A new interim report describes the obstruction and secrecy around the mpox proposal as a case study in how the institute “oversees and accounts for the monitoring of potentially dangerous gain-of-function research of concern.” The revelations land amid global concerns about whether coronavirus gain-of-function research — research that might generate pathogens with increased pathogenicity or transmissibility — may have contributed to the worst pandemic in a century.

A documentary on the Mandalay Bay shooting.

NY Times journalist Natasha Frost has now been named as the person who downloaded about 900 pages of content from an Australian Jewish chat thread and shared it w/ an anti-Israel activist who doxxed everyone in the group.

this week’s judgement made it a lot more tangible. 50% of search in the USA happens on channels where Google has a contract to make it the default: 28% on Apple devices, 19.4% on Android (the OEMs and telcos decide the default on Android, not Google) and 2.3% on other browsers (i.e. Mozilla) – and then another 20% happens in user-downloaded Chrome on PCs. (Amusingly, the contract means that Google pays Apple even for searches done in Chrome on Apple devices.)

Surveillance Watch is an interactive map revealing the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations.

I look at the fine print and gasp…170 sheets per roll. These days, a regular Charmin Ultra Soft roll, if you can find one, has 56 sheets. Even the roll they market as “Double” doesn’t have 170 sheets — it has 154. And the 1992 rolls are hardly the largest — the back of the package includes a note from parent company Procter & Gamble explaining these rolls have fewer sheets than a previous version.

Technician recruiting is increasingly hampered by competition from other industries and obsolete educational programs.

Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these Brides Of The State (BOTS) support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72-24%, providing the Party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections. Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50-45, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic. Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.

In this conversation, Sal, Mark, and Bryan McGrath discuss the ongoing attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea by the Houthis, who are clients of Iran. They also talk about the performance of the US Navy in protecting commercial shipping, the investments made in the Navy, and improvements and challenges in the US Navy.

The study by Srishti Agrawal, Adit Seth and Rahul Goel found that the most notable rise in cycling in India had occurred among rural girls – increasing more than two times from 4.5% in 2007 to 11% in 2017 – reducing the gender gap in the activity.

The city has pledged $9.1 million for the grocery store project over the last four years: $4.6 million to purchase the space in 2021, $3.5 million for tenant and grocery store improvements in 2023 and an additional $1 million in tenant improvements in May 2024. City officials hope to recover as much of the May 2024 $1 million tenant improvement costs as possible through future payments from developers Rule Enterprises and Movin’ Out, according to an April 10 letterto all alders from Rolfs.

My next, and it turns out last, major visit to the Living Computer Museum (outside of a few drive-bys) came in 2018, when I spoke at an event being held there. This gifted me with a chance to see how things had changed in 5 years, and how they had.

Many of the constituent parts of our government, economy and culture are broken. But this is not an accident; it is by design. This article discusses the breakdown in just one key segment that is illustrated by the contrast between the trial of war criminals when we were at war and immediately afterwards, and the current system of systematic and indefinite delay.

The old ideal of California as the apex of the American dream has been shattered. Since the 1970s, middle-class incomes, once ebullient, have stagnated. The state may be home to the most billionaires in the nation, but it also suffers the widest gap between middle and upper-middle income earners. It also faces a deep budget deficit, tepid job growth and the nation’s highest unemployment. The state is home to 30 percent of the nation’s homeless population, with some now living in caves.

Perhaps the most significant line was one that was ad-libbed: “Those protesters out in the street, they’ve got a point.”

Over the past few years, TV makers have seen rising financial success from TV operating systems that can show viewers ads and analyze their responses. Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasingly, if not primarily, seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking. How did we get here? And what implications does an ad- and data-obsessed industry have for the future of TVs and the people watching them?

August 15, 2022 marked the one-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul. How did the Second Family honor the fallen? They went on vacation in Hawaii. Cost to the taxpayer for @SecretService lodging? Over $756,000.

It’s all about the reach and influence of specific demographics. Plus influencers don’t ask real questions — they just want content without friction. Despite its self-importance, old media is on a declining audience scale and influence curve. No surprise that politicians are finally getting the memo, long after fashion, culture, and tech brands got on the bandwagon.

the disconnect with main street America is just as big. I even heard elites talking about Russian interference in previous elections (as if that weren’t debunked many times) and how the Russians blew up NS2.

Senior White House economic advisor Jared Bernstein pointed to tax lobbyists as the reason the “carried interest loophole” was not included in a group of tax hikes Democrats intend to pass.

When her Republican challenger observed that almost all occupations are safer today than a generation ago, Tammy put up a video claiming Eric Hovde said farmers don’t work hard. It’s a flat-out lie. Now Sen. Baldwin is up with a spot saying Hovde hates single mothers. Eric Hovde must be reviewing anything he may have said about puppy dogs. The Hovde campaign responded Thursday 08-15-24 with a scolding from the candidate’s wife, Sharon

Just four years ago, Epic launched Cosmos, its data and research software with 270 million de-identified patient records; last year, doctors drafted the first AI-generated messages to patients. But as health professionals retire and health systems struggle to hire and retain sufficient staff, Hain sees an opportunity for Epic to answer those sorts of questions while “building a series of guardrails and managing expectations.” 

