4.24

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Lancet paper: The reinfection rate in the UK, encompassing alpha and delta waves, was ~0.7% in adults and ~0.2% in children. It is astonishing that politicians and public health officials push mandates that ignore immunity after covid recovery.

The meltdown over Chomsky’s innocuous comments is an indication of a broader, profoundly creepy culture of enforced consensus on this issue. There’s immense bipartisan agreement in favor of helping Ukraine resist the Russian advance, both among politicians and within the media, and yet even this near-unanimity is not enough for many people, who seemingly want literal unanimity. Nonpartisan media is festooned with pro-Ukraine coverage, and yet the rare bit of skepticism that squeaks through provokes outrage. On social media, dissenters are regularly called traitors and fifth columnists. “You’re either with us or you’re with the enemy” is the dominant creed, right now. I haven’t seen an insistence on groupthink like this since the post-9/11 world. And what’s particularly dark for me is that people who define themselves by championing dissent and free speech – this whole constellation of anti-social-justice-hegemony dissident opinion publications and personalities – have been no less likely to demand that everyone get onboard with the dominant narrative. (And a lot of people who regularly mock Instagram-bio politics have put up Ukrainian flags in theirs.)

Even though it was on their ranch, they had never been allowed down inside the missile silo. Sometimes they saw convoys of Humvees and a wide-load semi traveling on their dirt roads toward the launch site, and once Ed had glimpsed part of the Minuteman III as it was being lowered into the ground, with its black-and-white painted warhead and rocket engine. But the exact comings and goings of the missile on their land remained classified. The 80-foot bunker was mostly a place of their imagination.

Kamikaze Drones in Russia’s War Against Ukraine Point to Future “Killer Robots”

Netflix Estimates More Than 100 Million Non-Paying Households Use Shared Passwords

She didn’t decline to comment!

If you read AWS discussions on Hacker News or other developer communities you will find that the issue of billing keeps popping up. AWS billing is a lot like taxes in USA – it depends on so many things and you can never be sure how much you will be paying when the month is over. Furthermore, AWS billing is uncapped, which has significant potential for trouble.

Four decades later, polyester rules the textile world. It accounts for more than half of global fiber consumption, about twice that of second-place cotton. Output stands at nearly 58 million tons a year, more than 10 times what it was in the early ’80s. And nobody complains about polyester’s look and feel. If there’s a problem today, it’s that people like polyester too much. It’s everywhere, even at the bottom of the ocean.

America’s largest labor union is the National Education Association (NEA), organized in 1906 with a congressional charter “to elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching; and to promote the cause of education in the United States.”

One hundred and sixteen years later, the average individual U.S. teacher salary is $60,909, just below the median household income of $67,521 for the country in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Inadequate teacher pay has long been a staple of NEA rhetoric and advocacy, as seen in this April 29, 2019, statement by then-NEA President Lily Ekelsen Garcia:

“Across the nation educator pay continues to erode, expanding the large pay gap between what teachers earn and what similarly educated and experienced professionals in other fields earn.

“Educators don’t do this work to get rich, they do this work because they believe in students. But their pay is not commensurate with the dedication and expertise they bring to the profession.”

one can of Coca Cola will get you three cabbages, or five eggs, or five rolls of toilet paper, or two AA batteries, while a Pepsi will get you nothing.

The initiative’s mission is to defend shareholders and employees of public companies from “woke” policies and to ensure corporate accountability, the outlet said.

4.17

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It’s worth noting that only about 10% of employed Americans worked remotely in March because of COVID, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over half of workers, 50.9%, reported being already required to return in-person full-time, according to Workhuman’s April Human Workplace Index, a monthly survey of 1,000 full-time U.S. workers.

Ok, so here’s the point: Despite all the big talk and incredible claims, when push came to shove, the Army had nothing/NOTHING to use as a basis for planning. Lord knows we threw enough time and money at the problem, but in the end, Schwarzkopf just had to pray that we had enough combat power when our troops rolled across the line. He would have given anything up to half his kingdom for the QJM at that moment. He had a lot of opinions to choose from, but nothing solidly based on history. And frankly, I don’t think the situation has changed in the intervening 30 years. Now that the chips are down, people aren’t likely to care WEI/WUVs were developed by the opinions of various branch influence groups. But a model with an historical basis would be worth its weight in gold.


