This is an impressive look at the @SebastianThrun Larry Page aircraft @kittyhawkcorp -vertical takeoff, 1/2 the energy use of a Tesla, 35 decibels cruising, 100 mile range at 180 mph.

Spotlight: The Story of Japan’s Schindler, Chiune Sugihara

Lisbon has shared dissident info with repressive regimes for years. Municipal authorities forwarded the names and addresses of activists to the Chinese, Venezuelan and Angolan embassies.

Welcome to the first annual State of Independence report, where we gather insights on how independents are redefining the future of work.

Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC — and that could seriously weaken the fledgling tracking system

What We Learned Doing Fast Grants

Most hospitals aren’t complying with price transparency rule

Virtual reality ads make their way to Facebook’s Oculus headsets

Cool URIs don’t change

Step 5: Dinamo built a custom type tool for symphony designers. The plug-in, built for Illustrator, expedites the design process through pre-set recommendations, such as the curve library, to help internal teams quickly compose within a sophisticated system. As an added bonus, Dinamo included a “randomize” button as its gift of engineered surprise. “It’s fully random but restricted,” says Breyer. “For instance, it ensures that the aesthetic steps are still quite distinctive in the letter forms.” This feature became a great starting point for designers — revealing previously unseen rhythms in a word, at random.

As a reporter who has spent a decade revealing hundreds of serious safety breaches at U.S. biological research labs, it has always seemed obvious to investigate whether the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a major coronavirus research center, possibly played a role given that the initial outbreak happened in the same city.

Yet for more than a year, those who publicly raised such questions were too often deemed a crackpot conspiracy theorist or a simpleton who just didn’t understand science.

It has only been in recent weeks that a growing list of high-profile scientists, intelligence officials and politicians – including President Joe Biden – have publicly acknowledged the plausibility of a lab accident and pushed for rigorous investigation.

No, millennials don’t have it worse than previous generations

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel2 made a simple case for this: When there’s a combination of resources and competition, civilizations develop much faster.

Cookie licking is one of those concepts where once you’ve seen it you “can’t unsee”. Now that I’m aware of the concept, I keep finding it all over the place. And thinking about it, it is literally all over the place.

‘The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.’ – Aldous Huxley

60,000,000,000 Chickens

Six months of COVID vaccines: what 1.7 billion doses have taught scientists

Your medical records are about to be given away. As GPs, we’re fighting back

The Covid-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus.

For all the bellyaching that goes on throughout the country about out-of-touch bureaucrats, corrupt and unresponsive government, and how much everyone hates Washington, these visible signs of our increasingly intrusive and overbearing government did not fall out of the sky upon an unsuspecting public. The Deep State, along with its headquarters in Washington, is not a negation of the American people’s character. It is an intensification of tendencies inherent in any aggregation of human beings. If the American people did not voluntarily give informed consent to the web of unaccountable influence that radiates from Washington and permeates the country, then their passive acquiescence, aided by false appeals to patriotism and occasional doses of fear, surely played a role.

Farmers Deserve the Right to Repair Their Tractors

What happens when journalists don’t have any friends in finance to challenge their thinking?

To Protect Against Weaponized Drones, We Must Understand Their Key Strengths

Drone refuels U.S. Navy fighter jet in midair for the first time

U.S. Postal Service Releases Dog Attack National Rankings

Boom – is it all just noise?

Google has a new concept called “known victims” for revenge porn & people serially attacked on slander sites. Once a person requests removal of these results from a search of their name, Google will automatically suppress similar content from resurfacing.

Facebook asked Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters for “Another Brick in the Wall II” to promote Instagram. He told Zuckerberg…

The science proves people with natural immunity should skip COVID vaccines

After escaping from prison several times in the early 19th century, Eugène-François Vidocq turned himself in — and went on to revolutionize policing.

The possibility of a science in which all the world is thought of computationally casts the study of computers in an important new light. As its practitioners are fond of saying, computer science is not about computers, any more than astronomy is about telescopes, or biology about microscopes. These devices are tools for observing worlds otherwise inaccessible. The computer is a tool for exploring the world of complex processes, whether they involve cells, stars, or the human mind.

A new antitrust case shows that Prime inflates prices across the board, using the false promise of ‘free shipping’ that is anything but free.

The Next Gatekeepers of the Automotive Industry

The most startling aspect, to me, about the modern institutional media is its hyperconformity.