First of, he writes that it was “of course a system where the US made the rules and complied with them when it suited the US“. He gives the example of the WTO which “was very much an American creation but when it suited US domestic politics”, and now that it doesn’t anymore “the US effectively destroyed it by refusing to nominate the ‘arbitrators’ who are essential to its functioning”. He also says that “the rules-based system didn’t stop American involvement in Vietnam, or invasion of either Iraq or Afghanistan”. He encourages “anybody who doubts that the US itself obeys the ‘rules’ very selectively” to read The Arrogance of Power, by Senator William Fulbright (the longest-serving chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee).

The FP’s @JuliaTheIntern asks members of the press at the DNC what they think about the fact that Kamala has not given an interview.

Deadline understands that the fast-food firm has been working with a number of major production companies, including some of the studios, to create family-friendly shows, particularly in the unscripted space. It is also in talks to license and acquire content.

asking SCOTUS to review how Special Counsel Jack Smith, working hand in glove with former DC Chief Judge Beryl Howell, forced Twitter to produce Trump’s entire Twitter file and also impose a nondisclosure order prohibiting Twitter/X from notifying Trump about the search warrant.

There are investments you can’t make from a structured, nine-to-five, narrowly teleological environment. You have to let your life go fallow sometimes, like a crop rotation giving the land time to bring forth new fertility. This is actually a consequence of a fairly general theorem about how to find treasure in complex search spaces: The best search strategies for complex problems like life generally don’t seek out particular homogeneous objectives, but interesting novelty. The search space is too complicated and unknown for linear objective-chasing to work. Biological evolution, in practice, works through a diversity of niches which it explores in parallel to find unpredictable advances.

The PAF is a critically important national dataset. It’s not personal data – it’s a database that lists literally every physical postal address in the country, and it’s a very useful thing to have access to.

Athletes who swam in the Seine during the Olympic Games in Paris had higher rates of gastroenteritis than those in games past, a U.S. Olympic official told MedPage Today.

Where is the rightful outrage from environmentalists? Thousands of tons of crude oil will now pour into the Red Sea. This is a clear sign of the collapse of American credibility and deterrence. Letting the Iranian proxy Houthis shut off a major maritime seaway is an epic fail. America can and must do better! Leadership matters

So proud to have the Future President of the United States back in San Francisco where it all started.

Leaked government memo confirms whistleblowers were targeted by Border Agency after exposing federal DNA Collection law was not followed for immigration violations. Homeland Security whistleblowers claim American deaths “were preventable.”

The Chips Act, enacted two years ago Friday, is the nation’s most audacious foray into industrial policy since World War II. It’s essentially a bet that four companies — Intel Corp., Micron Technology Inc., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics Co. — can bring sophisticated chip production back to the US. In a sign of the ambition, one explicit goal is making a fifth of the world’s most advanced processors by 2030, up from roughly zero today.

Judge orders CDC to stop deleting emails of departing staff, calling it ‘likely unlawful’

OpenStreetMap has grown exponentially or quadratically over the last twenty years depending on the metric you’re interested in. My involvement has waxed and waned like soul mates oscillating between rapture and, inevitably, wanting the best for each other in our post-relationship new lives.

Soros’s Open Society Foundations is a sprawling grantmaking network that disburses over $1 billion to left-wing causes as its founder bankrolls the Democratic Party. Democratic lawmakers are often later forced to distance themselves from their policy wish list items. But this comes only after pressure boils over into the public eye. Even liberal cities dealing with skyrocketing crime eventually want civil society restored.

“I have wondered if some in management roles today that were here when we lost Challenger and Columbia remember that in both of those tragedies, there were those that were not comfortable proceeding,” Milt Heflin, a retired NASA flight director who spent 47 years at the agency, wrote in an email to Ars. “Today, those memories are still around.”

Dreyer said his “brain was mush” and he was having hallucinations about freighters and a steel wall. He figured he would need a few more days to reach Milwaukee, but there was a forecast of 9-foot (2.7-meter) waves.

AT&T has been told to stop running ads that claim the carrier is already offering cellular coverage from space. AT&T intends to offer Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) and has a deal with AST SpaceMobile, a Starlink competitor that plans a smartphone service from low-Earth-orbit satellites. But AST SpaceMobile’s first batch of five satellites isn’t scheduled to launch until September.

You can get started with Proton Docs using a free Proton account, which gives you 5GB of cloud storage space for all your files. An upgrade to one of the paid plans, which start at $4.99 a month, give you more space and benefits across other Proton products (including extra email addresses and email filters).

Former President Donald Trump is known for his off-script moments. But his signature freewheeling banter also masks important consistency. He is, actually, predictable. Listening to his recent on-the-campaign-trail speeches reveals some patterns:

Worse yet for the Dems, many of the minority voters they expected would produce their “new Democratic majority” — a term coined by Teixeira in the 1990s before reality set in — are not only unmoved, but are positively repelled, by woke issues like trans rights, abortion, defunding the police and more.

Susan Wild, the Democratic Pennsylvania congresswoman in one of the country’s tightest House races, has privately and repeatedly trashed working-class conservative voters in her district as bigots who “drank the Trump Kool-Aid.” But in public, the Pennsylvania Democrat has drastically moderated her positions on hot-button issues as she seeks reelection in her battleground district.

The Harris campaign has been editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads that make it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News and other major publishers are on her side, Axios has found.

The worry is about the state of our country and the DNC’s all-out, anti-democratic lawfare campaign.