In a story that shows how hard it is to deter a billionaire ravenous for public money, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and The Washington Post fame appears to have prevailed upon buddies in the Senate to keep alive a childhood dream of not only going to the moon, but getting the public to pay for it. A Bezos company officially lost this moon contract three times in less than a year, but the fourth time’s a charm: thanks to congress, his Jason Voorhees-like determination may be rewarded with a contract worth $6 billion or more. On March 28th, Joe Biden released his fiscal year 2023 budget, which despite eyebrow-raising changes — in particular, a 10% increase in defense spending — generated few headlines. One of the few items the press did cover was this passage:

“Zeitenwende is real, but the country is the same,” said Thomas Bagger, a senior German diplomat who will be the next ambassador to Poland. “Not everyone likes it.”

In fact, TSMC was able to raise rates by the most in over three years. The Taiwanese company doesn’t release prices, but we can approximate it from the data it does provide. For the March quarter, it brought in $4,650 for every 12-inch wafer it churned out for customers. That’s 10% higher than the prior quarter.

Though several militia members explicitly opposed kidnapping the governor, Chapel and Robeson helped hatch a ludicrous plot to snatch Whitmer from her vacation home and take her away for trial. FBI operatives took the participants, who prattled idiotically about stealing a Blackhawk helicopter, for drives near Whitmer’s vacation home, which supposedly proved they were going to nab the governor and unleash havoc. It was all a setup. Shortly before that excursion, an FBI agent texted instructions to Chapel: “Mission is to kill the governor specifically.” There were as many FBI informants and undercover agents as there were purported plotters in this case.

He pivots to the present and China’s latest Covid surge. “By the way,” he says, “our people are sleeping in sleeping bags by the hundreds in the Shanghai FedEx facility, to keep the economy of the world going as we speak.” Mr. Smith wants to make clear that none of this was easy. Congress’s last Covid relief stimulus “created an enormous amount of withdrawal of labor from the market,” and that had a direct impact: “People make the supply chain this arcane subject. Hell, it was a lack of people to off-load trucks, and of people to drive the trucks.” There wasn’t “a big problem going through those ports out there. They weren’t even working three shifts. It’s simple: you couldn’t move it once it got ashore.”

4.10

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It’s really an odd game, these interviews. The rules are mostly there for you to see before you play, with books detailing the process, online sites dedicated to the questions asked, and many avenues to practice. Interestingly, some companies also tell you about the rules and what to expect, even going as far as recommending specific subject areas to study (or, helpfully, that they won’t be asking any dynamic programming questions). Some of the companies even recommend specific sites to practice on.

The 1950 census records were released by the U.S. National Archives on April 1, 2022. This website provides full access to the 1950 census images, including population schedules, enumeration district maps, and enumeration district descriptions.

How do consumers currently view hybrids, EVs, and gasoline vehicles;, and what does their purchase intent for each vehicle category look like?

In Yarvin’s worldview, what keeps American democracy running today is not elections but illusions projected by a set of institutions, including the press and universities, that work in tandem with the federal bureaucracy in a complex he calls the Cathedral. “The mystery of the Cathedral,” Yarvin writes, “is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.”

U.S. cities still bear scars of the Federal Housing Administration’s segregation policies of the 1930s. I can’t speak on the lived experiences of other U.S. cities, like Cleveland, Los Angeles, or Chicago, where communities like mine were also color-coded, but I’m a daily witness to the ways redlining continues to divide my city.

Zuckbucks were used to achieve targeted disenfranchisement, with rural Louisianans treated less favorably than fellow citizens in cities.

David Mamet talks to Joe Rogan about why we need the Bible.

The Paypal founder then also makes a mockery of all those who say that bitcoin is not an inflation hedge with just one chart – the chart showing how anyone who had a sense of the inflationary tsunami that is coming, made a killing in early 2020 when the could have bought bitcoin at a far lower price.

It is not illegal per se for Chinese firms to hire Taiwanese engineers. Taiwanese law, however, prohibits Chinese investment in some parts of the semiconductor supply chain including chip design and requires reviews for other areas such as chip packaging, making it very difficult for Chinese chip firms to operate on the island legally.

