By  Rachel Pritzker

Twenty years ago, in the mid-2000s, I was a partisan warrior, and my philanthropy was entirely dedicated to pursuing my ideological beliefs. At the time, I served as a founding board member of the Democracy Alliance, a network of philanthropists focused on advancing a progressive policy agenda.

But at a certain point, I came to see that my efforts, under the banner of “democracy,” were actually furthering the decline of democracy. Our passionate advocacy, while aimed at strengthening the country, was contributing to mounting gridlock and toxic partisanship. Democratic elected officials felt increasingly pressured to adhere to party orthodoxy rather than passing legislation through compromise, lest they be primaried by a progressive group for being insufficiently pure. Recognizing the extraordinary period of U.S. and global democratic backsliding in which we live, I have since shifted my philanthropy toward creating spaces, such as the Democracy Funders Network, where supporters of liberal democracy from across the political spectrum can step out of our ideological bubbles, build new relationships, and learn together how to defend democracy.

Caleb Wethington

A bill aiming to classify food containing a vaccine or vaccine material as a drug has passed and is moving to Gov. Bill Lee’s desk.

The bill, HB1894, was discussed in the Tennessee Senate on Thursday before a vote to send it to Lee’s desk.

“As introduced, defines food that contains a vaccine or vaccine material as a drug for purposes of the Tennessee Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act,” the bill reads.

Sen. Joey Hensley, R-Hohenwald, spoke during the session about the bill, which he’s sponsoring.

“House Bill 1894 merely would require any food that contains a vaccine or vaccine material would have to be classified as a drug and labeled as such,” he said.

George Leaf:

Many Americans realize that our higher-education system is decaying, its standards in decline while costs continue to rise. Is this situation like a tooth with a cavity that can readily be fixed? Or is the decay so deep that we need something far more serious, such as a root canal?

David Barnhizer’s new book, Conformity Colleges, strongly suggests that we must have the latter. His subtitle explains that we suffer from “the destruction of intellectual creativity and dissent.” That’s an accurate diagnosis.

An emeritus professor of law, Barnhizer has written a no-holds-barred exposé of the tragic fall of our institutions of higher education. Our colleges, he states, “have turned into a one-sided process where true believers who see the world through an ideological lens have taken control.” Instead of graduating thoughtful, mature people who can employ reason to evaluate claims and arguments about the world, our schools produce increasingly large numbers of people who act as “social justice warriors,” single-mindedly following the lessons drummed into them in college.

David Blaska:

Small solace that he can’t be worse than Jennifer Cheatham, who presently is cloning herself over at depends-on-the-context Harvard U. Can anyone tell the Werkes why, say, a Tommy Thompson would not do a bang-up job as superintendent of Madison schools? Or a Scott McCallum, whose degree is economics? Who else could produce tangible results? Why not a Barry Alvarez, Judith Faulkner, Kevin Conroy, Zach Brandon, Kaleem Caire, Paul Soglin, Mike Gallagher, or Paul Ryan — all successful managers of complex institutions?

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Ernest Hemingway, Henry Ford, Harry Truman, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg never got college degrees. Never futzed up Madison’s public schools, either!

—-

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

The ACLU, once a free speech organization, is arguing it was justified in firing a whistleblower, not because she was actually being racist, but because her words caused harm.

The US, for political reasons, has proven incapable of imposing similar discipline on the healthcare market. Prices are negotiated in a medical marketplace where the sellers of healthcare hold significant market power, and this process is intrinsically inflationary. This inflation has been far more intense in the employer-insurance market than in the public sector, particularly since the mid-1980s; Medicare and private-insurance prices have diverged to the point where commercial insurers pay on average 254% of Medicare for the same procedures.

Thank you for your interest in attending a historical tour of the Nevada National Security Site. Free monthly historical tours of the Site are offered to help the public learn how the Site has evolved over the years.

Of course, relying on Toyota to honor my opt-out is a matter of trust. I’m really not a trusting guy. So, I also pulled the fuse for the Data Communication Module(DCM), which connects the car to the cellphone network. No DCM, no phoning home. No DCM, no interior microphone either, since that runs through the same fuse in the 4Runner (check what’s affected before trying this with your own vehicle). But I don’t want my phone and its data synced to the vehicle anyway, so that’s no loss to me.

Starlink constellation.

BYD Takes On EV Laggards Toyota, VW With Steep China Price Cuts

We are now in a position to expose the identity of the most senior Capitol Police official in that meeting and the man who reportedly presented congressional officials and staffers with the absurd excuse that the Capitol Police and Secret Service allowed a group of children to walk in front of the bomb so as not to cause panic—a baffling explanation for such a flagrant breach of protocol as to be unbelievable to the point of offense. That Capitol Police official is Ashan Benedict, currently Assistant Chief of Police of the Capitol Police in charge of Protective and Intelligence Operations. Yes, you read that right. A man who would excuse the flagrant violation of security protocol as depicted in the footage of the DNC bomb discovery is the head of Protective Operations at the Capitol Police.

This system seems like it was accelerated last fall post the BRICS meeting in August which exacerbated the US bond selloff. This is what scared the Treasury and the Fed to pivot in October/November in an attempt to buy time to weaken the dollar and lower interest rates to help the US government’s finances out. We know that China and India are already doing this buying of oil in their local currency. I am starting to think that Japan is doing this as well and over time, Europe is likely to begin too.