Which is why the magnetic poetry version of the life of Luckey that does the story justice goes more like this: Before the recent preference cascade enabling high-profile tech moguls to violate the taboo against supporting Donald Trump, there was first the lonely figure of Palmer Luckey, the homeschooled, Jules Verne-obsessed, amateur scientist with no money, whose faith in the power of technology was so strong that he worked jobs sweeping ship yards, scrubbing decks, fixing engines, repairing phones, and training to sing as a gondolier for tourists, all in order to spend his nights in a gutted 19-foot camper trailer trying to manufacture dream worlds out of breadboards and lens equipment and accelerometers and magnetometers and a soldering iron—which he did, bringing virtual reality to the masses, burning a hole in his retina with a laser, and losing it all to Zuckerberg over a meme, only to reemerge from his defrocking by Big Tech as a vengeance-seeking icon of counterelite Americana, the aspiring rebuilder of the arsenal of democracy, the black mullet-, chin beard-, Hawaiian shirt-, cargo short-, sandal-clad possible savior of America.

NEW: The New York Times has suddenly discovered that Hunter Biden never registered under FARA, despite taking millions from Russia, China, Ukraine, and Romania to lobby the U.S. government.

This is the best example of how we have all been manipulated by MSM and the Dems. I also finally saw the whole video a fee months ago and that was actually my hoky fuck moment. Trump condemned the Nazi’s. He was referring to something ttly different with ‘good people on both sides’. I believe it was taking down the statues.

That explains why no one including secret service was able to “find” the bomb. It was planted later, to be conveniently found, along with the RNC bomb, within a 15 minute time frame that perfectly coincided with unfolding Ray Epps orchestrated breach of Capitol

When asked in 2020, she was unequivocal: “there’s no question, I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Seems an unlikely change!

Study co-led by Mass General Brigham found that one in four patients with severe brain injury who appeared unresponsive responded to instructions covertly. Understanding this phenomenon can help guide decisions about life-sustaining treatment, goals of care, and clinical management, according to the authors.

Police have been scouring the narrow streets for unauthorised units poking out over the terraces of the village’s homes. There were reports of 22 illegally installed units spotted on various rooftops and terraces between January and May, and a further 15 since June as temperatures soared.

A vast majority of the instructions sent to banks do not move through the modern day REST APIs that we are used to, they move through file.

A new version of the London Underground map designed by a University of Essex lecturer has gone viral.

“The best and most secure way to conduct elections? Paper ballots.”

In 1948, Taruffi devised a twin-torpedo four-wheeler, the Tarf I Bisiluro, with a 492-cc Gilera four-cylinder as one of its possible powerplants. Running in the 500-cc class, Taruffi and the Tarf I set six world speed records for various distances and standing-start or flying conditions. A swap to 1500-cc power garnered two more speed/distance records in that class.

We have received further demands for censorship and for the personal account information of our users, impacting not just Brazilians but residents of the United States and Argentina.  We share those here in the interests of essential transparency.

Just look at it. The implications are so … well … shocking that they don’t seem to quite sink in. This report was funded in 2019 and delivered in 2024, 150% of the time it took for the USA to defeat Imperial Japan in the Pacific.

The Democratic Party of RFK and JFK was the party of civil liberties and free speech. VP Harris‘s is the party of censorship, lockdowns, and medical coercion.

We have long maintained that the two smoking guns of the January 6 Fedsurrection are the curious case of Ray Epps, on the one hand, and the RNC/DNC pipe bomb hoax, on the other. Our extensive reporting on the case of Epps enjoyed a natural assist from the fact that the now-iconic video of Epps urging the crowd to go “into the Capitol” and the subsequent chants from the crowd of “Fed, Fed, Fed” were seemingly tailor-made to go viral. While our ground-breaking reporting on January 6 had been no less comprehensive and no less damning, for the longest time it lacked a corresponding video clip to help carry this historic scandal into mainstream attention.

tour inside @blueorigin’s New Glenn Production Facility at Cape Canaveral,

When Your Customers Disappear

In addition to Luckey, Cramer invited defense giant Lockheed Martin to participate in the Summit. Lockheed has purchased a large booth and will feature a Ground Control Station and model of its RQ 170 Sentinel. Lockheed will also provide breakout speakers.

In this work, we computationally mined the global microbiome (63,410 metagenomes and 87,920 microbial genomes) and discovered nearly 1 million new antibiotic molecules in microbial dark matter, several of which were effective in preclinical mouse models. This is the largest antibiotic discovery exploration ever described. We believe our approach marks a significant advancement in uncovering these essential molecules from the vast biodiversity of the global microbiome.

“It’s a shame because Massachusetts is forcing us to do that,” Rose said. “They’re going to lose their revenue, you know, money every year they’re going to get for excise tax, [and] sales tax when somebody tries to register it.”

But the vacancy rate for downtown Chicago has reached 30 percent, not due to Covid, but to the Black Lives Matter riots and subsequent smash and grab sprees of theft. This puts increased strain on taxpayers.

Trump critics say his full-on embrace of crypto is overshadowed by critical comments of it in the past, and that his admin can’t be trusted to prioritize crypto. These same critics (pro-Harris camp) say nevermind the aggressive anti-crypto actions of the current administration that Harris is vice president of, when she’s in office, things could be different!