4.3

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That’s a whole lot of effort to suppress a story that seems to be … true? The New York Times reported March 16 that the emails are part of the evidence in a federal investigation now before a grand jury.

Exxon is mining bitcoin in North Dakota as part of its plan to slash emissions

Finally the upshot: it is feasible for a computer to do what I did as a concierge Google searcher. The answer to many of these questions was clearly on the Web, though not always highly ranked by Google. This is simply a question of crawling and indexing different corpora.

Why in the world has this idiotic trend of abstracting everything away by layers upon layers of complexity gained such a strong foothold in the industry? Has everyone except the “unix greybeards” gone mad!?

Kaspersky published a statement on the FCC public notice, expressing disappointment in the FCC’s decision. Speaking of the 2017 BOD, the statement reads, “As there has been no public evidence to otherwise justify those actions since 2017, and the FCC announcement specifically refers to the Department of Homeland Security’s 2017 determination as the basis for today’s decision, Kaspersky believes today’s expansion of such prohibition on entities that receive FCC telecommunication-related subsidies is similarly unsubstantiated and is a response to the geopolitical climate rather than a comprehensive evaluation of the integrity of Kaspersky’s products and services.”

The Weird, Wonderful History of Fairground Photography

The court concluded that drone photography was covered by the First Amendment: In the analogous context of filmmaking, the Fifth Circuit has noted that “the First Amendment protects the act of making film, as ‘there is no fixed First Amendment line between the act of creating speech and the speech itself.'” Furthermore, courts have never recognized a “distinction between the process of creating a form of pure speech (such as writing or painting) and the product of these processes (the essay or the artwork) in terms of the First Amendment protection afforded.

Here, Plaintiffs have established that Chapter 423 restricts their use of drones to record the news, necessarily constraining their ability to disseminate the news. It is uncontested that budgetary and other constraints may make drones the only option for recording certain events. Defendants assert that other options—namely expensive helicopters—can fill the same role in facilitating news production. Yet they cannot dispute the extreme price and safety differences between these technologies. Furthermore, Pappalardo and the organizational plaintiffs’ members have stated that drones are central to their journalistic pursuits, claims which Defendants do not refute. The court concluded that the restrictions were content-based and thus subject to strict scrutiny:

Yetke and her husband, Richard, 80, have found Holland America Line’s Grand World Voyage—an annual cruise that circumnavigates the globe for up to 128 days—to be the perfect way to escape Chicago’s harsh winters while seeing the world. “You have a room on the ship, and that’s your home,” says Yetke. “The staff feeds you, provides entertainment, and cleans your room twice a day. It all meets our needs at this stage in life, and of course we make friends—because the same people come back year after year.” The Yetke’s have already taken Holland America Line’s Grand World Voyage 12 times, and they’re tentatively booked on the 2023 voyage aboard Holland America’s 1,917 passenger MS Zuiderdam. A big selling point for Yetke on the company’s world cruises: They typically sail round-trip from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “I don’t want to fly halfway around the world to get on a cruise ship,” she says. “Florida is easy.”

The scientists gave the virus new functions—enabling it to spread efficiently among ferrets, which are genetically closer to humans than mice—as a way to gauge its risks to people. Both studies had received NIH funding.

3.27

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How did this work? In brief, Europe’s political fragmentation spurred productive competition. It meant that European rulers found themselves competing for the best and most productive intellectuals and artisans. The economic historian Eric L Jones called this ‘the States system’. The costs of European political division into multiple competing states were substantial: they included almost incessant warfare, protectionism, and other coordination failures. Many scholars now believe, however, that in the long run the benefits of competing states might have been larger than the costs. In particular, the existence of multiple competing states encouraged scientific and technological innovation.

Commentary on iPhone cameras

Asia travel notes.

What Data Do The Google Dialer and Messages
Apps On Android Send to Google

Plus, the black mark on their files means they often can’t get a contract with more favourable fixed rates.

When the device is installed, a stove or anything else requiring 240 volts of electricity won’t work.