This morning I tweeted that the cargo owners would have to pay for the damages to the bridge under the principle of maritime law known as general average. I was wrong. It appears they will only have to pay for the damage to the vessel and the cargo, split pro rata based on how many containers they have the ship. The damage to the bridge, compensation to the victims and other damages will be born by the ship operator and their P&I insurance carrier.

There are tens of thousands of genes in the human genome: minuscule twists of DNA and RNA that combine to express all of the traits and characteristics that make each of us unique. Each gene is given a name and alphanumeric code, known as a symbol, which scientists use to coordinate research. But over the past year or so, some 27 human genes have been renamed, all because Microsoft Excel kept misreading their symbols as dates.

The grant was announced by U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison.

“Since few weeks we have Sansa Oil,” one staffer wrote, referring to the low-grade oil made from olive pulp that generally retails for half the price of extra virgin, and is so unappetizing it is apparently often used as fuel for biomass boilers. “This for me is totally crazy,” the staffer fumed.

“To the [NY Times] Editor:
A Supreme Court decision preventing the Biden administration from deciding what can and cannot be said on social media would also prevent a potential future Trump administration from [doing so].

The NYT refused to comment until last week, and did so in the most Times way possible… by burying a mention of my story 52 paragraphs down in an article about how concerns around censorship are somehow a plot to help Trump.

It’s hard to gauge the harmful effects of LLMs on the field as a whole from the perspective of a single developer testing the tools directly. The risks only become obvious once you look at studies that look at the effects across a sample size that’s larger than a single person, and from that perspective LLMs look like a Y2K-style code quality disaster in the making.

The amount of maple syrup in the national reserve – stored in tens of thousands of barrels in several warehouses across Quebec – has dwindled significantly since 2020. That year, the reserve had more than 103 million pounds of the sticky product.

The belief that software can solve problems of human conflict has a long history in U.S. war-making. Beginning in the late Sixties, the Air Force deployed a vast array of sensors across the jungles of Southeast Asia, masking the Ho Chi Minh trail along which North Vietnam supplied its forces in the south. Devised by scientists advising the Pentagon, the operation, code-named Igloo White, and designed to detect human activity by the sounds of marching feet, the smell of ammonia from urine, or the electronic sparks of engine ignitions, relayed information to giant IBM computers housed in a secret base in Thailand. The machines were the most powerful then in existence; they processed the signals to pinpoint enemy supply columns otherwise invisible under the jungle canopy. The scheme, in operation from 1967 to 1972 at a cost of at least hundreds of millions a year, was a total failure. The Vietnamese swiftly devised means to counter it; just as Hamas would short-circuit Shin Bet algorithms by feeding the system false information, the Vietnamese also faked data, with buckets of urine hung in trees off the trail, or herds of livestock steered down unused byways, which were then dutifully processed by the humming computers as enemy movements. Meanwhile, North Vietnamese forces in the south were well supplied. In 1972, they launched a powerful offensive using hundreds of tanks that went entirely undetected by Igloo White. The operation was abandoned shortly thereafter.

Getting rid of textbooks was a mistake.

Perhaps it was. For seven years, from 2010 to 2017, assigned to the company’s South Carolina assembly plant and appalled by the lax controls, Barnett had tried to persuade his managers that the mistakes they were letting slide could one day be fatal. In 2019, Barnett told a journalist at Corporate Crime Reporter that his managers “started pressuring us not to document defects, to work outside the procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected. . . . They just wanted to push planes out the door and make the cash register ring.”

The feds are refusing to make any further installments of Bulger’s case file public, saying the records are “investigative” and no longer subject to the Freedom of Information Act. “The records responsive to your request are law enforcement records; there is a pending or prospective law enforcement pro .

Three core providers dominate the market for core banking systems for depository institutions (DIs). These providers also have a large presence in vertically related markets, such as card network services; payment processing services for DIs, merchants, or governments; and banking-as-a-service. This market structure may make it difficult for DIs to switch their core providers, affecting their ability to offer new services and stay competitive.

Where does Cuba go after it loses faith in Marx? What happens to intellectuals, when after rejecting God, they reject atheism? Where is there left to go?

What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane?

I would recommend just writing one (simple site generator) yourself. It’s not very hard, and the process of writing it will make you intimately familiar with how it works, so you won’t feel overwhelmed.Just writing simple software feels way better than reading docs for an arcane tool that will change on you over time due to updates.

None of these issues seem lost on management and insiders, who have been awarded compensation based on manipulated AFFO metrics and have cashed out $476 million since the company’s conversion to REIT status, including over $100 million since 2023.

Rather than using its rotary engine to power the vehicle directly, the MX-30 R-EV uses the engine to drive a generator. The electricity produced is then used to power an electric motor, in a configuration generally referred to as a “series hybrid” or “extended range electric vehicle.” Examples of this that are already in production include the Nissan e-Power range and the Honda e:HEV. (In the Honda vehicle, the engine can also be made to drive the wheels directly.)

