4.16

George Soros’ backed nonprofit invested at least $140 million into politically charged nonprofits just one year before the midterm elections. Those donations are on top of the more than $170 million Soros personally contributed during the 2022 midterm election cycle to help Democratic campaigns and political action committees.

A son of billionaire George Soros has quietly become a de-facto White House “ambassador,” making at least 14 visits there on behalf of the far-left kingmaker since President Joe Biden took office, records reviewed by The Post show.

What do you say to the charge that if you are a climate change campaigner, but you also travel around the world in a private jet, you’re a hypocrite?” Rajan asked bluntly. “Well, I buy the gold standard of, funding Climeworks, to do direct air capture that far exceeds my family’s carbon footprint,” Gates replied. “And I spend billions of dollars on climate innovation. So you know, should I stay at home and not come to Kenya and learn about farming and malaria?”

Sans autonomie stratégique, l’Europe risque de « sortir de l’histoire », prévient le président de la République dans un entretien réalisé lors de sa visite d’Etat en Chine.

War games suggest the best nuclear attack submarines won’t be detected until seconds before their homing torpedoes hit. We don’t really know, because no nuclear attack sub has fired on a surface ship since 1982. But in a ship-versus-sub fight, probably the sub wins. Thus a saying among sailors: “There are two types of vessels, attack submarines and targets.”

Consider the healthcare providers sidestepping the traditional inflationary payment model and offering direct care to patients at a fraction of the price. These include independent physician, surgical, imaging, and lab centers that charge affordable prices and operate apart from expensive insurance networks and claims adjusters For example, direct primary care doctors offer families all their primary care needs for around $100 a month — no insurance required. Some specialists such as obstetricians are moving to a similar Netflix-style payment model. Independent surgical centers such as the Surgery Center of Oklahoma offer procedures for around half the cost of what big hospitals charge. SCO provides knee replacements for $18,000 versus roughly $40,000 at hospitals. Cash-based imaging centers such as Express MRI offer MRIs for $500, up to ten times less than what hospitals charge.

Today we have made the difficult decision to close four of our stores in Chicago. The decision to close a store is never easy. The impact is greater than just closing a building. It affects people — people who work in, shop in and live in communities near our stores — and we never take that lightly. Treating people and communities with respect and compassion during this transition will guide everything we do.

Several issues are hurting Tupperware, including a “sharp decline in the number of sellers, a consumer pullback on home products, and a brand that still does not fully connect with younger consumers,” according to Neil Saunders, retail analyst and managing director at GlobalData Retail.

ITP’s history serves as a testament to the idea that the project of moderating data usage in digital advertising is a relentless game of whack-a-mole. Outside of starving the ecosystem of unique identifiers that can be used for user-level attribution and identity — as Apple did with ATT — or of regulating that use through legal standards, there is no effective path to utterly inhibiting it. Like a sapling on the forest floor contorting itself to meet an improbable ray of sunshine evading the canopy above, ad tech finds a way: be it through link decoration, CNAME cloaking, A/AAAA record masking, or server-to-server implementations of conversion tracking. To my mind, the only credible path to moderating this flow of data with clear, enforceable standards is through legal restrictions.

There are no studies about bicycles built before the 1980s. Life cycle analyses, which investigate the resource use of a product from “cradle” to “grave,” only appeared in the 1990s. However, the benchmark for a sustainable bicycle stands in the room where I write this. It’s my 1980 Gazelle Champion road bike – now 43 years old. I bought it ten years ago in Barcelona from a tall German guy who was leaving the city. He had tears in his eyes when I walked away with it. I have a second road bike, a Mercier from 1978. That is my spare vehicle in case the other one breaks down and I don’t have the time for immediate repairs. I have two more road bikes parked in Belgium, where I grew up and where I still travel a few times a year (by train, not by bike). These are a Plume Vanqueur from the late 1960s and a Venturafrom the 1970s.

The vast, vibrant blooms are a sign of abundance after a prolonged drought, which was broken by historic snow and rainfall this winter. Wildflower seeds that accumulated underground through a series of punishingly dry years are finally coming up, UC Davis plant sciences professor Jennifer Funk explained in a news release. “A very wet year – like the year we are having now – could trigger germination of all of these seeds at once, leading to a superbloom.”

4.9

Happy Easter!

In remarkable deep snow conditions, Mono Lake Committee staff skied from Lee Vining to the lakeshore this morning, April 1, to read the level of Mono Lake cooperatively with the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (DWP). The level today establishes the maximum allowed DWP water exports for the next twelve months, and this year was an unprecedented photo finish at a critical threshold.

Here’s the problem that ends up killing company after company. Allsuccessful software companies had, as their dominant personality, aleader who nurtured programmers. But no company can keep such a leaderforever. Either he cashes out, or he brings in management types whoend up driving him out, or he changes and becomes a management typehimself. One way or another, marketers get control.

So today’s post is about a risk that Moore took that didn’t work. It was a project that, commercially, was a disaster. But, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that it was a reasonable risk to take. In fact, the spectacular failure of this project probably helped lay the seeds for Intel’s success in the late 1980s, 1990s and beyond.

So if they’re not reliable for use as a search engines, what are LLMs even good for?

C is a programming language and Unix is an OS. So, how did they run C before Unix era?

One key to making all of this work is using a new type of engine based on “rotating detonation.” Governments around the world have been researching this technology for more than a decade because it has the potential to increase fuel efficiency in a variety of applications, from US Navy ships to rocket engines.

This is the ultimate in storage flexibility as there is now no longer and structure to your data, it is instead simply a list of strings.

Today, we are publishing Master Plan Part 3, which outlines a proposed path to reach a sustainable global energy economy through end-use electrification and sustainable electricity generation and storage. This paper outlines the assumptions, sources and calculations behind that proposal. Input and conversation are welcome.

Correlations within the bank’s deposit base are a known risk. This is the boring business of banking. You can diversify, to a point, but every bank has a strategy. At any of them smaller than the largest firms in the world, those strategies result in customer books where many of the customers rhyme with each other.

LiquidPiston says its new XTS-210 solves the efficiency, lubrication and fuel type issues of Wankel rotary engines. This supercharged, liquid-cooled two-stroke claims 5X the power of an equivalent size or weight diesel engine, and 3X the torque.

Meta to debut ad-creating generative AI this year, CTO says

As we later found out, among other things via Jeff Gerth’s gigantic piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, the FBI said nothing about many stories it knew to be wrong, including the influential New York Times exposé, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” The possibility that officials can lie to us in this way — leaking, asking that attribution be limited to uncheckable “sources familiar with the matter,” then saying nothing as stories start taking water — is exactly why we don’t stick our necks out for such people.

All this takes place in the context of what I’ve dubbed “preemptive underinvestment” in world oil and gas projects. There’s not a lot of spare production capacity. And demand will grow.

While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.

As is common in France and many other European countries, the French President’s office, known as the Elysee Palace, insisted on checking and “proofreading” all the president’s quotes to be published in this article as a condition of granting the interview. This violates POLITICO’s editorial standards and policy, but we agreed to the terms in order to speak directly with the French president. POLITICO insisted that it cannot deceive its readers and would not publish anything the president did not say. The quotes in this article were all actually said by the president, but some parts of the interview in which the president spoke even more frankly about Taiwan and Europe’s strategic autonomy were cut out by the Elysee.

4.2

Trae Stephens, a part­ner at the ven­ture-cap­i­tal Founders Fund, said in­vestors are turn­ing to de­fense be­cause of chang­ing dy­nam­ics in the startup mar­ket. The view of many VCs, he said, is, “You re­ally can’t de­ploy cap­i­tal into crypto any­more, you re­ally can’t de­ploy cap­i­tal into e-com­merce any­more. Where am I go­ing to de­ploy cap­i­tal? Well, there is a re­ces­sion-proof cat­e­gory, it’s de­fense.”