Load limiters allow for continued operation of a furnace, a few lights and small appliances (but only one at a time). If too much electricity is used at once, the limiter will trip — turning off the power all together, until the meter is reset physically by the client or remotely by the distribution company.

There are many players in the field – Epic, Cerner, Meditech, AllScripts, AthenaHealth, to name a few. It isn’t necessarily bad to have many players, but these players don’t cooperate in data interoperability, as they see the difficulty of data migration as a competitive moat. (Taxpayers have lavishly subsidized electronic medical record sales)

Hacking Google Maps to fake a traffic jam.

You don’t write the code for the machines, you write it for your colleagues and your future self (unless it’s a throw away project or you’re writing assembly). Write it for the junior ones as a reference.

The Americans came up with a solution: issuing debt to bring the dollar back to the U.S. The Americans started to play a game of printing money with one hand and borrowing money with the other hand. Printing money can make money. Borrowing money can also make money. This financial economy (using money to make money) is much easier than the real (industry-based) economy. Why will it bother with manufacturing industries that have only low value-adding capabilities?

The complete list of alternatives to all Google products

The manager of Blue Origin’s rocket engine program has left the company

Why big nations lose small wars: The politics of asymmetric conflict.

Google routinely hides emails from litigation by CCing attorneys, DOJ alleges

Understanding U.S. values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point of U.S. policymakers.

“When I first noticed the airbrushing on the segment referenced, I thought something was honestly wrong with the video. But then, I watched it again and thought, ‘Wait a minute, this appears to be intentional. Lia’s features are softened,’” Denhoff said. “I then went to my original photo, on the sites that they could access to license the photo, and compared it and immediately saw a difference.”

NCLA Takes on U.S. Surgeon General’s Censoring of Alleged Covid-19 “Misinformation” on Twitter

You can dine and shop well enough in the La Brea district of Los Angeles to forget that its name translates as “tar”. You can savour the treasures of the LA County Museum of Art and ignore the lake of gurgling black goo in the park outside. You can decide against the La Cienega route to LAX and avoid the sight of oil derricks, bobbing up and down like perpetual-motion executive desk toys. In the end, though, even in California, home to the disembodied economy of tech, the coarse physicality of the energy sector is inescapable. And so, ever more, in all our minds, is its importance. The war in Ukraine has put paid to a series of fantasies. No, Germany cannot opt out of History. No, it is not butch to tweet adoringly about a strongman you don’t have to live under or near. Yes, the EU is a dream, not an ogre, for tens of millions of people in its near abroad. Of all the illusions, though, the most quietly punctured is the idea that tech is the industry at the centre of the world: the one that makes it go round. Energy, it turns out, is still a worthier bearer of that mantle. This is an education for anyone born in the half-century since the Opec oil crisis.

The Ultimate Guide to Onboarding Software Engineers

The optimism, however, is the assumption that allowing the war to keep going will necessarily undermine Putin’s position; and that his humiliation in turn will serve as a deterrent to China. I fear these assumptions may be badly wrong and reflect a misunderstanding of the relevant history.

For more than forty years, I struggled to get decent health insurance. My first grown-up job, as a fact checker at a weekly magazine, came with a medical plan, but my wife and I were in our early twenties and therefore didn’t think of that as a benefit. My take-home pay was less than the rent on our apartment, so I quit to become a freelance writer, and for months after that we had no insurance at all. Then my wife, Ann Hodgman, got a job at a book publisher. When our daughter, Laura, was born, in 1984, Ann’s policy covered most of the cost of the delivery.

He began by going to an important center in his industry and becoming an understudy to a master practitioner. Rural Haiti is to health vulnerability what Silicon Valley is to tech innovation. In his early 20s, Paul went there to work for Fritz Lafontant, a Wozniak-like Haitian priest pioneering a community-based approach to the social determinants of health.

3.20

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This research shows people are perceived as less powerful when they use pictures versus words. This effect was found across picture types (company logos, emojis, and photographs) and use contexts (clothing prints, written messages, and Zoom profiles). Mediation analysis and a mediation-by-moderation design show this happens because picture-use signals a greater desire for social proximity (versus distance) than word-use, and a desire for social proximity is associated with lower power. Finally, we find that people strategically use words (pictures) when aiming to signal more (less) power. We refute alternative explanations including differences in the content of pictures and words, the medium’s perceived appropriateness, the context’s formality, and the target’s age and gender. Our research shows pictures and words are not interchangeable means of representation. Rather, they signal distinct social values with reputational consequences.