At least an interview. Except that that isn’t how the job market works these days. Instead, the world’s bedrooms are full of lonely young people wading through websites that promise their efficient algorithmic filtering will take them straight to the dream job. In fact they do no such thing.  Employers may imagine the system is efficient. In fact, it is a wasted opportunity. Every time someone applies for a job, there is a chance to build that company’s reputation. Those young people (and their parents) are also consumers. So this is a moment to polish a brand, not tarnish it. Kids will remember who helped and who treated them as disposable. No amount of advertising will persuade them that the companies that never replied will ever care, about people or the planet or customers

Today, China Experts and China Watchers flourish once more. A once nearly-defunct claque of people working in government for national political ends, journalists, academics, ne’er-do-wells, as well as the talented curious and literary dilettantes jostle and contend with each other in the New Epoch of Chairman of Everything Xi Jinping. The long-overlooked, or underestimated, skills of being able to read, listen to and understand the bloviations of the Chinese party-state are even somewhat in vogue. Although Xi Jinping has been a boon for strategic thinkers, think tanks and academic opinionators in Euramerica, China’s own market for strategists — ?????????????????, and so on — has fallen under the sway of the Communist Party. [Note: The colourful and wildly imaginative efforts of the previous ‘hundred schools’ have been reduced to a far more modest and grey palette of opinion. Those on both sides of the divide do, nonetheless, share similar ambitions: to serve ideological interests, to make a name, curry favour and influence while enjoying a slice of the cake that through their efforts is ever bigger. One of the time-honoured ways of grabbing the discursive spotlight is to formulate an expression or catch-phrase that gains currency.

Who has the best source of links to debunks of hoaxes”?

Worried about hospitals closing and higher costs for patients, state lawmakers are increasingly tangling with hospitals over potential health care mergers, in some cases derailing deals they think don’t serve the public interest.

The German auto industry faces a perfect storm of challenges as it navigates the shift to electric mobility, with major implications for jobs, trade, and the country’s industrial future. Adapting quickly and strategically will be critical to avoid the fate of other once-dominant manufacturing hubs.

This provocation, published yesterday, is overwhelmingly likely aiming to feed into those prevailing active measures (“ops”) meant to drag Christians into a positions of fruitful reaction that the Regime can use to clamp down on them. Again, Christian reaction is their real action, and we know for certain that Christian circles are deeply infiltrated with a chest-beating and growing radicalism that is being baited toward and associated with a growing antisemitism. The responses to this post will almost certainly prove this out, btw. Your evil government wants this to happen. They are baiting you into it.

Shiba Inu’s price at the beginning of 2021 was very low ($0.00000001) until Elon Musk tweeted about Shiba Inu (in March 2021), and its price rose 300% in the hours following Musk’s tweet. Since then, “Shiba Inu has grown as one of the biggest shitcoins in the cryptocurrency space.”

I composed the following prompt for Claude 3, where I pasted in both of my code examples and then added some instructions about what I wanted it to build at the end:

Adopt a brutal new conflict of interest policy that prohibits NAR leaders and the association from benefiting from opaque relationships with industry vendors and outside business interests.

Industry pros sweat the possibility that many digital files will eventually become unusable — an archival tragedy reminiscent of the celluloid era.

A rejection is exactly what it sounds like. Your proposal is rejected, with no explanation why. In this case – ask for specific reasons why. One you know the reason, you can address it.

Apple Inc. is in talks to build Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence engine into the iPhone, according to people familiar with the situation, setting the stage for a blockbuster agreement that would shake up the AI industry.

This capability opens up exciting possibilities for MLLMs to tackle more complex, real-world tasks that require integrating information from multiple sources. However, the computational challenges associated with processing multiple high-resolution images remain an area for further research and optimization.

After being pressed by conservative sites like Breitbart News, AP admitted that a claim of having “geolocation data” implicating Moreno is untrue and Moreno’s counsel has shown that an intern admitted that the posting was a prank. Moreover, the AP knew and reported on the admission from the intern but still ran the story and claim of geolocational data support. The article is being denounced as a political “hit piece” and AP has reportedly brought in a major defense attorney to handle the legal repercussions.

Image and especially video compression is a problem of obvious real life significance, with video traffic taking up over 60% of all internet traffic. Increasingly better lossless and lossy codecs have been developed over the years to combat this problem. Relatively recently, a nascent research domain on using auto-encoder style neural networks for compression has emerged. This post goes through the evolution and highlights where the field might be heading.

Why cash is a cutting-edge technology for maintaining a balance of monetary power.

Fueled by private equity and a subscription-based business model, the auto wash industry is flooding the US with new outlets. Some towns and cities have had enough.

One reason for the slow rollout is that Apple’s design team has to work with carmakers to create a bespoke interface and style for each model. Even without a fully integrated approach, the new CarPlay still needs to be customized.

“It probably will cost about 30 cents per person in the United States to find out if we can mass produce this home. Doesn’t that seem reasonable in view of [the] public benefit that will accrue?”

Why didn’t this library work in conjunction with the latest version of AWS? Who knows? Not even the developers of the library might know, because the JavaScript ecosystem is so badly interconnected that everyone relies on blindly trusting each other’s code and infrastructure. It’s not even close to the experience of using robust package managers like Cargo (Rust), NuGet (C#), or others.