“I told the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, that I disagree strongly with his decision to open certain facilities,” Trump said at a White House coronavirus task force press briefing, doling out praise for “strong, resolute” Georgia residents

This is corroborated by articles from a long time ago, perhaps when it was a little easier to publish ‘inconvenient’ facts, before Big Tech completely fettered the internet with their barbaric ‘WrongThink’ cleansing algorithms. This Guardian article from 2009 for instance, confirms a 15x increase in birth defects in infants. But there are two ways to think about this. The first is that, the Battles of Fallujah, which are the primary culprits where this DU poisoning took place, were maybe two months long in total, combined. That means, we can consider the fact that in only two months of firing DU in Fallujah, they poisoned the population to such a degree as to affect upwards of 14% of births with defects.

Software is misunderstood. It can feel like a discrete thing, something with which we interact. But, really, it is the intrusion into our world of something very alien. It is the strange interaction of electricity, semiconductors, and instructions, all of which somehow magically control objects that range from screens to robots to phones, to medical devices, laptops, and a bewildering multitude of other things. It is almost infinitely malleable, able to slide and twist and contort itself such that, in its pliability, it pries open doorways as yet unseen.

A little more than six months after the failure of its New Shepard rocket, Blue Origin has published a summary of the findings made by its accident investigation team. For a private company flying a private launch system, the analysis of this “NS-23” mission is reasonably detailed. Essentially, the rocket’s main engine nozzle sustained temperatures that were higher than anticipated, leading to an explosion of the rocket. The accident occurred at 1 minute and 4 seconds into a research flight that launched on September 12, 2022. The emergency escape system performed as intended, rapidly pulling the spacecraft away from the disintegrating rocket. Had a crew been on board this flight, they would have experienced a significant jolt and some high gravitational forces before landing safely in the West Texas desert. Blue Origin led the investigation, with assistance from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board. Investigators had a wealth of data to pore over, both from telemetry obtained during the flight and hardware recovered from the desert in West Texas.

“We wanted there to be an Amish community here, but seems like everybody Amish is more from Ohio or Pennsylvania, where there are more trees,” Rudy Borntreger, the community’s bishop, or elder, explained. “I think it’s so open, nobody wants to join us. Now more people decided to move back to Iowa and Minnesota, so kind of for unity’s sake.”

A Short 100-Question Diligence Checklist

Hospital pricing games are also widespread. Hospitals claim large operating losses, especially in the COVID pandemic period, but large systems sit on balance sheets with tens of billions of dollars in the bank or invested. Hospital prices for the top 37 infused cancer drugs averaged 86.2% higher per unit than in physician offices.3 A patient was billed $73?800 at the University of Chicago for 2 injections of Lupron depot, a treatment for prostate cancer, a drug available in the UK for $260 a dose.4 To drive up their own revenues, many hospitals serving wealthy populations take advantage of a federal subsidy program originally intended to reduce drug costs for people with low income.5

Recent stories in the financial press have uncovered a coordinated campaign by prudential bank regulators to drive crypto businesses out of the financial system. Bank regulators have published informal guidance documents that single out cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency customers as a risk to the banking system. Businesses in the cryptocurrency marketplace are losing their bank accounts, or their access to the ACH network, suddenly, and with no explanation from their bankers. The owners and employees of cryptocurrency firms are even having their personal accounts closed without explanation. And over the past two weeks, federal regulators have shut down a solvent bank that was known to be serving the crypto industry and, although it is required to resolve banks through the “least cost resolution” to the Deposit Insurance Fund, the FDIC chose to shutter rather than sell the part of the bank that serves digital asset customers, costing the Fund billions of dollars.

Industrial policy and subsidies are nothing new and can be useful. But shutting off from the world will have consequences.

Whether you look at teams of scientists, inventors, or software developers, this paper shows that small teams are more likely to develop disruptive, novel ideas than large teams.

It’s All Being Covered Up’: Sen. Ron Johnson on Missing Batch of Fauci Emails, COVID Origins, and Silencing of the Vaccine-Injured

Follow the money: lucrative lobbying gigs and billions in government biodefense contracts help NIH’s Anthony Fauci redirect focus away from US grants for virus research.

To ensure that users receive accurate answers, we need to separate our language model from our knowledge base. This allows us to leverage the semantic understanding of our language model while also providing our users with the most relevant information. All of this happens in real-time, and no model training is required.

Yet simply writing checks was never going to be enough. Producing chips in the US still takes 25% longer and costs nearly 50% more than doing so in Asia. Significant policy changes would be needed for US-based manufacturers to be even remotely competitive. As things stand, they face three serious impediments — all inflicted by the government.

A Scammer Who Tricks Instagram Into Banning Influencers Has Never Been Identified. We May Have Found Him.

I’d never photographed a rodeo before, but it turned out to be the most adrenaline-pumping photography I’ve ever done.

Unconventional warfare is defined for the purpose of this report as the conduct of covert and clandestine operations, psychological operations, subversion, sabotage, special operations and intelligence and counterintelligence activities aimed at contributing to a state’s military objectives. Describing these activities is complicated by the fact that Russian unconventional warfare fits within a distinct methodological tradition that uses precise but different terminology from other traditions.2 For example, in the US ‘unconventional warfare’ has a heavy weighting towards the sponsoring of non-state actors to overthrow a state.3 As shall be seen, the Russian attempt to subvert the Ukrainian state and thereby collapse resistance clearly fits within this concept of operations, but the combination of tools employed has a different weighting to what would normally be considered unconventional warfare. A consistent challenge in this special report is that Russian terminology for activities often has a very limited parallel in other traditions. On the whole – given that this is aimed at a NATO professional audience – this report uses British terms of art. Where it is necessary to use a specific Russian concept, this is explained

$50 Billion in Opioid Settlement Cash Is on the Way. We’re Tracking How It’s Spent.

Thankfully, the lessons gleaned from the cumulative weight of these data points are relatively simple. First, Iraq will not be the last unprovoked war America or one of its allies starts. That is because we do not live in a “rules based” international system. We live in a world where might equals right and powerful nations can commit mass murder with impunity, unless America decides they should be held accountable. Those nations that do not wish to suffer like Iraq (or Palestine, or Vietnam, etc.) must therefore give serious thought to creating the sort of political, social, and economic institutions that can lead to developing the industrial, technological, and military capabilities needed to protect themselves.

The Democratic merger between the corporate Left and traditional Leftism is clearly unnatural. The old Leftists like Sanders, and publications like The Nation, have become alarmed by the growing power of the oligarchic elites within the party as well as the accelerating movement of working class voters to the GOP. Given that all ten of the nation’s wealthiest congressional districts arenow solidly Democratic, they have a point. As the radical publication Jacobin complained: “The Democratic base is getting richer and whiter.”

As SpaceX enters its third decade — and solidifies its reputation as one of the leading private space companies — a generation of people who cut their teeth at the startup during its earlier years are now looking to secure their own share of the space sector. A website that tracks SpaceX alums estimates there are now dozens of companies founded or co-founded by former SpaceX employees. It also calculates that they’ve collectively raised $3.6 billion, with much of that fundraising taking place in just the last few years.

There’s a reason people sometimes get very serious about networking; for the most part, that’s how good jobs are found. And in defense of the employers of the world, it generally takes very little to shake them out of their funk – a word from a person they trust is often enough, as is some small amount of novelty in approach. It’s not like they love Indeed-style hiring; as far as I know, they hate it too. But they lack options.