Rear Admiral Harry E. Yarnell of the U.S. Navy had exposed a serious weakness in their defenses and won the simulated attack. And he had done it by going against the prevailing views of military leaders across the U.S. — he believed that in the future, a country’s navy would be successful only if its air capabilities matched its seagoing strength.

Not a shred of doubt: Sweden was right

Why are enterprise systems so terrible?

Looking at the chronology of the dispute, it is apparent that the moment China truly escalated matters was when Canberra demanded an independent inquiry into the origins of Covid-19. Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, even called for international experts to be given “weapons inspector-style powers” in conducting their probe. China’s ambassador to Canberra responded by warning that this perceived insult might trigger a boycott of Australian produce by Chinese consumers. Within months, the Chinese government itself had taken the initiative by imposing tariffs.

A grow­ing fight is un­fold­ing across the U.S. as cities con­sider phas­ing out nat­ural gas for home cook­ing and heat­ing, cit­ing con­cerns about cli­mate change, and states push back against these bans.

“all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them”.

Why Working From Home Will Stick

Thanks to Facebook and its clampdown on any discussion of the theory that Covid-19 might have been ‘manufactured’ or might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, people in America, Britain, France and across the globe were subjected to Chinese-style silencing. They were essentially banned from saying things that might embarrass the Chinese Communist Party. The supposedly woke, chilled overlords of the World Wide Web helped to globalise the CCP’s repression of free thought and open debate.

Of course, the Indian paper was quickly withdrawn by its authors, and the notion that COVID-19 could have been man-made was rendered radioactive – for a while.

The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find. “found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step”; “It tackled a fundamental question: How did a novel bat coronavirus get to a major metropolis of 11 million people in central China, in the dead of winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t sold into the epicenter of an outbreak?” In addition, many leading experts had either received or approved funding for gain-of-function research. Their “conflicted” status, said Pottinger, “played a profound role in muddying the waters and contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry.” “The sums at stake allow it to “purchase a lot of omertà” from the labs it supports, said Richard Ebright of Rutgers. (In response to detailed questions, an EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson said on behalf of the organization and Daszak, “We have no comment.”)

The nub of the media criticism is, in my view, justified. Last April, I wrote, responding to Rogin’s reporting, that the press should “isolate legitimate questions” from conspiratorial noise “and try and report out the answers”; numerous journalists took this approach to the lab-leak theory, but many others did indeed dismiss it as an illegitimate line of inquiry.

Homeowners, it’s time to ignore your neighbors’ manicured lawns and replace grass with native plants

Hate it when I accidentally develop and deploy a geofenced targeted censorship feature on the anniversary of the censored event, due to human error

The “running cardboard,” the “plastic bomber” or the “Saxon Porsche” — those are just some of the many nicknames that have been given to the Trabant.

Facebook Still ‘Secretly’ Tracks Your iPhone—This Is How To Stop It

Coming from the words doro, meaning “mud” and dango, a type of Japanese flour cake, hikaru dorodango consists of forming a mud ball by hand. Layers of increasingly fine dirt are added to the surface over the space of days to a point at which the dorodango can be polished to a high sheen (hikaru means “shining”).

Building on Tradition — 1,400 Years of a Family Business

Why Some Old Computers are Interesting

Some of the stealth edits that Vox made to its article debunking “conspiracy theories” that Covid-19 originated in a lab leak between its original publication in March 2020 and now.

Why You Can’t Get an Uber or Lyft in Boston Right Now

Rare Vietnam War images from the winning side, 1965-1975

The revolutionary contradictions of Richard Wagner

But the high public cost of LA’s first sanctioned campground — more than $2,600 per tent, per month — has advocates worried it will come at the expense of more permanent housing.

Strong Towns Has Filed a Lawsuit Against the Minnesota Board of Engineering Licensure in Federal District Court

Favorite individual blogs.

I thought I would share how I, as someone who is visually impaired use my iPhone

Protasevich Street? Bucharest mulls changing address of Belarusian embassy

Healthcare privacy laws in the US allow hospitals to share information with contractors and allow researchers to analyze patient data without express permission from those patients. Healthcare companies can use that information in any way they see fit, including to boost profits.

SCOOP: @LockheedMartin, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sent key executives to a three-day white male reeducation camp in order to deconstruct their “white male culture” and atone for their “white male privilege.”

Time has proven Rand Paul had his thumb on the pulse of the science of the virus, and understood the unintended consequences of government interventions better than public health officials.

