative AI applications.

In such a state of affairs, many years ago and with much that was plainly wrong already present, the “New Coke” fiasco occurred, wherein Coke’s executives came to the brink of destroying the most valuable trademark in the world. The academically correct reaction to this immense and well-publicized fiasco would have been the sort of reaction Boeing would display if three of its new airplanes crashed in a single week. After all, product integrity is involved in each case, and the plain educational failure was immense.

“At that time (1909) the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation.”

In my view, pharmaceuticals are undervalued and underinvested in because, despite high prices, pharmaceutical innovations earn only a fraction of the value that they create (Nordhaus finds that in general that innovations reap only a small share of the gains that they create). In 2014, for example, we got Harvoni a new treatment that offered a complete cure for hepatitis C (HCV) infection. In 2014, Harvoni cost over $1000 a pill and between $60,000 and $100,000 for a full treatment. In 2015 Medicaid spent more on Harvoni than on any other drug and there were calls for regulation and price controls. Studies showed, however, that even at that high price, Harvoni was value/cost-effective. Today, with more competition, there are equivalent versions of Harvoni available from Amazon for $12,869 (and 64 cents) which is still expensive but cheap for a cure for an often debilitating and sometimes life-threatening disease (and the price is less for a private insurance buyer or Medicare/Medicaid). In 2030, Harvoni will go generic and prices will fall much more.

States now offer a vast menu of personalized plate options for a dizzying array of organizations, professions, sports teams, causes and other groups.

And it’s beneficial for companies to shift computing requirements from their servers to their customers browsers: a real win for reducing their spend on infrastructure.

We looked at all lawsuits occurring against OpenAI and listed them below. In addition to the relevant detail we had a lawyer provide some commentary. This list will remain updated as an easy-to-reference location for any lawsuits against OpenAI ordered by date (oldest to newest).

For centuries grape growers in different communities passed down lore about where their grapes came from. Some governments, particularly in Europe, designated appellations—strictly circumscribed regions with rules on how and where a varietal such as burgundy, rioja or barolo was legally allowed to grow and be produced. But genetic studies to discover where vines originated thousands of years ago began in earnest only 10 or 15 years ago.

However, the studio said it decided it would be better to put the future of the company in someone else’s hands, with Goro Miyazaki believing it would be too difficult to bear the responsibility on his own, according to the press release.

On a Saturday night, a security engineer at Equifax was updating an SSL certificate on a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). Immediately after, suspicious connections were detected. After a more in-depth investigation, it became evident that the situation was far graver than anticipated. A service had to be promptly shut down to prevent further exploitation, but by that point, the damage was already done. Malicious actors had been exfiltrating data for several months and had already collected personal information from 163 million customers.

Jack Poulson has an insider’s background, an outsider’s perspective, and unique technical expertise, making him an invaluable resource for monitoring the world of national security contracting.

It’s just a matter of time before people start to realize that we need some genuinely new ideas in the field, either new mechanisms (perhaps neurosymbolic 2), or different approaches altogether.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) today announced it is beginning a rulemaking process to remove medical bills from Americans’ credit reports. The CFPB outlined proposals under consideration that would help families financially recover from medical crises, stop debt collectors from coercing people into paying bills they may not even owe, and ensure that creditors are not relying on data that is often plagued with inaccuracies and mistakes.

Despite all his technical achievements, Barroso told WIRED in 2012 that mentoring interns was “probably the thing I’m best at.” Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, who brought Barroso to Google in 2001 with interviews over crème brûlée, tweeted on Monday without naming his onetime research partner, “Sometimes close friends and colleagues leave us altogether too soon.”

Micron Technology is set to break ground on its $2.75 billion semiconductor testing and assembly plant in Gujarat’s Sanand, just three months after announcing the project. This marks the largest investment under the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM), with Micron contributing $825 million, and the rest covered by subsidies. The plant is expected to be operational by late 2024.

I have been walking Austrian footpaths for decades. They form a wonderful network, and the signs are a wonder in themselves. How beautiful can a footpath be? Austria’s are amongst the best. I particularly enjoy the country’s system of footpath signs. Over the past three years here I have photographed many of them. I reproduce a selection here.

Or at least that was the case until May 2019, when the Agriculture Ministry abruptly disqualified all halal certifiers eligible to operate in the United States, except for one newly licensed company: IS EG Halal Certified. Five months later, the ministry awarded the same company exclusive certification rights in South America as well, a major source of Egypt’s imported meat.

From Nero to Sunak, leaders have always put on a show for the public. The scholar explores the notorious Roman emperor’s fondness for acting and how the stage became a metaphor for power itself

If Milley was a real patriot (or our system worked), he would have resigned in disgrace after the catastrophic retreat from Afghanistan.

Modern Buildings in London was authored by the outspoken architectural critic and broadcaster Ian Nairn, a man who’d made headlines nearly a decade earlier after coining the term “subtopia” to describe the degraded state of Britain’s built environment. Its publisher was London Transport, and reflecting something of the flavour of those times, copies were actually sold from automatic vending machines in selected stations.

The Accord Hybrid is jumping out of the cake but it’s Tesla’s party now.