HexaTrek is a 3034 km hiking trail, connecting 14 of the most beautiful nationals parks and crossing France from the Vosges to the Pyrenees.

This was the logic of the Stakhanovite Movement in the 1930s. But it is also the logic of contemporary popular and corporate cultures, whose messages are now everywhere. Promises that “possibilities are endless”, that potential is “limitless”, or that you can craft any future you want, can now be found in “inspirational” posts on social media, in management consultancy speil and in just about every graduate job advertisement. One management consultancy firm even calls itself Infinite Possibilities.

The industry started to outpace the skills of the regulators and it got even more complex with the advent of composite structures. Things that weren’t on the radar of the regulations—and the regulators–became important as time went by.

3.26

We shouldn’t limit the pool of potential NIH Directors to people who are most credentialed in the traditional academic life sciences. To draw on a private sector example, that would be like hiring a new CEO of a beverage company only from the existing pool of beverage company executives. Instead, when a company enters a CEO search, they might look to hire from within their own industry, but they also search far and wide for executives from other industries who have overseen change that their own firm would like to emulate.

Across the barriers of language, class and faith, joined-up gardening unites us, from Oxford to the Sufi heart of Sindh

JPMorgan is getting no special arrangements as part of this deal, according to one of the people familiar with the talks. “These deposits will be treated the exact same way anyone’s non-insured deposit would be treated,” this person said. The deposits have to stay at First Republic for 120 days and earn interest at the same rate of current depositors.

“So yes, of course, Syd loomed all over ‘The Dark Side of the Moon.’ Maybe Syd was the big shadow that creates the dark side of the moon,” he continued.

Breitbart’s debate partner on that show, liberal Leslie Marshall, gleefully predicted that Trump would become another Schwarzenegger and destroy the GOP from within.

Again, making predictions is hard, especially about the future. Perhaps more interesting is how Schwartz and Leyden looked that what might possibly go wrong with the bullish scenario, what they call “scenario spoilers” that could “cut short the Long Boom.” As I think you will see, many of them seem pretty relevant to America and the world of the 2020s. Here they are, in the order they were presented in 1997, with some comments by me:

When I asked the Committee to Protect Journalists why Assange did not make their list, I was directed to a December 2019 statement: “After extensive research and consideration, CPJ chose not to list Assange as a journalist, in part because his role has just as often been as a source,” it reads, “and because WikiLeaks does not generally perform as a news outlet with an editorial process.” The newspapers that signed the November letter have similarly refused to claim Assange as one of their own. At the same time, other charges and smears have warped the public narrative, obscuring the threats to the First Amendment. Many of the outlets now expressing alarm have ignored or misrepresented key information about his plight along the way. It is crucial to reflect on these misdirections, especially as a blatant assault on press freedom now appears to be on the brink of success.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said he would like the launch industry to achieve airline-like operations with rockets one day. His company is not there yet, as it takes a couple of weeks to land, refurbish, and relaunch a Falcon 9 first stage. Each mission still requires a brand-new second stage. And the fastest turnaround time at its three launch pads, Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and Vandenberg in California, is still about a week for each facility.

However, cloud-first strategies may be hitting the limits of their efficacy, and in many cases, ROIs are diminishing, triggering a major cloud backlash. Ubiquitous cloud adoption has given rise to new challenges, namely out-of-control costs, deepening complexity and restrictive vendor lock-in. We call this cloud sprawl.

Banks have a wide range of options to raise cash, but all those options depend on the market value of a bank’s assets. A bank could sell an assets outright at market value, or borrow against it. There is a range of lenders that are willing to lend secured to a bank, ranging from private investors to Federal Home Loan Banks to the Fed’s discount window.

Seven research studies reveal the traits and experiences that influence the decision to start a business.

Generally, it takes a clear technology shift that is accompanied by a strong marketing message to change things in a mature market. What that might be for the next round of cameras, however, is unclear. Current top cameras exceed virtually all customer needs at the moment. Incremental change won’t produce another high price replacement cycle that’s large enough to show clear profit growth.

I set about meeting local leaders and soon learned that no one was interested in my apologies for the war; they were pleased to be rid of Saddam, and they had high expectations that the coalition could fix everything very quickly. The US, after all, had put a man on the moon, one Iraqi noted.

Most drops we’ve looked at are heavily farmed and Sybiled

2: humans programmatically create lots of wallet IDs and jump through the hoops to qualify for a drop. Once dropped, they transfer their gains to a single wallet and dump the token (or list any NFTs). The resulting circle pattern of post-drop transfers has become so common at Spindl we call it the ‘bacteria plot,’ because it looks like a Petri dish exposed to microbes.

I am skeptical that I could find the right person at the right bank to actually authorize a deal like this but it turns out that the Danish mortgage system is built to allow this relatively easily. The Danish mortgage system is built on the match principle:

Several Republican lawmakers have urged the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to publicly address any role it may have played in the military records requests. According to Federal Election Commission records, the DCCC paid Due Diligence just over $110,000 between January 2021 and December 2022 and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee paid just over $172,000 to Due Diligence during that period.

“The RASCW Housing Advocacy Fund is dedicated to supporting policies and candidates that will help solve Madison’s housing crises,” Hackney said. “Wisconsin’s housing crisis is at a tipping point, and we will continue to create compelling campaigns to help residents realize who the local elected officials are that want to continue to move the city into the future.”

Our analysis covers two sets of official practice materials for the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), a three-step examination program used to assess clinical competency and grant licensure in the United States. We also evaluate performance on the MultiMedQA suite of benchmark datasets. Beyond measuring model performance, experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of test questions containing both text and images on model performance, probe for memorization of content during training, and study calibration of the probabilities, which is of critical importance in high-stakes applications like medicine.

The real bailout story is the regime change in the Fed’s treatment of collateral. Par value goes against every risk management commandment of the past 30 years. It turbocharges the monetary power of collateral.”

Historian Tom Holland joined Tyler to discuss in what ways his Christianity is influenced by Lord Byron, how the Book of Revelation precipitated a revolutionary tradition, which book of the Bible is most foundational for Western liberalism, the political differences between Paul and Jesus, why America is more pro-technology than Europe, why Herodotus is his favorite writer, why the Greeks and Persians didn’t industrialize despite having advanced technology, how he feels about devolution in the United Kingdom and the potential of Irish unification, what existential problem the Church of England faces, how the music of Ennio Morricone helps him write for a popular audience, why Jurassic Park is his favorite movie, and more.

Doctors are proud of their occupation’s mixture of sacrament and science in service to society. Urbanely trained at universities, these learned professionals once left the city to settle into solo practices or small partnerships in the towns they served. This autonomy allowed them to charge patients what they could afford—some more, some less and some not at all. Meanwhile, their authority allowed them to advocate effectively on behalf of their patients, even on nonmedical matters. Their familiarity with their neighbor-patients encouraged participation in the community, both economically and socially.

Europe and space.

This is also how Hindenburg makes money. They’re short sellers — which means they make money by betting a stock will decline in value. After they make their bets, they release their report, which, yes, often makes the stock decline in value! It’s cool that anyone does this much research and reporting on companies; I know very few journalists who can spend two years on a single story like this.

The design of Dark Sky was so wonderful that I could understand the shape of the weather at a glance, even from a zoomed out view of the app.

A director at the think tank and their lawyer told DailyMail.com the immigration documents could expose a thorny diplomatic issue: whether Harry declared his previous illegal drug use, and whether DHS officers gave him special treatment.