“Effectively what we’re doing is diverting tonnage from landfill”

Direct Solar Power: Off-Grid Without Batteries
Using solar panels without backup infrastructure makes renewable energy production much more affordable, efficient and sustainable.

This BMW i4 customer likes its hardware.
he’s got a few choice thoughts about the software though, and BMW’s pettiness in its customer treatment. The video is in German, but I summarized it for you:

This is actually happening!

Up to 10 informants managed by the FBI were embedded in anti-pipeline resistance camps near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation at the height of mass protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016. The new details about federal law enforcement surveillance of an Indigenous environmental movement were released as part of a legal fight between North Dakota and the federal government over who should pay for policing the pipeline fight. Until now, the existence of only one other federal informant in the camps had been confirmed. 

Vulnerabilities in common Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs) required in US commercial trucks could be present in over 14 million medium- and heavy-duty rigs, according to boffins at Colorado State University.

Pursuing GMT for fun (and funding) has positively affected other areas of my scientific interests, and my new research modules continue to be added to GMT. The future holds many promises but will require formation and leadership of communities to steer and maintain the essential science tools that have served us well for many decades.

And as Brandon points out above, these incompetent, unethical, and unprofessional agents harm consumers every day. It isn’t the professional agents who provide great service to buyers who are causing consumers to turn against the industry; it’s the hobbyists who ruin it for everybody. The trouble is that we have far, far, far too many non-professionals in the industry today. Cui bono? Who benefits from having so many hobbyists, so many part-timers? It ain’t the professional working REALTOR. It ain’t consumers. It isn’t first-time homebuyers or military veterans or minorities or anybody else who gets trotted out all the time as examples of people that REALTORS serve. They are hurt far more by having incompetent non-professionals handle their home purchase than is the hedge fund billionaire or the doctor buying his third investment property.

Andrew Bahl:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison plans to launch a statewide marketing campaign to change public attitudes that the school is too “elitist” and “leftist” in hopes for more state funding, documents show.

In documents seeking applications from private vendors to produce the initiative, UW-Madison said it wanted a campaign that would combat “misperceptions among state residents about the university and higher education in general.”

The chief goal, however, would be a favorable outcome next year, when the Legislature’s budget writers and Gov. Tony Evers will negotiate a new budget to cover Wisconsin’s state government until 2027.

“Primary mark of success will be a positive state budget for UW-Madison in the next budget biennium,” a university document answering questions about the project said.

The UW said it is looking to double its media spending as part of the campaign, with the total cost of producing and airing the ads expected to be around $1 million. UW-Madison spokesperson Kelly Tyrrell said the campaign will be privately funded.

Austin, Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio each have big annual rodeos. So why doesn’t Dallas have a big to-do, too? 

Now, let’s attempt to solve the task of finding nearest neighbors using PostgreSQL. Using our datasets, we will try to identify ten fires that occurred near the factory in russia, where Iranian Shahed drones are manufactured. For more detailed information about the plant, you can refer to the researchconducted by the Molfar team. The factory is located in the special economic zone Alabuga in Tatarstan, where previously cat food and automotive glass were produced, and mushrooms were grown. However, after sanctions against Russia, its priorities shifted, and now it plays a key role in russia’s plans for drone production.

I spoke with FT Group CEO John Ridding soon after he’d returned from Japan, where he’d been meeting with Nikkei leadership. Our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity and to remove brief asides about household pets, is below.

Kind of, but not quite. A key difference is that in the courtroom there is some reasonable chance that the opposing lawyer or the judge will notice that the key case has been overruled, so that your argument that hinges on that case will fail. You have a clear incentive to not rely on overruled cases. In science, however, there’s no opposing lawyer and no judge: you can build an entire career on studies that fail to replicate, and no problem at all, as long as you don’t pull any reallyridiculousstunts.

Back in the Fall of 2022, I watched the 2018 documentary The Bleeding Edge¹, which investigates the FDA’s medical device clearance process. I was surprised to learn that for many devices, clinical trials are not required. The documentary scrutinizes the FDA’s 510(k) clearance process, through which some devices can be fast-tracked for use if they are “substantially equivalent” to an existing device, even without a clinical trial.

For those following the increasingly tense row between Big Tech and the creative industries over copyright, here’s the Publishers Association letter to AI companies in full:

The winds of change are whistling through the global financial system. The BRICS alliance, a formidable economic force comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and newly added members, is revving up its engine for a revolutionary new payment system. This system, fueled by the cutting-edge technology of blockchain, promises to disrupt the current dollar-dominated landscape, potentially altering the course of international trade and finance.

Today the Pentagon is at 12.6% and health and human services is at 28%.

This is hands-down the best explanation I’ve heard on why sanctions on Russia backfired, and why they were never going to succeed in the first place.

I continue to be convinced that the Japanese camera companies simply don’t understand their customers. The source of that problem derives from cultural, language, and geographic barriers. These companies have all evolved to be too paternalistic in their product approaches (e.g. “these are the cameras we’re making, take them”) when they really need to be more embracing (e.g. “help us understand your needs and desires”). But as I note above, their paternalism seems mired in fear of smartphones now, and they race to other arenas in which to play. Meanwhile, the customers are left in the same venue with only smartphones to use. 