Mr. Chairman, many questions remain, yet several theories have been examined, and several questions have already been answered. I am prayerful that our Task Force can move forward effectively and professionally, guided by our shared love for America and our determination to seek full truth. Please know, as we continue our investigation into the attempted assassination of our former President, you can rely upon me as a solemn investigator of fact. It is with that spirit that I submit this confidential preliminary investigative report.

For the 9/10 drugs they announced here’s when generics go on sale due to patents. Not shown are the company’s own newer alternatives (like pens).

Widowed wife of slain Trump supporter Corey Comperatore has retained an attorney to get answers and accountability for major security failures at Butler, PA rally:

The Flywheel effect is a concept developed in the book Good to Great. No matter how dramatic the end result, good-to-great transformations never happen in one fell swoop. In building a great company or social sector enterprise, there is no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.

We looked at data from three of the largest audiobook platforms—Audible, Apple Books, and Spotify—and found a total of 847,685 audiobooks currently available on these platforms.

Eckerman is an ecologist with an interest in biodiversity, as well as in species’ natural histories, behaviors, life cycles, and places in the food chain. Moths are so diverse, he says, that it’s not uncommon to find one that hasn’t been named or described in the scientific literature. No entomologist studies “moths”; out of necessity, they specialize. Travis County has about 1,400 recorded species, the state of Texas more than 4,000. And those are just the ones we know about. Insects are the most diverse group of animals on the planet, and there are likely more undiscovered insect species than known ones—as many as 10 to 20 million species worldwide still left to discover, Rice University biologist Scott Egan told Texas Monthlyearlier this year.

Harris’ and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s social media accounts also directly contradict the VP’s claims by showing that the pair filled out women’s basketball brackets in 2021.

The federal government announces a program to issue block grants for states to purchase and operate shuttered grocery stores. The USDA also seizes closed-down production facilities.

This is a brilliant explanation by physicist @hsu_steve of the enormous mistake the US made with its semiconductor sanctions on China, basically sanctioning its own firms and creating a huge market opportunity for Chinese companies.

Noise complaints are just the latest challenge for Amazon’s drone program that’s been struggling to get off the ground since the company started testing deliveries in 2022. A mix of regulatory hurdles, missed deadlines and layoffs last year, coinciding with widespread cost-cutting efforts by CEO Andy Jassy, has halted progress of the ambitious service, which was conceived of by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos more than a decade ago.

findings support the democratic favor channel and challenge the idea that the institutional qualities of democracy per se lead to desirable outcomes.

According to the International Crisis Group, a think-tank, the Clan del Golfo, a gang that controls the entrance to the jungle on the Colombian side, nets over $4bn a year. Much of it is thought to come from human trafficking.

So why is software so terrible? Why do high-end gaming PCs struggle to browse the web at 60 frames per second? Why does a simple calculator need a splash screen? Why does your phone’s battery still die so quickly? And why does each update make the problem worse?And why do we all use huge frameworks that no one understands? Why do our projects take minutes to compile? Why do we have to restart our language servers every twenty minutes? And why does everyone think this is fine? We made it terrible.

Desperately looking for the country of origin I see ‘Netherlands’. The tomatoes look as desperate as I do. They traveled a long way, from the Netherlands to a Croatian island and I am sure the producers spent a lot of effort to grow them, but they look pale and boring, worn out like I do after travelling all day. The smell is horrible.

There is no “company success” unless civilization itself continues to progress.

The five-minute video shows a conversation between a person identified as Dr. Stacy De-Lin, Planned Parenthood New York City Medical Director for Abortion Services, and an undercover reporter with the Center for Medical Progress (CMP). During their conversation, De-Lin seems to acknowledge that Planned Parenthood would sell the livers of aborted babies.

Higher prices today can mean greater efforts at price discrimination, including over time.  That too can mean lower prices (compared to the counterfactual) at later points in time, or sometimes today as well.

Why does this matter? On one level, it’s an indicator of the unsustainability of many generative AI applications. Even with $150m in funding — which is a decent amount of capital — Character.ai likely couldn’t keep the lights on for very long, thus necessitating its absorption by a larger company. 

some wild stats in judge’s ruling: Google’s internal numbers showed that they’d lose up to 80% of searches on Apple devices, a revenue hit of $30B, if they surrendered default search position

The analysis sheds light on a legal and common way deep-pocketed groups lobby lawmakers in the state of California that is home to Hollywood, musical powerhouses, renowned theme parks and high-grossing sports teams. While many lawmakers accept invites to such events as a way to build relationships with important constituents or highlight major players in their districts, the gifts also raise ethics questions about the privileges enjoyed by public servants.

Hamtramck’s first woman mayor told our journalist she is “absolutely positive” she was ballot harvested out of office. Karen Majewski lost her election bid in 2021 after serving the city of Hamtramck for 18 years, first as a city council president, and then 16 years as mayor. A true Hamtramck insider, Majewski shepherded her city through major ethnic, racial, and religious shifts only to see the town’s progressive open door policy result in her ouster.

A Message to X Users

This Is How Much It Costs to Bring the Michelin Guide to Houston

These are the main building blocks of how I built a scraping pipeline forpricewatcher in order to keep track of how supermarkets change their prices.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is one of my favorite datasets because it has anything and everything. If it could conceivably exist on a map, it probably exists in OpenStreetMap. Whether it’s military bases, lakes, hedges, or power lines, it can all be mapped in OSM. But the scope of this data can be daunting. The entire planet file takes up a whopping 1,931 GB uncompressed.¹ As such, using this data can require a lot of RAM and a lot of time. Luckily, there are many open source tools freely available to help make sense of this large dataset. In my experience creating projects with OSM, I’ve used many of these tools to create interesting visualizations and to answer questions about the world we live in.

