1.23

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Lady al Qaeda: The World’s Most Wanted Woman

Why don’t we have a street like that anymore? After WWII, our city along with the rest of the country changed how we developed our cities. We started re-developing our cities to accommodate increasing car ownership and ended up building cities that are unsustainable and cannot support themselves. We built big houses with big yards out on the edge of town. We started to build big box stores and a mall on the edge of town, putting downtown out of business. All those big stores and houses required big new roads, new water infrastructure, and took up a lot of land. Every city did this, but what makes Galesburg different? Why are we out of money?

Netflix raised the price of its subscription plans in the US and Canada last week. The company’s standard plan went from $13.99 /month to $15.49 /month in the US, a +10.7% price increase. That same plan in 2011 was priced at $7.99, meaning Netflix has increased prices at an average rate of +6.2% annually over the last 11 years. During the same period, industry prices for cable and satellite television services increased +3.2% annually and US inflation rose +2.0% annually, meaning that in the US, Netflix’s prices have risen approximately 2x faster than cable prices and 3x faster than inflation.

“Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine,” said the letter. “These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than 24 hours. Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to Union Pacific by these same criminals.”

The Graphical User Interface History

Artificial intelligence is being taught to fly warplanes. Can the technology be trusted?

Okay, but what is a Cyclorama?

Comprehensive and up-to-date policial information is critical in civic tech, academia, data journalism, PEP checking, and many other areas. And Wikidata is going to be a key element of all those areas. So: explore and play, help make the data even better, and let us know how you get on! Tony Bowden created the EveryPolitician project at mySociety in 2015, and led it to becoming a key dataset of politicians worldwide. For five years before that he ran a funding and training program for civic tech projects across Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the South Caucasus, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

How Campbell Soup Turned New Jersey Into a Tomato-Growing State

Security flaw found in smartphone app for Olympians in Beijing

The differences among these many styles can be as profound as the difference between, say, the pit-smoked brisket you might find in Central Texas and the oven-baked carrot-and-onion-smothered brisket that you might be served in Brooklyn. So it’s important to not paint with too broad a brush when using the phrase “Mexican food.”

Arm Predicts Stagnation if Nvidia Deal Fails

Since my credentials at the IRS will soon no longer work, I opted to create an ID.me account and share the experience here. An important preface to this walk-through is that verifying one’s self with Id.me requires one to be able to take a live, video selfie — either with the camera on a mobile device or a webcam attached to a computer (your webcam must be able to open on the device you’re using to apply for the ID.me account).

Who could have believed a year ago that America would now beg Saudi Arabia and Russia to pump more oil—as we pulled our own oil leases, and canceled pipelines and oil fields? Our path to systems collapse is not due to an earthquake, climate change, a nuclear war, or even the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, most of our maladies are self-inflicted. They are the direct result of woke ideologies that are both cruel and antithetical to traditional American pragmatism.

Prayer-Bots and Religious Worship on Twitter: A Call for a Wider Research Agenda

For detractors of new styling, it means all BMWs are going to be ugly, not just the electric ones. That might be a tad harsh.

Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.

1.16

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Streaming Availability API enables you to look up which shows are available on 20 services including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Max and Hulu across 60 countries!

Forced by shortages to sell chipless ink cartridges, Canon tells customers how to bypass DRM warnings

Spaniards have long been leaving poorer rural areas for better opportunities in richer cities. Politicians in rural areas lament this. But it is not obvious that pricey infrastructure will do much to curb it. Mr Jácome notes that Zamora, until recently the high-speed trains’ last stop en route to Galicia, has gained weekend tourists but continued to lose population since their arrival in 2015.

As you see, there is a tipping point where being a company stops being cheaper: for EU citizens or permanent residents it’s around 8500 BGN per month, for others it’s around 6000 BGN.

Respected cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike has written up some thoughts on Ethereum and the modern ‘crypto’ ecosystem. Although I was involved in Bitcoin right at the beginning, I’ve never been involved in Ethereum or Web3, don’t currently own any cryptocurrencies and I broadly agree with a lot of what he says. Nonetheless I disagree on a few critical points. In this essay I’ll summarize parts of Moxie’s argument, lay out a couple of disagreements and then provide some suggestions for a path forward.