Macron’s ministers have been taken off dossiers where they have conflicts of interest — though that has highlighted the sheer number of these conflicts within the tiny Parisian ruling caste: Marlène Schiappa, minister of state for the social economy, had to hand in much of her portfolio after shacking up with the boss of a big mutual health insurance provider. The minister for energy transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, cannot touch matters involving petrol company Perenco, which her dad used to run, nor deal with the energy company Engie, where her ex-husband is a senior director. And Jean-Noël Barrot, minister delegate for the digital economy, cannot handle matters involving Uber, where his sister is a communications chief

Moore and his longtime colleague Robert Noyce founded Intel in July 1968. Moore initially served as executive vice president until 1975, when he became president. In 1979, Moore was named chairman of the board and chief executive officer, posts he held until 1987, when he gave up the CEO position and continued as chairman. In 1997, Moore became chairman emeritus, stepping down in 2006.

Not for noth­ing, how­ever. I in­vite you to don the green eye­shade of an auto mak­er’s ac­coun­tant. A car is a wid­get. While the mar­ket sets the price, the cost to pro­duce said wid­get can be divvied up many ways, ex­press­ing the pri­or­i­ties of the brand, man. In this case, the CX-50 blows its dis­cre-tionary bud­get on snazzy ex­te­rior de­sign and pre­mium-class ma­te­r­ial qual­ity.

This was a run on SVB’s business model. And when a bank’s business model no longer looks viable, then it starts mattering what the bank looks like from a liquidation perspective. In general, a bank is always going to look horrible through that lens, and the balance sheet grinds to a halt. So much of a bank’s value is tied up in counterparty/depositor/borrower relationships, providing its balance sheet as a service, its employees, ongoing management of assets within that bank’s corporate structure, long-term viability, etc. Capital ratios measure capital to assets, but the market measures capital ratios against a firm’s business model.

3.19

By December 31, 2019, the combined company was down to 21,255. By the end of 2020, that had dropped to 18,141. A year later: 13,800. And its most recent SEC filing reports that, as of the end of 2022, Gannett had just 11,200U.S. employees remaining (plus another roughly 3,000 overseas, mostly in the U.K.).

As mortgage rates began to rise in a truly unprecedented manner, SVB became trapped. The unhedged HTM portfolio began to fall in value while the deposit base began to fall in a historically unprecedented manner. Once again, SVB’s reliance on the IPO market for cash proceeds was critical. Note the 2022 annual report investor call… “The longest time that there haven’t really been any IPOs”:

The city is not moving toward the abolishment of single-family zoning, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said, “but I wouldn’t say it’s off the table either.” “That’s something that I would definitely want to learn a lot more about because I really do believe in learning from other places,” Rhodes-Conway said. “But my focus is really on creating housing options for people in every neighborhood in Madison — and so I’m interested in any tools, zoning or otherwise, that help us do that.”

“But the founders said, ‘No, we don’t have that commitment. We’re going to learn how to kill products.‘ And so they went around the company and they said, ‘Look, which products should we kill?’ The only one any group of people could agree with was Reader. So they said, ‘Fine, we’re going to delete Reader and we’re gonna see what happens.’ And that was the end of that.”

When newly appointed ambassadors had an interview with him and when ambassadors returning from their posts for their first visit with him were leaving his office, Shultz would test them. He would say, “You have to go over the globe and prove to me that you can identify your country.” They would go over, spin the globe, and put their finger on the country to which sent–unerringly. When Shultz’s old friend and former Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield was appointed ambassador to Japan, even he was put to the test. This time, however, Ambassador Mansfield spun the globe and put his hand on the United States. He said: “That’s my country.”

But splashing out on a property there hadn’t seemed like a viable option until Doug came across a listing for a 14th-century apartment in the town of Vasanello, located in the Italian region of Lazio, with a sale price of just 13,000 euros (about $13,450).

Any buyer of Signature must agree to give up all the crypto business at the bank, the two sources added.

For rural voters, the main incentive for backing the BBB was to protest against cuts in nitrogen emissions, according to an Ipsos poll for public broadcaster NOS.

Reputation is perpetual. You have destroyed yours. And you will be held accountable.

The result of all this is that the banking system is far more fragile than it was perceived to be—by regulators, investors and probably bankers themselves—before the past week. It is clear that smaller banks with uninsured deposits will need to raise more capital soon. Torsten Slok of Apollo, a private-equity firm, points out that a third of assets in America’s banking system are held by banks smaller than svb. All of these will now tighten up lending to try to strengthen their balance-sheets.

Although some photographers look back fondly on the color reproduction of the CCD era, there’s no inherent reason why CCD itself would capture color any differently from CMOS. Any differences are more likely to stem from changes in color filter selectiveness and absorption characteristics, as manufacturers tried to boost low light performance by using filters that allowed more light through.

PricewaterhouseCoopers said Wednesday that it will give 4,000 of its legal professionals access to an artificial intelligence platform, becoming the latest firm to introduce generative AI technology for legal work. PwC said it partnered with AI startup Harvey for an initial 12-month contract, which the accounting and consulting firm said will help lawyers with contract analysis, regulatory compliance work, due diligence and other legal advisory and consulting services.

In the graphs below, I’ve taken the difference between assets and liabilities maturing at different durations for top ten banks by 2022 year-end assets in Europe and Middle East & Africa, where there was sufficient data reported for assets and liability for various maturity periods. Where sufficient data was not available across the four time horizons, I have excluded such banks and therefore the list of banks is not necessarily the top ten by assets in absolute terms. Furthermore, financial assets payable on demand and liabilities available on demand were not widely reported and not included as part of the analysis. We can see that banks in Europe as well as Middle East & Africa have more liabilities maturing in under 3 months compared to assets maturing in the same time period, while it’s a mixed bag in the 3-12 month time period. On the other hand, if we look at longer term maturities, we can clearly see that the banks have sufficient assets maturing to counter the liabilities due.

The run triggered a significant realignment revealing new political fault lines that will dominate identity and ideology over the next 12 months, possibly reorienting both major political parties, along with the entire technology industry. Scapegoating began as early as Thursday morning, with the burning question of who — specifically — was to blame for the failure of a bank that had no apparent strategy for mitigating risk in a tech bear market. Was it all the money the government printed followed by a spike in interest rates? Was it the actual failing bank? Or was it perhaps the people who pulled their money from the failing bank? Tech is now facing a perfect storm of what I’ve warned for years. The industry’s practice of political censorship in favor of Democrats, not only accelerated but made totally overt over the course of the Trump years, alienated more than half the country. Problematically, the half alienated is represented by the only natural allies business has — conservatives who both resist Democratic calls for greater control, and historically sympathized with entrepreneurship as emblematic of the American Dream, something left-wing tech executives did everything in their power to ridicule and undermine on a public stage for years.

3.12

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“The current strategy on Venezuela hasn’t worked, so we have to try something else,” says Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow at Chatham House who has been leading a project to promote dialogue on Venezuela’s political future. “The Guaidó government was a failure but it did provide a rallying point which no longer exists.”

There’s definitely a lot of things I wish I’d done differently. For instance, I wouldn’t encourage anyone to quit their job until they’ve made at least one dollar selling a product or service online. Alas, hindsight is 20/20 right? More than anything though, I’m so thankful I had the courage, and privilege, to take a swing at this.

Although paper handouts obviously have a pure white background, the web is better served by the use of slightly off-white and off-black colors. Tufte CSS uses #fffff8 and #111111 because they are nearly indistinguishable from their ‘pure’ cousins, but dial down the harsh contrast. We stick to the greyscale for text, reserving color for specific, careful use in figures and images.

Lessors said that historically if a lessor wanted to repurpose an FAA configuration to EASA metrics, it might be weeks and no more than 2-3 months for manuals and pin selection changes.  Today, the lessor is in a queue of perhaps six months to receive attention and then a quote of six months to complete the tasks.