There Are Still Some Cars That Dealers Can’t Sell Right Now

I sat down expecting a narrative history of the fall of Rome, but was pleasantly surprised to find a portrait of the changing empire populated by statistics and technical hypotheses of a kind one would usually encounter in a copy of the Economist. The first ten pages alone contain references to cosmogenic radionuclides, the Maunder Minimum and the Early Anthropocene. I confess I needed a dictionary.

‘Pro’ has lost all meaning, and Apple knows it

White Castle Expands Partnership with Miso Robotics to Install Flippy 2 in 100 New Locations

Cities Should Not Pay For New Stadiums

Stop Crime SF threatened litigation when Boudin gave the San Francisco Chronicle some cherry picked data that he withheld from us earlier. Suddenly, everything he gave the Chronicle arrived by email at 9pm the night before Thanksgiving. After we threatened to sue, newly appointed City Attorney David Chiu got involved. He defends local officials against lawsuits. We want to thank Chiu’s office for facilitating the release of the data from Boudin’s office and avoiding a lawsuit Boudin would have lost.

State Can’t Force Adoption of Critical Race Theory Concepts in Curriculum

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WILL:

Local activists attempting to force district into curriculum changes

The News: Attorneys at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued a letter to the Cedarburg School District making clear that the district is not legally required to adopt Critical Race Theory concepts in their curriculum, nor can the Wisconsin Department of Instruction (DPI) legally mandate the school district to adopt Critical Race Theory concepts in their curriculum. The Cedarburg School District recently investigated a complaint from a local group alleging that its curriculum violates state and federal law and found no violations. That group has now made an appeal to DPI suggesting Cedarburg’s curriculum is not “diverse and representative.”

The Quote: WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, said, “Cedarburg should not be intimidated into adopting controversial and politicized curriculum as a result of vague and unsubstantiated charges made by a local activist group. And any attempt by the state to force curriculum changes would be inappropriate, unwarranted, and likely illegal.”

San Francisco’s Detracking Experiment

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Tom Loveless:

San Francisco Unified School District  (SFUSD) adopted a detracking initiative in 2014-2015 school year, eliminating accelerated middle and high school math classes, including the option for advanced students to take Algebra I in eighth grade. The policy stands today. High schools feature a common math sequence of heterogeneously grouped classes studying Algebra I in ninth grade and Geometry in tenth grade. After 10th grade, students are allowed to take math courses reflecting different abilities and interests.

Implementing Common Core was provided as the impetus for the change. When first proposed, district officials summed up the reform as, “There would no longer be honors or gifted mathematics classes, and there would no longer be Algebra I in 8th grade due to the Common Core State Standards in 8th grade.” Parents received a flyer from the district reinforcing this message, explaining, “The Common Core State Standards in Math (CCSS-M) require a change in the course sequence for mathematics in grades 6-12.” Phi Daro, one of Common Core’s co-authors, served as a consultant to the district on both the design and political strategy of the detracking plan.

The policy was controversial from the start. Parents showed up in community meetings to voice opposition, and a petition urging the district to reverse the change began circulating. District officials launched a public relations campaign to justify the policy. Focused on the goal of greater equity, that campaign continues today. SFUSD declared detracking a great success, claiming that the graduating class of 2018–19, the first graduating class affected by the policy when in eighth grade, saw a drop in Algebra 1 repeat rates from 40% to 8% and that, compared to the previous year, about 10% more students in the class took math courses beyond Algebra 2. Moreover, the district reported enrollment gains by Black and Hispanic students in advanced courses.

Important publications applauded SFUSD and congratulated the district on the early evidence of success. Education Week ran a storyin 2018, “A Bold Effort to End Tracking in Algebra Shows Promise,” that described the reforms with these words: “Part of an ambitious project to end the relentless assignment of underserved students into lower-level math, the city now requires all students to take math courses of equal rigor through geometry, in classrooms that are no longer segregated by ability.”  The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) issued a policy brief portraying the detracking effort as a model for the country. Omitted from these reviews was the fact that the “lower-level math” to which non-algebra 8th graders were assigned was Common Core 8th Grade Math, which SFUSD and NCTM had spent a decade depicting as a rigorous math course, as they do currently.