Tech Startup Wants To Gamify Suing People Using Crypto Tokens

GM recognizes California’s authority to set vehicle emissions rules

Boulder County allowing farmers to grow GMOs on open space after organic utopia didn’t materialize

Flexible work arrangements have become non-negotiable for job-seekers and employees alike — so much so that people now value such flexibility as much as a 10% pay raise, according to new research from the WFH Research Project. But not all companies are on the same page as their employees when it comes to remote and hybrid work. Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, co-founded the research team in May 2020 alongside Jose Maria Barrero, an assistant professor at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in Mexico City, and economist Steven J. Davis. Their latest research, shared on Jan. 3, collected responses from more than 17,000 employees in the United States about their attitudes toward working from home versus returning to the office. About 50% of respondents who have worked from home during the coronavirus pandemic said they would prefer a hybrid schedule once the virus is under control. Although large shares of people prefer a remote or hybrid work arrangement, Bloom, who has studied remote work for nearly 20 years, tells CNBC Make It that he expects there to be “huge battles” between employees and managers over remote work in the coming months.

Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab – but feared debate could hurt ‘international harmony’

A voyager named Tupaia guided Captain James Cook through the South Seas and drew an island-filled chart that has puzzled scholars for more than 250 years

Special Conditions: FedEx Express, Airbus Model A321-200 Airplanes; Installation of an Infrared Laser Countermeasure System.

A mortgage is a product, which is built by specialist workers using an immense and costly capital edifice, to be sold into a supply chain for consumers of that product. It incidentally happens to involve a house and a loan, but those two facts do not drive most behaviors of the mortgage industry. The structure of the manufacturing process, and the consuming supply chain, do.

Abandoned History: General Motors’ High Technology Engine, and Other CAFE Foibles (Part I)

Madame von Meck offered Tchaikovsky her generous patronage, but spoke to him only through letters.

1.9

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Rogan generates so many views and has grown so quickly – strictly because he allows open dialogue, civil discourse and approaches things with honest intent – that there is no financial incentive to de-platform him. Ever notice how YouTube apparently had no problem taking down Rogan’s interview with Malone, but hasn’t banned Rogan’s channel from the site yet? One issue for media and political elites to consider is the fact that Rogan has supporters on both sides of the aisle. These supporters watch him because he routinely touches on topics that are considered faux pas or irreverent. The question of whether or not Rogan’s legacy and impact are here, and are going to remain here, can be answered with a resounding “yes”.

People don’t quit enough.

Hospitals Still Not Fully Complying With Federal Price-Disclosure Rules

The Doctor’s Office Becomes an Assembly Line

AT&T Slashed Promised Life Insurance for Former Workers—and Time Runs Out at Year-End. The company, which is sparing its executives from the cut, says it brings benefits in line with what other firms offer

Churches Target New Members, With Help From Big Data

The thirty-year fixed-rate prepayment-option mortgage is an economic disaster. It encourages mass malinvestment. Policies designed to help low-income people build wealth actually trap them at the worst possible time. It presents macroeconomic risks (as we learned in 2008), but those risks are artificially understated due to the behaviors of lenders. And it artificially raises the volatility of one of the most important economic indicators in the world, leading to excess volatility and worse investments globally.

Austria, one of the most repressive European countries during the coronavirus pandemic, has recently overtaken Sweden in terms of total covid mortality, showing that almost all government interventions have been ineffective and unjustified.

Farming for the climate: Off-season ‘cover’ crops expand as U.S. growers eye low-carbon future

More pieces of the puzzle appeared in the form of copper artifacts from seemingly unrelated digs elsewhere. In the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, Greece, a 2016 analysis of three-legged cauldrons revealed that the metal came from the mines in the Arava Desert, 900 miles away. And an Israeli study published this year found that several statuettes from Egyptian palaces and temples from the same period, such as a small sculpture of Pharaoh Psusennes I unearthed in a burial complex at Tanis, were also made from Arava copper. The Edomites were shipping their product across the ancient world.

we launched the 777-300ER 50 tons heavier than the -200ER 10 years later and here is now a 787-10 HGW only 6 tons more, 18 years later (audience laughter) – a Boeing Poem

At a crucial moment during 2020’s racial justice protests, Seattle police exchanged a detailed series of fake radio transmissions about a nonexistent group of menacing right-wing extremists.

87% of US teens have an iPhone.

The liberal international order, erected after the Cold War, was crumbling by 2019. It was flawed from the start and thus destined to fail. The spread of liberal democracy around the globe—essential for building that order—faced strong resistance because of nationalism, which emphasizes self-determination. Some targeted states also resisted U.S. efforts to promote liberal democracy for security-related reasons. Additionally, problems arose because a liberal order calls for states to delegate substantial decisionmaking authority to international institutions and to allow refugees and immigrants to move easily across borders. Modern nation-states privilege sovereignty and national identity, however, which guarantees trouble when institutions become powerful and borders porous. Furthermore, the hyperglobalization that is integral to the liberal order creates economic problems among the lower and middle classes within the liberal democracies, fueling a backlash against that order. Finally, the liberal order accelerated China’s rise, which helped transform the system from unipolar to multipolar. A liberal international order is possible only in unipolarity. The new multipolar world will feature three realist orders: a thin international order that facilitates cooperation, and two bounded orders—one dominated by China, the other by the United States—poised for waging security competition between them.