The US was doing risky gain-of-function research on US soil until 2014, when the Obama administration banned it. Four months before the ban, Dr. Fauci offshored it to Wuhan, China through New York nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance. After Sars-CoV-2 broke out down the street from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Fauci engaged in a massive campaign to deny the possibility of a lab-leak from the lab he funded, and instead pin the blame on a yet-to-be discovered zoonotic intermediary species.

Ok, so all together, the idea of this app is to help the user, differently, at the three stages of presenting — help her craft the narrative, help her build a presentation based on that narrative, and then help her present in a way that gives the presenter confidence as she presents. If done perfectly, it would invite us to allow the speaker to present as if she were reading a presentation again, but with case and ease, but complement that reading with images and text that frames what’s being said in a way that reinforces what is being said.

In January of this year, the Government Accountability Office faulted the FAA for lacking a comprehensive strategy for drone integration, which has hindered all but the simplest line-of-sight operations.

As in, it will inevitably have to be “dumbed-down” in order for it to have the greatest effect across a broad spectrum of people.

3.12

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“The current strategy on Venezuela hasn’t worked, so we have to try something else,” says Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow at Chatham House who has been leading a project to promote dialogue on Venezuela’s political future. “The Guaidó government was a failure but it did provide a rallying point which no longer exists.”

There’s definitely a lot of things I wish I’d done differently. For instance, I wouldn’t encourage anyone to quit their job until they’ve made at least one dollar selling a product or service online. Alas, hindsight is 20/20 right? More than anything though, I’m so thankful I had the courage, and privilege, to take a swing at this.

Although paper handouts obviously have a pure white background, the web is better served by the use of slightly off-white and off-black colors. Tufte CSS uses #fffff8 and #111111 because they are nearly indistinguishable from their ‘pure’ cousins, but dial down the harsh contrast. We stick to the greyscale for text, reserving color for specific, careful use in figures and images.

Lessors said that historically if a lessor wanted to repurpose an FAA configuration to EASA metrics, it might be weeks and no more than 2-3 months for manuals and pin selection changes.  Today, the lessor is in a queue of perhaps six months to receive attention and then a quote of six months to complete the tasks.

The US was doing risky gain-of-function research on US soil until 2014, when the Obama administration banned it. Four months before the ban, Dr. Fauci offshored it to Wuhan, China through New York nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance. After Sars-CoV-2 broke out down the street from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Fauci engaged in a massive campaign to deny the possibility of a lab-leak from the lab he funded, and instead pin the blame on a yet-to-be discovered zoonotic intermediary species.

Ok, so all together, the idea of this app is to help the user, differently, at the three stages of presenting — help her craft the narrative, help her build a presentation based on that narrative, and then help her present in a way that gives the presenter confidence as she presents. If done perfectly, it would invite us to allow the speaker to present as if she were reading a presentation again, but with case and ease, but complement that reading with images and text that frames what’s being said in a way that reinforces what is being said.

In January of this year, the Government Accountability Office faulted the FAA for lacking a comprehensive strategy for drone integration, which has hindered all but the simplest line-of-sight operations.

As in, it will inevitably have to be “dumbed-down” in order for it to have the greatest effect across a broad spectrum of people.

Hutchison said he did not recognize the union at Madison Sourdough because he doesn’t like the idea of a third, unknown party coming between him and his employees. In a later email, he wrote that “an election is the only way to truly determine a majority” and noted that “folks who don’t want a union … will be involuntarily governed by its contract.”

There were two White House abuses he wanted me to expose before the presidential election in the fall of 1972. Dan told me that Nixon and Kissinger—for whom Dan had written an important early policy paper after he was appointed national security adviser—had been wiretapping aides and cabinet members. The second tip Dan had for me was that Kissinger had ordered some of his aides to produce a plan for using tactical nuclear weapons in South Vietnam, in case they were needed to end the war on American terms. If I could get one or two sources—by this time there were a number of former Kissinger aides who had quietly resigned over the Vietnam War—on the record, Dan said, it just might get the Democrats into office. It was the longest of long shots, but I tried like hell all summer to find someone who had firsthand information, as Dan did not, and who was willing to confirm Dan’s information, even if on background. Of course, it was understood I would have to tell Abe Rosenthal, executive editor of the Times, who my off-the-record source was.

During the coming year, the United States and its allies will confront a complex and pivotal international security environment dominated by two critical strategic challenges that intersect with each other and existing trends to intensify their national security implications. First, great powers, rising regional powers, as well as an evolving array of non-state actors, will vie for dominance in the global order, as well as compete to set the emerging conditions and the rules that will shape that order for decades to come. Strategic competition between the United States and its allies, China, and Russia over what kind of world will emerge makes the next few years critical to determining who and what will shape the narrative perhaps most immediately in the context of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, which threaten to escalate into a broader conflict between Russia and the West. Second, shared global challenges, including climate change, and human and health security, are converging as the planet emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and confronts economic issues spurred by both energy and food insecurity. Rapidly emerging or evolving technologies continue to have the potential to disrupt traditional business and society with both positive and negative outcomes, while creating unprecedented vulnerabilities and attack surfaces, making it increasingly challenging to predict the impact of such challenges on the global landscape.

We have also become aware that George Soros personally gave a maximum campaign donation Toulouse-Oliver in 2014 when she was Bernalillo County Clerk. How did a county clerk from one of the least-populated states in the union attract the personal attention of the primary funder of the left’s most radical national projects?

Outside everyone’s interest in knowing “who’dun’it” in the blowing up on the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea, there has yet to be an full appreciation of the larger meaning of its destruction.

M. abscessus is a water-loving bacterium known to occur at low levels in tap water, which is not sterile. As such, the researchers turned to the hospital’s water sources, surveying sinks, showers, and ice and water machines on the floor. Samples from two of the 14 sinks and showers on the floor had low levels of Mycobacteria contamination, between 10 to 50 colony-forming units per milliliter. But samples from the two ice and water machines were highly contaminated—between 2,000 and 8,000 colony-forming units per milliliter. And from those samples, the researchers could fish out genetic sequences unique to the M. abscessus isolates that had infected the patients, strongly suggesting this was the common source.

Cost is a huge factor. Care in countries like Mexico can be more than 50% cheaper than it is in the United States, according to Jonathan Edelheit, CEO of the non-profit Medical Tourism Association, an industry trade group.

A small but sadly amusing case in point is building in San Francisco. A plan was proposed to build the apartments at right. Love it, hate it. I don’t care. But it shouldn’t be up for collective action. Instead, what we have, however, is a planning process in which the President of the SF Planning Commission, Myrna Melgar, can opposed the plan because:

The company has reduced its non-debt expenditures to $1.5 billion from a projected $4.5 billion in 2023, helped by cutting its cloud services bill by 40% and closing one data center, Musk said. Twitter has also laid off thousands of employees.

While Washington has never opposed trading of Russian oil within G7-agreed price curbs, the largest independent oil traders had been wary of the market. “We’ve been actively encouraged by the Americans?.?.?.?to re-engage on moving the oil,” said one trader who spoke with the Treasury.

And he once mocked John Kerry, who has a degree in political science, in a congressional hearing on climate threats: “I think it’s somewhat appropriate that someone with a pseudoscience degree,” he said, “is here pushing pseudoscience.” Mr. Kerry stumbled, visibly surprised and angry. “Are you serious? I mean, this is really seriously happening here?”

The fact is, the Southern Strategy as described by the Washington Post failed miserably. Barry Goldwater carried only five of the 11 Confederate states and his home state of Arizona using that strategy in 1964.

Nixon rejected Goldwater’s Southern Strategy four years later — and took 5 of the 6 Confederate states that LBJ took in his landslide. Democrats took all the Goldwater states. The percentages of the votes for Nixon by state in 1968 reflect that.