Travis Fox’s beautiful, haunting drone photographs document America’s scars

Industry stands together on safety

Can DARPA’s simulator decipher that “This person is a journalist” wasn’t meant as a statement of fact or high praise, but rather a slight, implying, “…and should not be”?

It is depressing it has taken so long for the world of science, supported by most journalists and politicians, to start accepting the basic truth that no theory should be discounted without evidence — especially given the seriousness of the issues at stake and history of leaks from laboratories. A spate of strong articles seems to have suddenly changed the media narrative, despite mostly reheating material familiar to those of us who have been tracking this story for months. The latest Wall Street Journal story, for example, about three Wuhan researchers allegedly falling suspiciously sick in November, builds on facts revealed by David Asher, former lead investigator for the State Department, in interviews two months ago with both the Australian journalist Sharri Markson and myself.

There was even a three-year ban in the United States under the Obama administration, although the work was simply outsourced to labs in other nations.

A freedom of information request later exposed this influential statement was secretly organised by Peter Daszak, a British charity chief who channelled funding from US health authorities to his friend and research colleague Shi Zhengli, the infamous “Batwoman” expert at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Other signatories included Jeremy Farrar, the highly regarded director of the Wellcome Trust.

Since then, Daszak has expended considerable efforts on denouncing the lab leak theory. Yet despite this clear conflict of interest, he was invited to join the WHO investigation in China into the virus’s cause and to head up a 12-strong group for the Lancet on the same subject alongside five of his fellow signatories.

Chris Hubbach:

Earlier this month Madison Gas and Electric requested a rate increase that, if approved, would add about $4.90 to the average residential electric bill and nearly $18 to the average gas bill.

We are now living the intentional deconstruction of the aquifers and the groundwater. We are watching our home-grown food supply, and the most fertile farmland on the planet being destroyed. We are drinking water from the bottom of the barrel where contaminants are in concentrated form without the freshwater dilution for wells. Our infrastructure—-canals, roads, and bridges, are sinking because without water to plump it up, land drops.

Why introverts make great leaders

SeaGlass is a system designed by security researchers at the University of Washington to measure IMSI-catcher use across a city.

In other words, when push comes to shove and the system is pushed to its limits, policymakers invariably print.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory*

As it happens, Amish communities are home to plenty of tinkerers, hackers and technophiles. Just like early adopters who read the news online when ‘the internet’ was still a strange term, they rigged up light bulbs, bought telephones and surfed the web before their peers or church leaders knew much about them. Due to the decentralised nature of Amish religious life (there’s no Amish pope), no one set a policy for addressing these novelties. Contrary to what outsiders might expect, early adopters often aren’t censored, nor necessarily discouraged.

For Bittman, the central drama of this story begins in the course of the last century, as agriculture and food processing became mass industries, and as we moved from having two types of food (plants and animals) to being overwhelmed by a new third type—one that was “more akin to poison.” These “engineered edible substances, barely recognizable as products of the earth, are commonly called ‘junk.’?”

U.S. small towns take on energy-guzzling bitcoin miners

The Greensill Capital’s rise and fall has everything: investment banks, opaque finance, private jets, trophy mansions and the biggest…

In 2011, Chinese spies stole the crown jewels of cybersecurity—stripping protections from firms and government agencies worldwide. Here’s how it happened.

Microsoft co-founder’s philanthropic legacy is threatened by new revelations about his behavior

Now Your Car is a Cybersecurity Risk, Too

Are Angel Investors More Likely than Venture Capitalists to Drive Entrepreneurial Experimentation?

Report: USPS ‘Internet Covert Operations Program’ Is ‘Much Broader in Scope Than Previously Known’. The program ‘includes analysts who assume fake identities online, use sophisticated intelligence tools, and employ facial recognition software.”

Crime App Citizen is Driving a Security Car Around L.A. and Won’t Say Why

Status Trumps Argument

Amir Sariri:

Although angel investors and venture capitalists (VCs) both participate in the supply side of the same market providing capital and advice to early-stage companies, they are distinct in several ways. The differences in when they choose to deploy capital are well studied. The differences in when they choose to provide advice are not. Using a sample of 7,980 mentoring decisions by seed-stage investors from which I construct a novel typology of four types of startup activities, I report among the first empirical findings on systematic differences in angel versus VC advice. Angels are more likely than VCs to choose to provide advice on the design and execution of experiments (e.g., will customers buy this product at this price?), whereas angels are less likely than VCs to choose to provide advice on analysis (e.g., what is the size of the total addressable market?). While analysis is a skill that can be learned from studying, hypothesis testing is a skill developed via learning-by-doing. I report evidence consistent with the hypothesis that angels are more likely to choose to provide advice on the design and execution of experiments because they have a skill advantage in that domain due to operational experience. I also provide evidence that is inconsistent with alternative explanations, including financial incentives and selection.