I have nothing against the recipients of Social Security. I’m just saying that that DC will not pay them in real terms. Probably they’ll soft default with inflation.

The acceptance of the case, filed by Democratic law firm Elias Law Group, marks another significant shift between the current, liberal-controlled court and the previous, conservative high court, which banned drop boxes two years ago.

What Gawande didn’t know (being charitable) — Academic centers that gained monopoly position in their market charged commercial payers multiples of what they charged Medicare. The future wasn’t some utopia where academic health systems had patient outcomes as their 1º incentive. It was ruthless monopoly that sought to replace physicians with “providers” that would order lots of tests and send patients to academic specialists who specialized in doing lots of unnecessary procedures.

Recently, the Swift project began developing a new embedded language mode to support highly constrained platforms. This mode utilizes generic specialization, inlining, and dead code stripping to produce tiny binaries, while retaining the core features of Swift.

Pilots using personalized reminders for all sorts of tasks in the cockpit is extremely common, but the post-it note cue underscores the lack of detailed alerting in the master caution system aboard all generations of the 737, relying on pilot memory to switch off the potentially hazardous anti-ice system. “Easy to get distracted with other duties and miss turning off,” said Tajer, who has been sharply critical of Boeing. “That’s why I use a decades-old technique.”

What made the biggest impact on me, however, were the Italian neorealism films of the post-WW2 era, especially Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema [1948] (The English translation is The Earth Trembles).

DMCA Notices Took Down 20,517 GitHub Projects Last Year.

This started as blog post and became an essay before too long, so I’ve structured my writing in multiple sections each with a clear lead to make it a bit easier to digest — peppered with my own ‘takes’. I’ve tried to stick to original thoughts for the most part and link to what others have said where applicable. Some of the topics I touch on:

• Why I believe Vision Pro may be an over-engineered “devkit”
• The genius & audacity behind some of Apple’s hardware decisions
• Gaze & pinch is an incredible UI superpower and major industry ah-ha moment

Four decades after its debut, Inverse tracks down the ragtag crew behind one of the greatest indie films ever made. “If it was a Hollywood movie that had been made about punks and stuff, it would’ve died.”

But no space agency or company has dazzled us more in the last 10 years than SpaceX. The company produces moments of wonder and originality that are both breathtaking and full of promise. What SpaceX does best is provide us a glimpse into a tantalizingly close future. And that happened again on Thursday with the third Starship launch.

Observability is the process through which one develops the ability to ask meaningful questions, get useful answers, and act effectively on what you learn. – Hazel Weakly

Overall, current drones seem to increase the vulnerability of fixed assets such as tanks or troop formations, or for that matter oil refineries or Moscow or Ukraine fixed landmarks.  A very large and sophisticated U.S. aircraft carrier might be able to repel the drones (albeit at high dollar cost), but a bunch of tanks in an open field will not have comparable protection. In the abstract, “mid-valued assets become more vulnerable” could favor either offense or defense.

Damn right! How does rule of law and press freedom help all those starving kids in Canada, Sweden or New Zealand? See how North Koreans all worship the Kim Dynasty for ‘delivering full stomachs‘.

However, the spokesperson for the Elkanns said “there are categorically no missing paintings, these artworks were the personal property of Marella Caracciolo Agnelli and at her passing they were all fully accounted for in her estate by the Swiss court-appointed administrator”, adding that Margherita seemed “determined to inflict emotional pain on her three eldest children”. With seven legal cases under way that will take years to conclude, friends and relatives say the chances of a settlement are slim and the family is “unlikely to find peace” soon.

5) The Left feels barring Trump from the presidency is worth destroying 235 years of American jurisprudence.

$4,335 at “Nathan’s Luxlifestyle” on Martha’s Vineyard last August? Mmm hmm.

This is the story of Osborne’s spectacular rise and fall. It is based on contemporary articles in publications such as the New York Times, Business Insider, Infoworld, Dr. Dobbs Journal,and Byte; published accounts from those who were there; books such as Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and Fire in the Valleyby Michael Swaine and Paul Frieberger; and, finally, on the words of Adam Osborne himself.

I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train.

Now while you’re doing your taxes online, there are AI chatbots on the right side of the screen to answer your burning questions.

High efficiency raw—is because the still side is using a compression algorithm originally intended for the video side. 

Hear firsthand how 5 FBI assets—Dan, Steve, Jenny, Mark, and Red—accelerate the vague plot in Sept 2020 and push their targets to do something before the election. As I’ve written many times, straight up election interference again by the FBI. Also more confirmation Whitmer and her team were aware of the operation.

The affiliate claimed BlackCat/ALPHV took the $22 million payment but never paid him his percentage of the ransom. BlackCat is known as a “ransomware-as-service” collective, meaning they rely on freelancers or affiliates to infect new networks with their ransomware. And those affiliates in turn earn commissions ranging from 60 to 90 percent of any ransom amount paid.