Alabama 13.99%

Arkansas 30.77%

Georgia 30.40%

Louisiana 23.47%

Mississippi 13.52%

Those were the Goldwater states. The LBJ states embraced him.

Florida 40.53% (won)

North Carolina 39.51% (won)

South Carolina 38.09% (won) 

Tennessee 37.85% (won) 

Texas 37.85%

Virginia 43.36 (won)

Sure, four years later, Nixon took all 11 Confederate states. But he also took every other state in the country except Massachusetts. If you want to call that a Southern Strategy then your south extends to Alaska.

Further to ensure there was never a repeat of the crisis that saw 9,000 banks fail, FDR signed a new insurance system into law. From that day on, every bank in America has paid a premium to the FDIC to insure each depositor’s account, now up to a limit of $250,000. This new financial crisis has depleted the fund, with 157 bank failures last year alone. But the FDIC guards the balance closely. Where possible the failed bank’s loans and deposits are transferred to an acquiring bank, at a discount to sweeten the deal.

UM22-05: How Will COVID-19 Excess Mortality Affect Social Security Benefit Payouts?

As such, a top priority for the Trump campaign is to ensure that state Republican parties’ delegate selection plans would benefit a candidate like theirs who has a high floor, but low ceiling of support from GOP voters. In 2016, according to the Brookings Institution’s Elaine Kamark, a well-respected expert on party primaries, 80 percent of the delegates came from states that used “some sort of winner take all rule.” This rule, of course, allowed Trump to rack up delegates, even as he failed to dominate the field. Lots of folks point to the winner-take-all states, like Florida, where Trump took all 99 delegates while winning just 46 percent of the vote. But the hybrid winner-take-some or winner-take-most models also benefited Trump.  For example, in 2016, Tennessee awarded delegates based on the percent of the vote a candidate got by congressional district. This rule allowed Trump to acquire 57 percent of the state’s delegates, even as he won just 39 percent of the popular vote in the state. 

I (Naomi Wolf) believed a farrago of lies. And, as a result of these lies, and my credulity — and the credulity of people similarly situated to me – many conservatives’ reputations are being tarnished, on false bases. The proximate cause of this letter of apology is the airing, two nights ago, of excepts from tens of thousands of hours of security camera footage from the United States Capitol taken on Jan 6, 2021. The footage was released by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson [https://www.axios.com/2023/03/08/mccarthy-defends-jan-6-footage-tucker-carlson-fox-news]. While “fact-checkers” state that it is “misinformation” to claim that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi was in charge of Capitol Police on that day [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/07/27/fact-check-nancy-pelosi-isnt-in-charge-capitol-police/8082088002/], the fact is that the USCP is under the oversight of Congress, according to — the United States Capitol Police: [https://www.uscp.gov/the-department/oversight].

Fortunately, bail-ins do not apply to deposits under $250,000, which are protected by FDIC insurance. That is true in theory, but as of September 2021, the FDIC had only $122 billion in its insurance fund, enough to cover just 1.27% percent of the $9.6 trillion in deposits that it insures. The FDIC also has a credit line with the Treasury for up to $100 billion, but that still brings the total to just over 2% of insured deposits.

But today, the lakefront is not only looking shabby compared to the past (think flowers on Lake Shore Drive – the reverse of broken windows policy under Daly and Emmanuel), it simply is not safe anymore, as recent major crime data suggests. The growing homeless cities – they are now beyond “encampments” as many have dozens of tents with communal cooking and toilet facilities – under and around the viaducts and under passes on Lake Shore don’t help the problem and make getting back to your home after a run or walk an unpleasant and risky experience, especially if you identify as a birthing or egg producing person. The Chicago lakefront was the city’s treasure – something that attracted thousands to the city before it went downhill, including me. Ken Griffin realized this when he donated tens of millions of dollars to expand the lakeshore bike path. As did Rahm, when I saw him dozens of times jogging with his detail on the old single path before Griffin’s generosity to expand it (before he left for Florida, where I write this essay not too far away).

3.5

David Ogilvy, in Ogilvy on Advertising, discusses brand imaging with the following:

You now have to decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the marketplace. The personality of a product is an amalgam of many things — its name, its packaging, its price, the style of its advertising, and, above all, the nature of the product itself. Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the brand image. It follows that your advertising should consistently project the same image, year after year.

Extending this framing of brand image, one might define brand marketing as any activity that inculcates within the consumer a particular brand’s personality. The purpose of brand advertising, with that in mind, is to differentiate one brand from others such that consumers prefer it when confronted with the choice. In Brand equity on mobile, I discuss the concept of brand equity, which is the quantified value of a brand, measured across two vectors of consumer impact: 1) the ability for a brand to charge a price premium given consumer familiarity and receptiveness, and 2) the degree of amplification that a brand bestows upon a firm’s advertising activities (a sort of advertising effectiveness premium). Direct Response marketing is a wholly different undertaking than Brand marketing and fulfills a different objective. Direct Response marketing is almost exclusively accomplished through digital advertising for digital products, and its purpose is to foment an impulse on the consumer’s part to immediately purchase or otherwise engage with the product. Ideally, this opportunity is guided through audience and intent targeting such that the advertisement collides with need or desire at an appropriate time and results in an outcome for the advertiser (known in advertising parlance as a conversion).

It’s unclear how that dispute will resolve, and such patent fights can take years to unfold. It’s also unclear how aggressive the federal agency will ultimately be over its co-inventor status. As Nature pointed out earlier, the agency has tended to let industry partners handle intellectual property rights as it sees its role largely in the foundational research. But with drug prices continuing to skyrocket in the US, political will is shifting for the government to be more involved in the outcomes of its early-stage efforts.

Although VR and AR devices are nowhere to be seen in Apple’s current product line, the company is deemed a key player in the industry. “Everyone, especially VR companies in China, is waiting for Apple’s debut to point them in the right direction,” said Max Ive, an ex-Xiaomi employee who used to work on interactive design for Xiaomi’s AR equipment.

Production at North Sea oil fields between the U.K. and Norway has long tapered, buoying the Brent benchmark seen by investors as a global price gauge. At the same time, U.S. drillers produced a near-record 11.9 million barrels a day in 2022, according to the Energy Information Administration, which projects record highs this year and next. That is depressing the price for West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. standard, expanding the difference between Brent and WTI, said Gus Vasquez, head of crude pricing, Americas, at price-reporting firm Argus Media. In recent weeks, winter storms also slammed U.S. refineries, leaving many unable to process as much crude as usual. The disruption led to a relentless build in domestic stockpiles that are now 9% larger than the five-year average observed by federal record-keepers.

When settling healthcare bills, the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania rely on an ethos of mutual aid, independent of the government. Consonant with this philosophy, many Amish do not participate in or receive benefits from Social Security or Medicare. They are also exempted from the Affordable Care Act of 2010. This study expands the limited documentation of Amish Hospital Aid, an Amish health insurance program that covers major medical costs. Interview data from 11 Amish adults in Lancaster County depict how this aid program supplements traditional congregational alms coverage of medical expenses. T

Michael Lombardi, Boeing’s archivist, has been the company’s historian for more than 30 years. He’s nearing retirement age and can’t help but think about doing so. But his enthusiasm for his work remains high and contemplating life after this career is challenging. Lombardi has a couple of books in mind as possibilities. He certainly has the resources to fall back on to tell stories that haven’t been told, even by the most dedicated of authors.

All of these areas are really important areas but they require a lot of science behind them.

The changes and belt-tightening have frayed employee relations. A company Slack channel called “airing of grievances” has more than 22,000 members and a string of complaints about attendance proposals and perquisite cuts.