Jo Boaler, noted math reformer, professor at Stanford, and critic of tracking, teamed up with Alan Schoenfeld, Phil Daro and others to write “How One City Got Math Right” for The Hechinger Report, and Boaler and Schoenfeld published an op-ed, “New Math Pays Dividends for SF Schools” in the San Francisco Chronicle.

In this public relations campaign, there was no mention of math achievement or test scores. Course enrollments and passing grades were presented as meaningful measures by which to measure the success of detracking.

3.13

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In democracies, the opposite is true: the winning coalition is large, and the real selectorate is almost as large as the nominal selectorate. This means that dictators can keep their jobs by handing out private goods to their cronies, whereas democratic leaders have to dole out public goods to maintain their power. That seems to square pretty well with observations in the real world.

This is supposed to be yours, as the first person singular pronoun My implies. Problem is, it’s TheirChart. And there are a lot of them. I have four (correction: five*) MyChart accounts with as many health care providers, so far: one in New York, two in Santa Barbara, one in Mountain View, and one in Los Angeles. I may soon have another in Bloomington, Indiana. None are mine. All are theirs, and they seem not to get along. Especially with me. (Some later correction on this below, and from readers who have weighed in. See the comments.)

Payment technologies offered by the Federal Reserve have evolved over time. In the Federal Reserve’s early years, it established a national check-clearing system and used dedicated telegraph wires to transfer funds between banks. In the 1970s, the Federal Reserve developed an automated clearinghouse (ACH) system that offered an electronic alternative to paper checks. And in 2019, the Federal Reserve committed to building the FedNow SM Service, which will provide real-time, around-the-clock interbank payments, every day of the year.

This Texas Town Was Deep In Debt From A Devastating Winter Storm. Then A Crypto Miner Came Knocking.

Notes on banking and crypto.

You’re a 22-year-old Ukrainian who has just been handed a Kalashnikov, four magazines of thirty rounds, a helmet, and body armor. Last week you were studying architecture at Kyiv National University. Now you’re standing in the lead rank. An officer counts off and puts a hand on your shoulder. “You’re a fire team leader.” He points at the next three people in your rank. “That’s your team.” There are three people behind you. You’ve never seen them before. They await your command.

Long one of America’s safest cities, Seattle had 612 shootings and shots-fired incidents last year, nearly double its average before the pandemic. The city has just experienced its two worst years for homicides since the 1990s, when murder rates were at all-time highs. Gunfire has erupted all across surrounding King County, not just in neighborhoods plagued by violence.

New cars make me want to Saab. Once upon a time, not all cars had to look like folded-up Optimus Prime.

How do you suppose they’re going to tell what position you had that thing set to when your car rolled under the reader? The answer turns out to be relatively simple: they put a sign over each lane, and it just flashes up a “2” or a “3” depending on what it heard from your transponder’s response.

An interesting illustration of this comes from Union of Salvation (Soyuz Spaseniya, 2019), a film about the radical Decembrist revolt of 1825, made with the support of the Russian state. To the considerable shock of older Russian friends of mine who were brought up to revere the Decembrists, the heroes of this film are Tsar Nicholas I and the loyal imperial generals and bureaucrats who fought to preserve government and order against the rebels.

1. China cannot be tied to Putin and needs to be cut off as soon as possible. In the sense that an escalation of conflict between Russia and the West helps divert U.S. attention from China, China should rejoice with and even support Putin, but only if Russia does not fall. Being in the same boat with Putin will impact China should he lose power. Unless Putin can secure victory with China’s backing, a prospect which looks bleak at the moment, China does not have the clout to back Russia. The law of international politics says that there are “no eternal allies nor perpetual enemies,” but “our interests are eternal and perpetual.” Under current international circumstances, China can only proceed by safeguarding its own best interests, choosing the lesser of two evils, and unloading the burden of Russia as soon as possible. At present, it is estimated that there is still a window period of one or two weeks before China loses its wiggle room. China must act decisively.