The Japanese marque blames the phasing out of the UK’s 2G network as the main reason for dropping its Android and iOS NissanConnect EV app services, with some 3,000 Nissan Leaf and e-NV200 commercial vehicles manufactured before 2016 affected in the UK, according to the BBC. Much of the disappointment from owners surrounds the sudden loss of key functionality, such as the ability to remotely heat or cool the vehicle, as well as the option to set up charging schedules that allow batteries to be brimmed when energy tariffs are at their cheapest… all from the convenience of a smartphone.

This has been 100% wrong.

Verizon says the cell phone poles are needed to boost its Deer District signal. That’s especially important with Fiserv Forum hosting the Republican National Convention in July. Meanwhile, the Bucks are adding cell equipment for the same reason. The basketball club says Verizon can use its system ? for a $10 million upfront fee and additional monthly payments.

“The City Council affirms remaining a Non-Sanctuary City and asserts the City does not currently have the financial capacity to fund new services related to this crisis and demands that other municipalities and entities do not systematically transport migrants or people experiencing homelessness to the City.”

It must be noted that Milwaukee is home to the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum, which has produced bobbleheads of Biden, Harris, Trump and Republican former Vice President Mike Pence. Baldwin and Hovde have yet to make the cut.

Jonathan Kaplan, a major Dem donor, had no gov’t experience before Biden tapped him as US Ambassador to Singapore.

One nugget on a key swing state not voting today: @JoeBiden’s campaign is launching an effort to open 31 offices in Wisconsin by April.

PwC’s US election rules set limits on using partner meetings and electronic communications to campaign so that the race would not distract from the normal operations of the business.

“The aviation sector is massively undertaxed, and this long overdue change?.?.?.?it is the tax equivalent to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” said Matt Finch, UK policy manager at Transport & Environment UK, a non-government organisation

“the reason why Singapore spends so much less on health than other developed countries is its low hospital utilisation.” Instead, Singapore has invested in highly productive polyclinics and low-cost telemedicine. The result is that Singaporeans can visit their GP more often than English patients. In their polyclinics they also improve productivity by separating chronic and acute care.

The challenge with LLM-based code generation as described below is that it starts from a poorly defined natural language input.

Judgement day.

You’ll also hear Nilay try to convince me that the fediverse isn’t just happening but that it’s also going to be important and that we should be paying attention to it and that it is going to make the internet better. And I think I maybe even got a fediverse-related Verge scoop in here. 

The project was also a failure, at the highest levels of the company, to settle on one thing and do it. “There are a lot of roads you can take when you have a lot of really smart people and a very big budget,” says Reilly Brennan, a partner at the transportation technology venture fund Trucks VC. “But Apple never had the ability to make a bunch of specific decisions to lead them one way or the other.”

The U.S. military risks repeating history unless bureaucratic impediments are removed and the right organizations are empowered to make significant changes regarding the acquisition and distribution of small drones for infantry units — drones need to be proliferated, decentralized, and familiar to the units employing them. To do this, it must be made easier for infantry units to acquire and train with them. Failure to do so leaves the U.S. military unprepared for the modern battlefield.

Tuesday the FL Senate passed HB 1365 with DeSantis expected to sign. The main takeaway is that IF municipalities want to allow camping on public property, they have to follow certain rules, like providing 24 hr security and bathrooms. But it gets better.

When Trump raised the idea of using the National Guard, they called it tyrannical. When a Democratic governor now uses it, they call it a “public safety measure.”

For 100 years, the Nakoma League has put on an annual musical comedy revue for the neighborhood. This Saturday’s hour-long show at Nakoma Golf Club (sorry, it’s sold out) is the culmination of months of hard work and inspiration from over two dozen participants, most of whom haven’t sung or performed live since high school (and sometimes not even then).

“Tap the fuck in,” a message posted to a large crime-focused Telegram group chat in October read. The user included a photo of a Macbook Pro in a darkened room with a hand hovering above the keyboard. On the screen were blue and white boxes; a dashboard used by doctors and other medical industry professionals to order prescriptions. The panel displayed various pieces of information, such as the prescribing physician, the patient’s required dose, and the patient’s name.  In the middle of the screen read the text “oxyCODONE (oxyCODONE 5 mg oral tablet).”

Boeing isn’t an American company. They are a globalized, finance driven company focused on management team payouts and short term profits. That’s why they can’t make products that work anymore.

Your Doctor Replied to Your Email. That’ll Cost $25.
More doctors are charging fees to respond to patient messages

This site explains how to travel comfortably & affordably by train or ferry where you might think air was now the only option. Select an option below…

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock: If you’re in a country where you’re fearful of your government and maybe this is one of the reasons China has banned it, if you’re in a country where you’re fearful of your future, fearful of your government of you’re frightened that your government is devaluing its currency by too much deficits, you can say this is a great potential long term store of value. And as I said its like a digital gold…

“I think that’s a good lesson for everybody: never use hotel internet if you want to do a secure call,” Germany’s ambassador to the UK, Miguel Berger, told the BBC this week. Some may feel the advice came a little too late.

Should we move to Kansas? What stuff should we throw away? Are we too worried about money? Readers have plenty to say about our monthly concerns.

Not just Affirmative Action. It can’t get off the ground without being specifically exempted from environmental regs (which is effectively command-economy-by-stealth; can’t build things without explicit political favor).