The Pentagon and CIA Have Shaped Thousands of Hollywood Movies into Super Effective Propaganda

Toyota to remanufacture cars up to three times in UK

N.Y. governor proposes 1st-ever statewide ban on gas hookups in new buildings

History may tell that the French presidential campaign of 2022 started with one of the most common slurs in French. On Tuesday when President Emmanuel Macron promised hell to the unvaccinated to convince them to go and get their shot in the arm, he threatened to “emmerder” them (metaphorically, to cover them with, well, shit) until they did.

“These teenagers will continue to become consumers in the future and hopefully continue to buy phones into their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s,” said Harsh Kumar, an analyst for Piper Sandler. The firm recently found that 87% of teens surveyed last year own iPhones.

1.2

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Japan to pay companies to keep sensitive patents secret

FAA Shows ‘Sample NOTAMs’ For Possible 5G Restrictions

Rainy years can’t make up for California’s groundwater use

This is, unfortunately, part of the culture of front end development right now: sky-high levels of complexity are tolerated in application frameworks, in build tool chains, in deployment models and so on, and, when problems arise due to all this complexity, more complexity is often offered as the answer.

If I could do it all over again, I would spend the first 6 years of my career doing startups. And later join a FANG company as a senior engineer if none of my startups are successful

Each party will get a copy of their unique “key shard“, and optionally a copy of the “master document” (though this is not necessary, and in some situations you might want to store it separately so that even if the parties collude they cannot use the “master key” as they do not have the “master document”). We recommend laminating all of the relevant documents, and printing them duplex (with each page containing the same page on both sides).

How can I learn to work with clients well?

“People in Manhattan are constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves that keep them from dealing with more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe.”

The drama of the rental-car experience comes from the drama of the world around it. The pandemic has laid bare the senselessness of many of the institutions that rule, and ruin, our lives. Never is it more apparent than when we’re on the verge of going somewhere else—when we can feel a glimmer of hope. We’ve come this far, we think. We are inside a rental-car office; we can see a road through the window. Escape seems so close. But it keeps getting snatched away.

Some Suggestions For Ways You Can Help Someone In A Coma

Mirrortables are to cap tables what stablecoins are to fiat currencies. They streamline and internationalize the logistical mess of angel investing.

The FDA’s restrictive regulation of home testing devices.

The crew was managing the computers rather than flying the aircraft.

How Secure Boot works on M1 series Macs

For both the major post-9/11 wars – Afghanistan and Iraq – it is clear from the historical record that the Bush administration had no idea what would come after regime change. The neo-con faction wanted to install Chalabi in Iraq, but Bush sort of dithered and then rejected that view, and ended up just letting State Department types get to work writing a constitution with gender quotas and building something called “civil society.” The political system selects for people who think in terms of short-term political goals, not long-term grand strategy. When the war started going badly and there weren’t even WMDs, it was too embarrassing to admit how dumb the whole thing was and the 2004 election was coming up soon so they all started talking about how American freedom depended on democratizing Muslim countries. It’s often thought that putting yourself in the shoes of others helps build empathy, but when I studied the Bush administration in particular, my experience was pretty much the opposite, and I remain taken aback by the extent to which they didn’t seem to feel any moral responsibility to think too much about the consequences of their actions, at least for anything besides electoral politics.

Between 2008 and 2014, the Federal Reserve printed more than $3.5 trillion in new bills. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly triple the amount of money that the Fed created in its first 95 years of existence. Three centuries’ worth of growth in the money supply was crammed into a few short years. The money poured through the veins of the financial system and stoked demand for assets like stocks, corporate debt and commercial real estate bonds, driving up prices across markets. Hoenig was the one Fed leader who voted consistently against this course of action, starting in 2010. In doing so, he pittedhimself against the Fed’s powerful chair at the time, Ben Bernanke, who was widely regarded as a hero for the ambitious rescue plans he designed and oversaw.

Between 2008 and 2014, the Federal Reserve printed more than $3.5 trillion in new bills. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly triple the amount of money that the Fed created in its first 95 years of existence. Three centuries’ worth of growth in the money supply was crammed into a few short years. The money poured through the veins of the financial system and stoked demand for assets like stocks, corporate debt and commercial real estate bonds, driving up prices across markets. Hoenig was the one Fed leader who voted consistently against this course of action, starting in 2010. In doing so, he pitted himself against the Fed’s powerful chair at the time, Ben Bernanke, who was widely regarded as a hero for the ambitious rescue plans he designed and oversaw.