She did so out of desperation. Florence’s husband, Charles Clarence “C.?C.” Butt, fell ill with tuberculosis and couldn’t work; it was up to Florence to support the family, which included three young sons. In the days before antibiotics, prevailing medical wisdom held that tuberculosis could be cured through rest and exposure to fresh air in warm, relatively dry climates. Butt’s doctor had advised him to move to such a place. The family chose Texas—moving first to San Antonio, in 1904, and a year later to Kerrville, a half hour southwest of Fredericksburg. Today the town is a tourist destination, known for its spring wildflowers and summer folk festival—but a century ago it was a remote, rugged place where chronically ill Americans sought refuge. Physician George Parsons, from Chebanse, Illinois, had himself recovered from tuberculosis in the Hill Country town; he later wrote about his experience in a medical journal and started Kerrville’s first sanatorium, bringing still more patients hoping for a cure.

McCaleb’s space habitation company, Vast, emerged publicly last fall with a plan to build space stations that featured artificial gravity. This was significant because NASA and most other space agencies around the world have devoted little time to developing systems for artificial gravity in space, which may be important for long-term human habitation due to the deleterious effects of microgravity experienced by astronauts on the International Space Station. Vast boasted three technical advisers who were major players in the success of SpaceX—Hans Koenigsmann, Will Heltsley, and Yang Li—but did not offer too much information about its plans.

Hong Kong, the refuge for about one million Chinese who had fled the Communists, became the center of activity for the Third Force. The CIA-backed Fight League for a Free and Democratic China operating there recruited volunteers from among the refugees to train as anti-Communist foot soldiers to be smuggled onto the mainland. They were sent for training in counterrevolution in Okinawa, Japan, and in Saipan, a U.S.-controlled island in the Western Pacific. To lead the effort, the Americans hired a disaffected general of Chiang’s Nationalist forces, Zhang Fakui. In a memorable conversation at Hong Kong’s Foreign Press Club, Zhang warned one of the American organizers, “Anyone who lands on the mainland will be captured.” The Communists, he said, would outwit the foreign forces at every turn. He also contended that much of the intelligence on what was going on inside China was fake. Zhang’s suspicions turned out to be correct, but he nonetheless accepted a leadership position in the American scheme.

2023 Food & Wellness Trends

Most importantly, he misunderstands the foundation of the American Empire. It lies in our political stability, our economic growth, our network of allies, and our military power. The role of the US dollar is a result of these things, not a cause.

1,300 of our players provided information to share with one another about their current club, to not only help them make important career decisions, but also help raise standards across the league.

The Global Seed Vault in the Norwegian Arctic, which opened in 2008, is closed to the public and shrouded in mystery, the subject of numerous internet doomsday conspiracy theories. Now, to celebrate the vault’s 15th anniversary, everyone is invited on a virtual tour to see inside the vastcollection of tubers, rice, grains and other seeds buried deep in the mountain behind five sets of metal doors.

I think this latest piece of work can teach us a few things. First, that great cartography, which looks effortless, is not easy. Sure, anyone can make a map, but making a great map demands careful thought, a knowledge of the craft, and the experience of knowing how to approach the hundreds of decisions that are required in getting from an idea to execution. Great maps don’t just fall off the page. They take work to make them work.

Citizens have every right to question the role of their governments, particularly in times of war. Some of the dynamics around policing criticism of Zelenskyy or the Ukrainian government or the U.S. support for it are reminiscent of the efforts to stifle criticism of Israelthrough charges of antisemitism. Not only is this an intellectually bankrupt line of attack, but it also runs contrary to the vital principle of free debate in democratic societies. It also seeks to relegate to a dungeon of insignificance the vast U.S. record of foreign policy, military, and intelligence catastrophes as well as its abuses and crimes by pretending that only lackeys for Moscow would dare question our role in a foreign conflict on the other side of the globe.

An unintended side effect of the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes is that many banks and institutions are holding an unfathomable amount of low-yield debt that is now worth far less than it was a year ago. We went from a world where 100-Year Austrian bonds would pay only 0.39% yields, to one where we’re now concerned about 8-9% annual inflation, in just two years.

2.26

That father advised his son that they shouldn’t offer above asking, not because he had toured the home and uncovered a flaw but because he had fixated on a detail he saw online: The house was 18 feet wide. The father believed it was priced as if it were 20. They insisted on putting in an offer at $1.6M, or $50,000 below the asking price of $1.65M. The house ultimately sold for $150,000 over asking — to someone else. “It would have been very nice if they’d listened,” Harris said, not only because his client regrets losing that townhouse but because, more than a year later, Harris, an agent with Coldwell Banker Warburg, is still taking the same client to showings. “I can’t get that time back.”

And if you’re interested in the operational cost of running this setup it is like 60$ for the RaspberryPi (one time cost) + electricity (less than 1$ a month) + 10$ a year for domain (which I needed anyway). So not more than like 2$ a month if you already have internet in your home.

But, even more crucially for the VCs who’ve plunged more than $5bn into the sector globally since 2017 — they’re asking whether the business model works at all.

“We are taking this preventative step to ensure the health, safety, and confidence of residents,” said Mayor Aftab. “Our entire community has East Palestine in our thoughts, and in coordination with the Ohio EPA and the Sanitation Commission, we will continue to support the best recovery possible. I am proud of the swift action of Water Works and City Manager Long in stepping up to protect our families.”

Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off, at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy. It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly. If we just had an engineering strategy, their eyes will implore you, things would be okay. For a long time, those imploring eyes haunted me, because I simply didn’t know what to give them: what is an engineering strategy?

An international team of scientists has shown that the blood pressure-lowering effect of exercise is significantly reduced when people rinse their mouths with antibacterial mouthwash, rather than water — showing the importance of oral bacteria in cardiovascular health.

The Finnish data protection authority (Data Protection Ombudsman) ruled against the use of Google Analytics by four libraries in the Helsinki metropolitan area. You might have heard this one already, because authorities in Austria, France, Italy, and Denmark also found that the use of Google Analytics is not compatible with the GDPR.

Left unmentioned in the brief was that the parties behind it had direct financial ties to Google. The group that funded the brief, a nonprofit advocate for startups called Engine, is funded in part by Google. And at least one of the content creators who signed on to the amicus brief has said that employees from YouTube, a Google subsidiary, invited them to sign onto the brief. In addition, the firm representing the creators and Authors Alliance — Keker, Van Nest & Peters — represents Google in other litigation.

Guys who think they are the next Jame O’Keefe get in via promising donors, they take over the board, and James is gone. What’s the lesson for Talent? Work with money men. The ones who don’t really care about what you do nor understand it. If they are boring, even better. Then be Talent. Create value. Let the Suits capture it. Win-win.

The conclusion of a leading Beltway pundit that the Biden administration offered its outstretched hand to Beijing in Munich, only to have it “slapped away,” seems difficult to refute.

In any event, the more I learned about Estonia and their history, the more they became one of my go-to countries. When I saw their MOD earlier this month published Russia’s War in Ukraine: Myths and Lessons, I knew it had to be good.

and also included a “fat finger error” that overstated the price at which he sold it.

“I didn’t have, like, a Grant Thornton or somebody audit my personal books.”

As Gen Z is the most online of any age group — spending up to six hours a day on their smartphones — the iPhone’s dominance is shaping the social circles of young Americans, according to researchers who advise companies on the preference of Gen Z consumers.

We must do everything possible to avoid an enormously destructive war in Ukraine | Bernie Sanders February 2022

All in all, the adjustments increase launch revenue by $130M and Starlink revenue by $890M, driven by the outperformance of the subscriber numbers and a reallocation to the higher-priced Starlink Business subscriptions. In addition, our adjustments introduced $325M in revenue recognition from NASA lunar landing and Space Force next-gen constellation programs. All in, Payload has adjusted its 2022 SpaceX revenue estimate from $3.25B to $4.6B. 