California calls electric cars “zero emissions vehicles” because they don’t have tailpipes. That is deceptive. Generating the electricity that powers those cars creates particulate pollution, and of course electric cars still use tires, which are made from petroleum. Electric cars weigh far more than gasoline-powered ones, so their tires degrade faster, as electric car buyers are learning. The same analytics firm cited earlier compared two cars—a plug-in electric and a hybrid. The electric car weighed about one-third more than the hybrid and emitted roughly one-quarter more particulate matter because of tire wear. Total direct emissions went up, not down, when the electric car was driven.

Part of that success lies in Porsche’s quality standards. 911s don’t break too often, and when they finally do, it usually doesn’t take a rocket scientist to fix them. That’s why 70 percent of all 911s ever built are still on the road, and that’s why you can find unicorns like this 930 with more than 725,000 miles on the clock.

Subsidies intended to boost our semiconductor production come with a tangled web of strings attached.

With the opening of China in 1972, a young John Kamm embarked on his China venture, starting in Macau and then Hong Kong. In 1976, he began attending trade fairs in mainland China in the waning days of the Cultural Revolution. A journalist and trade promoter during a period of political upheaval, Kamm’s work took him throughout the largest cities and surrounding countryside, including Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta. Kamm saw aspects of Chinese life largely unknown to those living in the West. This instalment of John Kamm Remembers details some of Kamm’s experiences during this period. In early March, we will release a companion piece, “Nothing Starts Without a Sale: Learning to Sell in Cultural Revolution China,” focusing on the bi-annual Chinese Export Commodities Fair held in Guangzhou.

https://deadsimplesites.com

With hundreds of thousands dead or wounded and still no end in sight, the conflict has revealed that U.S. battlefield calculations must evolve.

Bill Clinton 1995 immigration clip

That media blackout obfuscates the reality that unfettered immigration into the US presents an innate threat to citizens. Since the 2021 fiscal year, Border Patrol has arrested 43,674 criminal non-citizens. US Customs And Border Protectiondefines the term criminal non-citizen as any individual who has been convicted of one or more crimes either in the US or abroad before behind interdicted by immigration officials. The metric also discounts criminal convictions abroad for crimes not illegal in the US. Of those 43,674 criminal non-citizens arrested, violent crimes accounted for over of their 8,000 preexisting convictions. Murder convictions related to 165 of those arrests, while sex crime convictions comprised nearly 10 times that amount with 1,210 having been documented by Border Patrol. Despite being on the books, these figures have received as little coverage by legacy media outlets as Riley’s murder has.

Less well known is the company’s sideline of accepting money to help authoritarian governments put out positive messages about their record-breaking achievements. This week, GWR certified ten new records for Saudi Arabia, which is condemned by human rights groups as a repressive state that is holding two people on death row who were children at the time of their alleged offences.

At $US15,000, BYD’s new Qin EV is already being touted as a “Corolla killer”, as the world’s second largest EV maker continues to disrupt the global auto market.

Dean Phillips’ presidential campaign denounced the alleged actions of one of its consultants and said it may take legal action against him.

The governor has been raising money for Democrats in other states ahead of the November election and actively campaigning for President Biden’s releection bid. On Sunday, he returned from Washington where he attended a meeting with other governors and the president and participated in national television interviews as a surrogate for the Biden campaign. 

One reader made a comment I’m going to steal: Sony should really be named Sony*, because all the details you need to know end up in footnotes.

There are simpler ways to gain exposure to the growing Tequila category than building a quant strategy tracking rap songs lyrics in real time. And yet. The brokerage’s consumer team has taken an awe-inspiring look into the world of alcohol references in rap and pop music, to see if cognac — rap’s favourite imbibable leitmotif — still reigns supreme.

Google has seen this torrent of British activity and flagged our public IP address as British

A British Airways supervisor has gone ‘on the run’ in India after being accused of organising a ‘£3million immigration scam’ from his check-in desk at Heathrow airport.

A record 93.4 per cent of all in-store card transactions up to £100 were made with ‘touch and pay’ in 2023, cementing it as the UK’s most popular payment method.

The FCC originally awarded CostQuest $44.9 million to create the broadband maps. Everybody I know who works with mapping thinks this is an exorbitant amount, but if this was the end of the mapping story, then congratulations to CostQuest for landing a lucrative federal contract – lots of other companies have made hay doing so over the years. Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of the mapping story because the FCC gave CostQuest the ability to own the rights to the mapping fabric, which is the database that shows the location of every home and business in the country that is a potential broadband customer. This is a big deal because it means that CostQuest, a private company, controls the portal for data needed by the public to understand who has or doesn’t have broadband.

The biggest threat to the Big Three comes from a new crop of Chinese automakers, especially BYD, which specialize in producing plug-in hybrid and fully electric vehicles. BYD’s growth is astounding: It sold three million electrified vehicles last year, more than any other company, and it now has enough production capacity in China to manufacture four million cars a year. But that isn’t enough: It’s building new factories in Brazil, Thailand, Hungary and Uzbekistan, which will produce even more cars, and it may soon add Indonesia and Mexico to that list. A deluge of electric vehicles is coming.