You’re probably using the wrong dictionary

2021 Man of the Year: Kenosha Cop Who Arrested Jury-Stalking MSNBC Producer

The Great NFL Heist: How Fox Paid for and Changed Football Forever

Permanently suspended on Twitter… and how to find me.

It is difficult to overstate how big an innovation this is. We went from not being able to do something at all to having a first working version. Again to be clear, I am not saying this will solve all problems. Of course it won’t. And it will even create new problems of its own. Still, permissionless data was a crucial missing piece – its absence resulted in a vast power concentration. As such Web3 can, if properly developed and with the right kind of regulation, provide a meaningful shift in power back to individuals and communities.

The crypto project has had 13 years to try and find a problem to solve. It has not found one.

A few hours ago, a promising token called $YEAR was airdropped. It was set up as a “year in review” of your Ethereum transaction history. Less than an hour ago, this turned into a painful experience for buyers of the token.

Japan pays a high price as it goes down market. The world’s third richest country is facing rising poverty – and its associated ills.

A Texas School District Banned My Book. Then Things Got Really Ugly.

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Ashley Hope Perez:

The viral circulation of Bell’s stunt triggered waves of hatred toward me and others close to me: ugly phone messages calling me a “degenerate piece of s—,” emails that were little more than expletives strung together, social media comments saying I was “literally SATAN,” and suggestions that I hang myself. One letter I received in the mail informed me that I am “no better than a slut or hooker,” continuing, “I am guessing that you would love for some boys to take you out back.” The day I started getting hate letters at my university address was the last straw. After that, I enlisted some media-savvy friends who helped me make a funny video response to Bell’s rant—a response that I hope reveals the absurdity of these attacks and the importance of recognizing them for the attention-seeking antics they are.

12.26

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All these places, despite their wealth and seeming sophistication, are embarking on their ambitious plans without ever having conducted any kind of detailed engineering study of how their new proposed energy systems will work or how much they will cost. Sure, a wind/solar electric grid can function with 100% natural gas backup, if you’re willing to have the ratepayers foot the bill for two overlapping and redundant generation systems when you could have had just one. But “net zero” emissions means no more fossil fuel backup. What’s the plan to keep the grid operating 24/7 when the coal and natural gas are gone?

Biden Administration Offers Bonuses to Doctors Who Implement ‘Anti-Racism Plans’

As part of its effort to promote Chinese culture abroad, the state has pushed international organizations to accept Chinese medicine as a legitimate healing art. In 2018, the World Health Organization included it in its influential International Statistical Classification of Diseases. This is a diagnostic tool used by more than one hundred countries to classify disease and death, making it possible to compare statistics, guiding how insurers cover illnesses, and setting research agendas. The WHO included a supplementary chapter, for optional use only, of 150 disorders and 196 disease patterns that originated from Chinese medicine and are now commonly used in East Asia.

Many years ago, a McKinsey study concluded that nobody in the developing world would buy smartphones because they were too expensive. Based on that study, they held off on launching a smartphone for another three years.

the number of people who were homeless at one point in 2020 or during the entire year was 40,800.

Construction of radio equipment in a Japanese PoW camp.

FDA should need only ‘12 weeks’ to release Pfizer data, not 75 years, plaintiff calculates

China’s top influencer was fined $210 million and erased online

Stablecoins find a use case in Africa’s most volatile markets

I wanted to end 2021 the same way I ended 2020: by asking fifty top thinkers in technology to finish the sentence: “The next big thing next year is…”

Austria, one of the most repressive European countries during the coronavirus pandemic, has recently overtaken Sweden in terms of total covid mortality, showing that almost all government interventions have been ineffective and unjustified.

Bottom line: we now have more stronger data that on average, more medicine doesn’t improve health. Though of course for people committed to buying useless medicine insurance can cut financial stress. Update your beliefs accordingly.

Wenzhou Christians Banned from Gathering to Contain Covid, while Restaurants Remain Open

A thread on the Apple & Google contact tracing scheme

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I am not a fan of the tracking business models Google and Facebook use, among others (and Apple to some extent). Thus I find this sausage making tale interesting and largely familiar.

12.19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12.12

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

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

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

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

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

Global Sequencer

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

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

I Want to See My Friend, Jimmy Lai

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

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

Leaked SoCal hospital records reveal huge, automated markups for healthcare