Often, the issue was not with the copier but with unintentionally destructive behavior by the users.  That, too, was considered fixable.  Orr declares that the technicians’

Now let’s normalize this by comparing $RIVN and $LCID to $TSLA when they had similar Revenue back in the day*:

They will use those drones to create pop-up blockades (air/land/sea) for commercial traffic stretching hundreds—thousands of miles.

During a fireside chat yesterday, SpaceX President & COO Gwynne Shotwell confirmed that Starlink can provide everybody in rural and semi-rural U.S. with high-speed broadband internet connectivity for a very small fraction of the price of laying down a fiber optic cable.

Signs of the approaching storm were already visible the day after the murders, when Britain’s new Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visited Southport to lay the obligatory wreath and was met by vocal hostility from locals. This time the public wasn’t willing to go along with the British state’s choreographed rites of candlelit vigils and the hollow “anti-hate” messaging from state-sponsored community leaders mechanically deployed in the aftermath of now-increasingly frequent atrocities.

Given that the problems are, on some level, built into the structure of the NPS, “I think it needs a complete radical reform,” says Jarvis, the former director. The National Park Service Centennial Act from 2015 lays some groundwork to level the playing field with concessionaires, he says: It gives the agency broad authority to award new contracts without specifying how they should be structured, unlike earlier laws. Almost a decade later, the park service is still working on regulations to implement the law. But in theory, it could take greater control of its own assets and shift the balance of power back to the land it’s bound to protect. For change like that to happen, there needs to be pressure from political leadership, Jarvis says—and therefore, ultimately, from the American people. After all, the parks are supposed to be for them, and Jarvis says, “They should be pissed off.”

NASA is planning to significantly delay the launch of the Crew 9 mission to the International Space Station due to ongoing concerns about the Starliner spacecraft currently attached to the station.

Pilot labor leaders from around the world have sent Airbus CEO @GuillaumeFaury a letter that makes clear: technology alone can never replace the indispensable role of two pilots on the flight deck.

I would argue that ultimately, the same will be true for Google. What will eventually end the reign of Google Search isn’t the rise of Bing or some other would-be competitor in internet search, it’s going to be something tangential that makes internet search just matter less. Maybe it has something to do with AI (though I’d be skeptical that something like SearchGPT is the, um, answer). Or perhaps it’s something no one is really thinking about right now. I don’t know. I’m just pretty certain that this case will have little to do with that end.

The third bomb’s plutonium core went on to have a history of its own. After the surrender it was sent to Los Alamos for use in experiments to determine how much material was needed to produce a critical mass under different circumstances. On August 21, 1945, less than a week after Japan notified the US that it would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, physicist Harry Daghlian was performing an experiment when he accidentally dropped a piece of “tamper” material, used to reflect neutrons back into the core, and triggered a critical mass. Daghlian used his bare hands to pull the mass apart to stop the chain reaction, and absorbed a fatal dose of radiation. He died three weeks later. A military security guard in the room with him, Private Robert Hemmerly, was also irradiated but survived, only to die of cancer 33 years later.

Confused? That’s because these filings from Harris are irregular. If Kamala Harris had used her own candidate ID number, like every other candidate in modern history, this wouldn’t have been so complicated, but then it would have been difficult to make the case that she’s entitled to Biden’s war chest. Undoubtedly, these filings are trying to circumvent those pesky campaign finance laws.

Another example of how US competitiveness, security, and resilience is becoming completely reliant on out of the box thinking and “moonshots” (SpaceX, Anduril, OpenAI, MCCPDC, etc.) by rogue billionaires.

Ortberg’s long list of things to do reflects a failure of leadership by Calhoun.

“According to Safety and Mission Assurance officials at NASA and DCMA officials at Michoud, Boeing’s quality control issues are largely caused by its workforce having insufficient aerospace production experience.”

…Weiss just made the case against the Justice Department and himself in protecting Hunter Biden from the most damaging charges of being an unregistered foreign agent. The latest filing includes another presumptive FARA violation involving Romanians and influencing U.S. policy.

Additional footage was just released of abortion leaders at Planned Parenthood giggling about MUTILATING fetal bodies to cover up criminal LATE-TERM abortions.

and to this very moment we have heard no explanation from Biden as to why he withdrew, and not a single “journalist” has had the cajones to ask Biden, Harris, Obama, Pelosi, Schumer or Jeffries a SINGLE QUESTION about all of this. This is the biggest political story of any of our lifetimes, and the major media is wholly and utterly incurious about it.

The evidence I can find does show that Frankfurt has the highest crime rate in Germany, although perhaps much of that standing comes from the presence of the financial district and the city being such a transport and convention hub, rather than from the immigrants per se. In any case, if you wish to understand the popularity of AfD — which now seems to be Germany’s #2 political party — I suggest you take a walk around Frankfurt.  I didn’t even go near the train station.

Notes on voting machines.

The U.S. Army has a 25% recruitment deficit. Ask yourself why.

“According to a 2023 University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) report, beef production can be climate-neutral or even better if management practices are optimized to minimize emissions and maximize abilities to store carbon.