It’s been more than a year since Dr. Greg Schulz was suspended from Concordia University Wisconsin for publicly objecting to its board of regents inserting racial prejudices into its criteria for a new president. Interim president Dr. William Cario suspended the tenured philosophy professor on Saturday, Feb. 19, 2022, immediately banning Schulz from campus and his university email, according to legal documentation.

“The most difficult thing is personnel management. Americans are the worst at this, because Americans are the most difficult to manage.”

Create daily. You don’t have to publish daily, but creation is the habit that makes everything else possible.

Cracking the technical debt conundrum requires us to challenge conventional management thinking in two critical ways: The first is realizing that technical debt is not a problem to be solved but rather one to be managed. The second is seeing technical debt as a way to achieve strategic competitive advantage rather than as a burden.

In the first post, I covered 16 important lessons which helped us to not only grow the business and increase ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue), but also how we did it without any outside investments. We got traction in an industry which is dominated by billion dollar companies.

It’s possible that one day, when physical land is abundant too, Balaji’s vision will come to pass. But for now, The Network State is an exemplary salvo in a debate playing out in tech today over which type of world we want to live in: A world of Atoms, or of Bits?

There’s been some talk online about whether we are post peak wokeness. I will have more to say about this when I complete my analysis of several institutions language usage dynamics. For the time being, I provide a timely update of a chart I made in 2019 about prevalence of terms in New York Times news and opinion articles. This is the chart from 2019:

The Camera & Imaging Products Association presentation at the CP+2023 show indicated that average camera prices doubled in 3 years and increased 6 times in 10 years. Here is a recap of the presentation:

2.19

Most of the world’s olives grow in southern European countries, such as Spain and Italy. In the U.S., California dedicates more than 30,000 acres to the commodity. But Florida may be the next agricultural region for small-scale commercial olive production.

It appears that editors will support Hersh’s work when it serves the interests of the party they support, the Democrats, whether those stories are true or not. His establishment media enablers stayed away from the Biden pipeline piece because it aligned with the belief of many on the right, including senior GOP officials, that Biden blew up the pipelines.

Of liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz’s $195,000 fundraising haul in large donations last week, only $7,500 came from in-state donors.

It’s a tactic Democrats employed nationally in last year’s midterms to mixed reviews from their partisan camp. The strategy involves implicitly siding in partisan primaries with the GOP candidate opponents feel would appear to voters as most conservative in the general election, then going after that candidate and casting them as out of touch with voters after the primary

‘The left has become largely irrelevant in the US because it is incapable of working with the right’, said Nick Brana, chair of The People’s Party, which organised the rally with libertarians. ‘It clings to identity politics over jobs, health care, wages and war, and condemns half the country as deplorables.’

That progress could be overstated and the company isn’t out of the woods just yet, according to an internal memo from one of the company’s top executives that Recode obtained. Meta still faces major business challenges, including Apple limiting its advertising business, TikTok’s rising popularity, and its brand sentiment with users in the US.

This is the reality of the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Washington seems determined to pursue its increasingly illusory goal of maintaining international hegemony, now packaged in spurious claims of supporting “democracy versus authoritarianism.” Not many buyers there. How long will the US continue to flail in endless foreign wars to desperately prove to itself and the world that it is still # 1?

SQLite is one of those projects that I wish I had known about long before I did. I had heard about it, but for many years I never thought about taking a serious look at it because I was under the false impression that is was a tiny database only useful for personal address books and small embedded devices.

As defense counsel has pointed out, and the Government does not dispute, many individuals use a VPN for benign purposes. In the Government’s view, however, the use of a VPN raises several potential concerns. First, a VPN is a mechanism of encryption, hiding online activities from third parties, including the Government. Second, it is a means to disguise a user’s whereabouts because a VPN server essentially acts as a proxy on the internet. In other words, because the demographic location data comes from a server in another country, a user’s IP appears as if it is in that country, and the user’s actual location cannot be determined.

“The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems,” Seshadri said. “They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called ‘Ads’ that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins. (1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement.”

Even before the famous scandal, there was another kind of snow he was interested in: the stuff falling from the sky. His passion for winter weather and vehicles that could traverse those icy conditions became one of DeLorean’s main sources of post-GM income (and a significant pawn in the post-conviction DMC bankruptcy) but was somehow simultaneously his least known business endeavor. In fact, the first DeLorean wasn’t the DMC-12—it was a snowcat.

The suit, filed in 2017 by a sales representative for a competing medical device firm, alleges an illegal kickback scheme between Medtronic and hospital employees. According to the complaint and documents released in the suit, between 2011 and 2018, VA health care workers received steakhouse dinners, Apple electronics and NASCAR tickets, and in turn, Medtronic secured a lucrative contract with the hospital. Meanwhile, the company’s representatives allegedly “groomed and trained” physicians at the facility, who then deployed the company’s devices even when it was not medically indicated.

China’s state-run aviation industry is working toward self-sufficiency because of sanctions. But it is these same sanctions that will make it difficult to achieve.

Denver’s snow plowing response was widely criticized following the December storm, when a sustained cold snap combined with the city’s failure to deploy side-street plows caused mounds of snow and ice to languish for weeks. In response, the city upped its plowing efforts for the Jan. 17-18 storm, dispatching small plows to clear residential streets. Still, due to a sidewalk clearing system that relies heavily on business and private property owners to ensure sidewalks and curbs are accessible, problem areas have inevitably remained.

“The mainstream media, they have decided on their own that we are at war and by ‘we,’ that means the Acela corridor, the expensive suburbs of the East Coast … and that means the rules (of journalism) have changed,” Brecher offered.

Back at the Boulevard Mall, I return to LensCrafters to pick up my glasses. I’m anxious because I have one ear that’s higher than the other and a touch of undiagnosed OCD, and getting them to fit the way I like them—almost floating, not gripping my ears like tight little baby hands—is always an ordeal. But the young man who helped me choose the frames bends and shapes them with such slow and attentive care that I am put immediately at ease. As he works, we talk. His name is Pouyan. He is twenty-eight years old, bearded and solidly built, with intense blue eyes and a warm, open manner. He immigrated to Las Vegas three years ago from Fardis, a city outside Tehran, by way of Turkey, to which he had escaped by foot, and where he was later met by his parents and younger brother. He was an optician in Iran, as was his father, but his family is Baha’i, a persecuted religious minority there, and the Iranian government shut their optical shops down.

The items and issues included the US SPR levels, the North / South divide on the energy transition, the challenges of expanding minerals supply, the IRA, the strong push governments are giving the energy transition, the talk and the mood at Davos, Dan’s perspective on European governments and their palpable return to reality on energy security, the different perspectives that will be showcased at CERA on the energy transition, and the US and China relationship.

Kerry is no stranger to long flights and extravagant stays as Biden’s climate czar. From March 2021 to June 2022 alone, he flew nearly 200,000 miles—the equivalent of traveling around the world more than seven times—to fight climate change, the Washington Free Beacon reported in September. Those flights produced 9.54 million pounds of carbon, roughly 300 times the average American’s carbon footprint for an entire year. In November, meanwhile, Kerry attended an international climate conference in Sharm El Sheikh, an Egyptian resort town known for its long beaches, luxury resorts, and recreational watersports, including windsurfing, an activity Kerry has long enjoyed.

But in America, the exact opposite attitude holds: woke virtue signaling is more important than scientific achievement, but not more important than beating the Steelers.

My Dear Fellow Clergymen: I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham.

An e-battery factory and new cultural center have put Skelleftea at the heart of an eco-urban renaissance