It’s not hard to imagine this system being expanded to adjudicate a merged ToS that spans most corporate online platforms.

A parallel ‘legal system’ that’s beyond the reach of democratic governance that dictates what 4-5 billion people can or can’t do online.

So keep this in mind when I say that, from my perspective, the potential of the blockchain SOCI is easily equal to the whole of the current $200 Trillion global economy. Consider this, if you were sitting in the 1500 with a global GDP around $500 Billion and someone told you about the joint stock company, representative democracy and empirical science, you might have been skeptical that this new world would not only come to completely absorb the old but would ultimately grow five hundred times beyond it over the coming centuries. Yet that is precisely what happened.

Google faces $5 billion lawsuit in U.S. for tracking ‘private’ internet use

How China turned a prize-winning iPhone hack against the Uyghurs

The internals of App Review’s testing — quite fascinating!

The First Rule of Bite Club? Talk About It.

Reporters fume at White House ‘quote approval’ rules

This is a notable milestone because in 2018, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the goal for its Falcon 9 rocket would be to fly each first stage booster 10 times before requiring significant maintenance.

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent ‘misleading data’ being shown to pilots

By as early as the fall of 2016, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had already started to worry deeply about the progress—or lack thereof—being made by his rocket company, Blue Origin

These leaders, alongside Smith, built a culture of caution rather than deliberate risk-taking in order to move more quickly.

Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

This article examines the effect of church-state relations on rates of Christian population growth or decline worldwide. It makes the paradoxical argument that contexts of both pluralism and persecution do not impede Christian growth rates.

“This would be consistent with DarkSide’s earlier activities, which included several ‘big game hunting’ attacks, whereby attackers target an organization that likely possesses the financial means to pay the ransom demanded by the attackers,” Flashpoint observed.

The Oncoming Ransomware Storm

As I outline in my Content Fortresses thesis, when only first-party data is permissible for use in advertising targeting, then the largest consumer tech companies will simply grow their first-party datasets. Apple is claiming that the entirety of the App Store exists in its first-party data environment and so every interaction that takes place in any app is fodder for its ads optimization algorithm.

The news highlights the interest in payroll data, with various companies launching products centered around the novel dataset. Last week, Motherboard reported on how a company called Argyle was linked to a series of suspicious websites that offered to pay people for their workplace login details.

This screencap shows Ferguson’s “unmitigated” model scenario predicting 84,777 deaths in Sweden. It comes straight from Ferguson’s own website.

No-Fly Zone in the Loan Office: How Chief Executive Officers’ Risky Hobbies Affect Credit Stakeholders’ Evaluation of Firms

Limited functionality instead of account deactivation

Fact-checking Modi’s India
As the pandemic rages across the country, one team of fact-checkers contends with a post-truth dystopia.

Another Group of Scientists Calls for Further Inquiry Into Origins of the Coronavirus

Putin seems to have revived the 16th-century “letter of marque” that England used against the Spanish Empire.

Klamath Basin water allocation cut to zero

WATCHES FROM THE SOVIET UNION

A major lesson of Covid-19 is that there is no distinction between natural and man-made catastrophes.

The Texanist: Why Do I Get So Many Robocalls From Small Texas Towns?

Publish books on Amazon. I’ve published 4 and make about $3k in profit per month, after paying for ads on amazon. Don’t write them yourself, that’s a lot of work. Instead, do key word research about what books sell in non-fiction categories (fiction is a whole different ballgame). Look for keywords that 1) auto complete in the amazon search bar, and 2) have less than 4,000 matching books, and 3) have an average Amazon BSR of less than 150k.

While I was examining the private intelligence business, it became clear that I needed to look at another profession, the one where my career had been spent — journalism. Reporters and private investigators long have had a symbiotic relationship that is hidden from the public. Hired spies feed journalists story tips or documents and use reporters to plant stories benefiting a client without leaving their fingerprints behind.