Harris’s campaign Web site, meanwhile, does not even have a policy section, or an articulation of beliefs. There’s just a button to donate, some merch and yard signs, and a biography that describes her as “the daughter of parents who brought her to civil rights marches in a stroller.”

During the USS Eisenhower carrier strike group’s twice-extended nine-month deployment to the Red Sea, U.S. forces fired over 135 Tomahawk land attack missiles, weapons that cost upwards of $2 million apiece, at Houthi targets in Yemen. The ships also launched 155 standard missiles of various kinds, which cost between $2 million and $4 million per missile, to destroy the drones.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has quietly hired a celebrity photographer — who boasts Mark Zuckerberg, George W. Bush and Barack Obama as previous clients — to burnish his man-about-the-state image. Charles Ommanney, a former photojournalist and war photographer who traveled with Newsom to China last fall as a freelancer, was on hand Thursday to capture Newsom in aviator sunglasses, jeans and work gloves, picking up detritus left over from a recently-cleared homeless encampment in Los Angeles County. Late last month, he photographed the governor surveying the damage of the Borel Fire in Kern County.

On July 22, POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account. Over the course of the past few weeks, the person — who used an AOL email account and identified themselves only as “Robert” — relayed what appeared to be internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official. A research dossier the campaign had apparently done on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, which was dated Feb. 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them and granted anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as a preliminary version of Vance’s vetting file.

Blunt truth telling by Prof. Decosimo. People may avert their gaze, pretend not to know, change the subject, but it does not change the reality.

Forest Service orders Arrowhead bottled water company to shut down California pipeline

AI systems, when trained on historical data, can inherit and amplify human biases, particularly from flawed past hiring practices. This can result in the unfair exclusion of candidates based on irrelevant factors, undermining the potential of otherwise qualified individuals. Combining AI with human oversight can ensure balanced and just decision-making.

The Biden-Harris Admin also launched a novel new IRS crackdown on tips, getting the IRS inside the door at bars & restaurants to directly monitor tips at the cash register, “at point-of-sale.” She also backed the $1.7T spending legislation expecting taxpayers to report their $600 phone app transactions to the IRS without she and the Senate reading the bill (later dropped as untenable). Kamala Harris, who now claims to be against taxing tips, was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which expanded the IRS so it could go after people not paying taxes on tips.

The strange and total lack of curiosity around:

Is it not abnormal for a person to serve as U.S. Senator for 36 years, then to go on to be Vice President for 8 years, and still have time left to serve as President, and even to run for reelection as President when he is 81, and then to drop the nomination after excluding competitors and winning it in the primaries, handing the nomination to a person who never won any votes in any bid for the presidency? Is it not abnormal for a President to oversee the criminal prosecution of his predecessor, his rival, and then, after dropping out, to seek to rearrange the Supreme Court to enhance the likelihood that his rival will suffer real criminal punishment?

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a collection of personal emails between J.D. Vance and a law school friend of his.  The two were politically far apart, but for many years shared a close and respectful friendship in which they discussed the things that they agreed and disagreed about.  Then the friend, Sofia Nelson, who identifies as a “gender queer radical pragmatist” broke off the friendship over Vance’s support for an Arkansas bill banning gender reassignment for minors.  Here’s what Vance said that was apparently too much for Sofia’s “radical pragmatist’ sensibilities:

“the separation line between being ambitious or being wrong was very thin”

Both OEMs’ views have key flaws.

This kind of Systemic collapse is endemic to human history, to greater or lesser degrees.

according to a senior law enforcement official…

A hacker has stolen a wealth of data from health giant Bausch Health, has attempted to extort the company, and has told associates they think the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) will buy back the data, 404 Media has found. 

As a courtesy to law enforcement, we are not going to post the entire request. This is the first page of that request.

And no, not “every court” has said special counsel office is lawful. DC appellate court upheld Mueller appointment (of course) but it has never been challenged outside of DC. Cannon concluded the appointment of Smith was unconstitutional because it violated the Appointments Clause without a presidential nomination and Senate approval. She also determined the 4 random statutes Garland cited in his appointment order did not apply.

She has a Bible once treasured by a Green Bay couple. She wants their descendants to have it.

This trend of spinning and manufacturing a parallel reality to serve the Dem agenda, solidified by complicit mainstream media, hit home with the Hunter Biden laptop story, the coordinated vilification of President Trump and his followers, and President Biden’s cognitive decline — depriving voters of a voice in a proper primary. These examples displayed the hubris of the current Dem leadership. You must think the American people are fools to believe the spin on these issues. I despise this elite vs. general population ideology viscerally.

“and that she ought to embrace her hazy ideological categorization because “if she keeps people continually guessing then she can adjust the interpretation of your guess every time she sees you.”

We know that Malley’s security clearances were pulled, and he was placed under investigation by the FBI, but repeated Congressional inquiries have shaken almost no information loose from Team Biden. Is Rob Malley the victim of a witch hunt, or the new Alger Hiss, an Iranian mole embedded in the White House in two Democratic administrations?

New data reveal how companies that farm out IT workers exploit flaws in the visa lottery while other US businesses and talented immigrants lose out.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008-10, China has lost faith in the western economic model and is pursuing its own system. In the process it has become far less open to international criticism. “They dealt with the financial crisis much better than anybody else and I would say that’s when we lost them,” he says. China’s market remains deeply challenging for foreign businesses.