Seventy-seven years later, when Mayor London Breed confirmed the closure of Macy’s San Francisco flagship on Tuesday (among 150 “underproductive” Macy’s stores across the country), the news was not just the shuttering of the centerpiece of Union Square shopping. It was the end of a San Francisco cultural icon. The store started, according to early Chronicle reporting, on a chance 1945 meeting by two tycoons walking their boxers in Central Park. Macy’s executive Wheelock H. Bingham of New York and department store executive Joseph V. Costello of San Francisco talked about their dogs, then their jobs, then a potential business deal.

As I continued to piece together Benioff’s land purchases in Waimea, a colleague at NPR got an out-of-the-blue text from him. Word had gotten back to Benioff that I was poking around town. He wanted to speak with me.

Newsom has been an empty vessel for rich special interest friends since his time as San Francisco mayor. Pathetic that some see him as the future of the Democratic Party. Or a perfect fit perhaps…

The politics of Compliance: The target is You!

At the time, the company was dealing with questions from its top engineers about its next project, according to three people familiar with the project’s origins. It had just finished the Apple Watch, and many engineers were restless to begin work on something new. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, approved the project in part to prevent an exodus of engineers to Tesla.

An underreported feature of the Reddit IPO is that they’re decentralizing ownership. Early users can get in on the same terms as institutional investors, which is unusual:

How to Get to Orbit Cheaper than SpaceX’s Starship. Ian Brooke has developed a new kind of jet engine that can act as the first stage of a rocket.

“Palm Beach is the only place where people care that I’m a duchess,” she says, laughing. “They think I’m the Queen here.”

What do I mean? Well, in 2023 alone, Letitia James spent over $28,500 on hotels. Over $15,000 of that was spent on luxury hotels in Puerto Rico. Then there’s the airfare. In the 5 years she’s been the New York State AG, James’ has spent over $84,000 on airfare to fly herself all over the country. This includes private jet rentals.

The rental company — which had a 1.86 rating out of five based on 59 visible reviews made prior to the email — raised its score to 2.3 stars since Tuesday. Many of the new reviews call out the company for “bribing” their tenants for good scores. Google user Jonny Semington left a review alleging the company is “a little shady when it comes to paying for gas and electric.”

Joe Lockhart, Bill Clinton’s former press secretary, once referred to Saudi crown prince Muhammad bin Salman as “one of the most ruthless killers in the world.” That could prove awkward for the Democratic operative, who this week registered as a foreign agent of a sovereign wealth fund controlled by the Saudi leader.

Zak Koga told the bankruptcy court that by 2019, Karben4’s gross revenue was nearly $4 million. “Before the pandemic, the business essentially broke even on an operating basis,” Koga said in a court filing. But the pandemic temporarily shuttered the taproom and wiped out keg sales, one of Karben4’s most profitable offerings. The company adapted by holding drive-thru sales, and it received an Economic Injury Disaster Loan from the U.S. Small Business Administration.

The first step to a Zero-day war is a profound penetration of the target country by a small number of infiltrators, bypassing defenses and security precautions. For best effect, this is done slowly and with care to minimize detection. There are three types of infiltrations:

Potsdams a nice place – but it’s just not quite as cool as its younger brother Berlin. Whatever Potsdam does it’s always seemingly second class to Berlin. Its got the original Brandenburger Tor (Potsdam 1770, Berlin 1788, Königsberg 1860), the Stadschloß they restored is cheaper (and was finished quicker) than Berlins (120 million to 590 million) and they’ve got less dog shit on the streets, but for reasons that be – Potsdam has the dubious honour of just being a 1 day tourist destination – reduced to Sans Souci and a coffee at the Brandenburger Tor.

The great advantage of co-processors is that, when they’re not being used, they use little or no power at all. However, when running at full load, their power use may well exceed the total of all the CPU cores.

Last month, DePaul University warned its community that three people affiliated with the school had recently had their electronic payment apps hijacked by street performers around its Loop campus. Chicago police warned about men operating a similar scheme along Clark Street in Wrigleyville and on the Magnificent Mile in January.

Traditionally, perovskite cells have struggled to match the durability of their silicon counterparts, which can reliably function for over two decades. Perovskites, on the other hand, have shown a tendency to degrade after just a few months to a few years of operation. Furthermore, replicating the high efficiencies achieved in small-scale laboratory samples over larger, commercially viable panels has proven to be a significant technical challenge.

 Imagine how this article would be written if it were a Republican President who didn’t read books and confined himself to official briefings.

I like to think of it it with the question: what is to reading what a text-editor is to typing?

I’m about to finish my CS degree this May and I’m already sick of the tech industry. I’m at a loss. I know the job market could get better soon, but there’s no guarantee that it will, and things are looking bad for us with less experience. There are multiple things that are demotivating me and making me feel hopeless, it’s not just the constant news about layoffs.

Ah, Doonesbury. Now for more perspectives…

IFoundYourCamera.net has proved that a lot of people lose their cameras and many people are willing to help out total strangers in getting their lost items back.

*NEW* Canada’s GDP grew by 1.1% between the 4th quarter of 2022 and 2023, while its population grew by 3.2%. That means GDP per capita is now falling at 2% annually (roughly the difference). Zero economic growth in more than 6 years.