In a headline blaring: “Gov. Shapiro’s Failures Enabled Sexual Harassment,” the National Women’s Defense League said in a statement that the Harris vetting team should “consider the handling of past complaints of sexual harassment inside the Pennsylvania Governor’s office.” The group claims to be a nonpartisan organization dedicated to preventing sexual harassment.

In the world of data, CSV is the cockroach of file formats. It’s simple, resilient, and seemingly impossible to kill off. While flashier formats have come and gone, CSV quietly reigns supreme in the data processing kingdom. But how the hell did this happen? Let’s dive into the fascinating history of this accidental standard.

One week ago, the last time NASA officials spoke to the media, the agency’s program manager for commercial crew, Steve Stich, would not be drawn into discussing what would happen should NASA conclude that Starliner’s thrusters were not reliable enough for the return journey to Earth.

“Vice President Harris was the deciding vote for the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act. She owns those, they would not have passed, it was 50-50 and she broke the tie. Those caused the great inflation.

“So many Democrat voting women, often married, think Trump is untrustworthy because they believe he slept with side chicks. So now they are going to demonstrate how much they hate Trump by voting for the actual side chick, Kamala Harris. It’s honestly amazing,” the message shared by Patrick read.

The British businessman Mike Lynch, who this June was acquitted in the US of a multi-billion pound fraud, has said he believes he was only able to clear his name because of his huge wealth.

“I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.” If we accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?”

Indeed, there is evidence that, following U.S. export controls, China has boosted domestic innovation and self-reliance, and increased purchases from non-U.S. firms that produce similar technology to the U.S.-made ones subject to export controls.” In other words, it’s almost a pure loss for US firms who lose customers, revenue and market capitalization whereas the affected Chinese firms find alternative suppliers and China boosts its domestic innovation and self-reliance.

Notably, not all of DJI’s funding came from the Chinese government. Foolishly, in retrospect, the growth of the Chinese drone industry was, in part, fueled by American venture capital. In 2014 and 2015, Sequoia and Accel made major investments in DJI, collectively exceeding any funding for 3DR, Airware, or any other American drone manufacturers. With CCP subsidies and American capital, DJI would continue to dominate the global market. Naturally, a mass-extinction event for U.S. companies followed. In 2016, 3D Robotics shut downits drone manufacturing business line, and Airware, a leading American enterprise drone manufacturer, closed its doors in 2018.

However, we find no evidence of reshoring or friend-shoring. As a result of these disruptions, affected suppliers have negative abnormal stock returns, wiping out $130 billion in market capitalization, and experience a drop in bank lending, profitability, and employment.

The best photos from the 20th stage of this year’s Tour de France.

Since Barack Obama won election in 2008, health insurance premiums have doubled for single employees. Family plans have skyrocketed to almost $24,000, on average.

“We’re all finding out by tweet,” said one Dem. “None of us understand what’s happening.”

Workers in Washington State are seeking a 40% pay increase in an attempt to claw back concessions previously given to the company by the union. The Local represents over 30,000 members in the region, which includes the plants in Renton and Everett, where the 737 Max and 777 aircraft are assembled.

Second, did you know the US is borrowing more[2] under the “Biden boom” than it did during COVID? Set aside whether a coronavirus should have been treated as a financial crisis.

For the protection of whistleblowers and our investigation, we will not be sharing further information with the congressional task force due to the connective tissue between that entity and FBI, USSS, and other entities.

I know I should not be astonished, but the fact is that I am incredibly astonished that virtually every Democrat voter is insanely happy to have literally no say whatsoever as to who their Presidential candidate is.

Very interesting that TikTok is aggressively laundering and rehabilitating Kamala Harris’s image.

Taylor Swift’s Jet Use In 2023.

The FBI used voice analysis to prove that he was telling the truth. EAD Moore knew that, but hid it from Congress.

But US can still have high QoL and prosperity if it doesn’t start WW3 by listening to dumb strategists and warhawks. Obviously stupid Ukraine tricks and pushing Russia into a deep alliance with PRC will be seen in retrospect as a mistake as big as the Iraq War.

The U.S. healthcare system requires substantial out-of-pocket payments by most consumers, which can prevent some from receiving needed medical services. Recent policy proposals seek to address this problem by increasing government health care spending in order to reduce out-of-pocket costs. The social value of these policies rests in part on the extent to which consumers face credit constraints in financing medical spending. We present a novel analysis of whether elderly households face such credit constraints by estimating the effects of wealth variation from home price changes on out-of-pocket medical expenditures. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study and various measures of home price changes, we find no evidence that housing wealth impacts out-of-pocket medical spending. The estimates are universally small and precise, allowing us to rule out even modest-sized effects. Effects are zero across the expenditure distribution, for specific categories of expenditure, and for different types of consumers split by health insurance status and SES. Our results suggest that further subsidizing health care for elderly homeowners, the majority of older Americans, would increase moral hazard costs without increasing access to needed care.

ActBlue money laundering scheme: reports indicate that $20 million from Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss was broken down into over 1.6 million donations across 400,000 donors.

Drone based contested trade with just one minor actor contesting it (Houthis).

The world’s only AI superpowers are engaged in an arms race for swarming drones that is reminiscent of the Cold War, except drone technology will be far more difficult to contain than nuclear weapons. Because software drives the drones’ swarming abilities, it could be relatively easy and cheap for rogue nations and militants to acquire their own fleets of killer robots.

We study how the widespread legalization of sports gambling over the past five years has impacted consumer financial health.

China’s electric vehicle exports declined 13.2% from the previous month in June to 86,000 vehicles, new data showed on Wednesday, signaling growing resistance to the cars as Europe raises trade barriers.

Note that overturning Euclid v. Ambler would not make zoning in the interests of health and safety unconstitutional. Indeed, it wouldn’t make any zoning unconstitutional it would just mean that zoning above and beyond that required for health and safety would require compensation to property owners.

With that in mind, Capitol Weekly recently did a very subjective, very unscientific email poll of our fellow journalists who cover the Capitol or other parts of California government to see who they think are the best press reps to deal with. And yes, we also asked who they think…. hmmm, how to put this nicely? … could be better at their job. We granted everyone anonymity so they could speak freely. Replies came from reporters whose beats span the gamut of government, from city council meetings to chronicling the day-to-day activities of Gov. Gavin Newsom. As one might expect their answers were similarly broad in scope.

It’s the petty, ugly, banalities of an entire subculture of tiresome neurotics who cannot dredge one single beautiful, interesting, or true thing out of their souls that would make you voluntarily pay attention.

A few weeks ago in Paris we got last minute tickets to Palais Garnier, one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world. The show ended up being horrific

If you drive a car made by General Motors and it has an internet connection, your car’s movements and exact location are being collected and shared anonymously with a data broker.

Phones are supported well beyond their average ownership lifetime. In stark contrast, automakers are struggling to work out how long their “smartphones on wheels” can be kept on the road.

An inconspicuous suburb close to Geneva became the first Swiss municipality to banish commercial advertising from its streets, in a policy that creates a blueprint for similar bans in larger cities across the country.

Now sprinkle on long build times and difficulty of testing and it’s no wonder a lot of mobile native devs switch to something else more sane, like the web. Sure, the web has its own issues but it’s minuscule in comparison to that of mobile native dev on average. All this to say – Google and Apple keep making it more and more difficult for developers to ship and maintain quality mobile apps, but they market their releases as the next greatest thing. All the while no real innovation in mobile has happened in close to 10 plus years.

Why would such a fate befall the would-be Polish Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (as he’s dubbed in today’s Poland)? Why on earth would any country deprive itself of potentially becoming the leader in a vital and cutting-edge field of technology? This article looks into these very questions and looks a bit closer at the man behind the machine: Jacek Karpi??ki. 

The problem is that Democrats are so used to having total cloud supremacy — total information control — that they’ve never actually had to make an argument. It is completely demoralizing for them to see high production value videos with Democrats as the butt of the joke. Like a bully getting punched in the nose, these vicious wokes are finally facing committed, capable resistance in the information war. It is their first fair fight.

An African-American two-spirit Hindu Palestinian MtF transgender fat-liberated NEA union kindergarten teacher wearing a rainbow tutu and a Che Guevara halter top told me, “You know, I really don’t think Kamala is qualified to run this country, I’m voting for Trump.”

In my old business of providing Diplomatic Security in two active war zones we were expected to execute the basics or we would be fired. Clearly USSS failed at the basics of a secure perimeter and once shots were fired their extraction was clumsy and left DJT highly exposed to follow on attacks. It looked like they had never drilled together because those responses should be effectively autonomic. Will there be accountability? That’s not the Washington way.

In an email Saturday at 7:34 pm that appeared to be addressed to sympathetic journalists, and which was also sent to Semafor, Mehlhorn wrote that one “possibility — which feels horrific and alien and absurd in America, but is quite common globally — is that this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash. This is a classic Russian tactic, such as when Putin killed 300 civilians in 1999 and blamed it on terrorists to ride the backlash to winning power. Others who have embraced this tactic of committing raw evil and then benefitting from the backlash include Hamas on October 7. If any Trump officials encouraged or knew of this attack, that is morally horrific, and Republicans of decency must demand that Trump step down as unfit.” More.

This event feels like a bookend moment to the George Floyd killing. That opened wide the era of ACAB and insane public safety decisions made to appease the loud, leftmost fringe. There will be less appetite for things like the SAFE-T Act, police no-chase policy, and hands-off treatment of teen riots.

A stunning new report from our friends at Paragon Health Institute, quantifies the stunning scale of Obamacare fraud under the Biden administration, with millions of enrollees now receiving subsidies for which they are supposed to be ineligible based on income. The problem started when Biden made Obamacare “free” (fully taxpayer-funded) for incomes between 100 and 150 percent of the federal poverty level:

This is how you do good reporting. No speculation, no theories, no leading questions, just plain facts. Excellent work by @BBCBlindGazza with one of the best interviews of eye witness account on Trump assassination attempt. As an aside Gary is visually impaired but brings out the most visual account. Kudos as well to whoever is producing him.

A 501c3 called National Youth Advocate Project has been awarded $292 million by the Dept of Health and Human Services for assistance to unaccompanied illegal alien children in Ohio since 2021. The organization’s 2022 IRS form 990 says that the CEO, Marvena Twigg (social worker), earned $1.27 million that year. Wowie.

Well, I’ve thought the Secret Service were rubbish not just since we learned of the Cartagena hookers but for at least another decade before that. And increasingly, when it comes to American officialdom – from Kabul to Uvalde – to modify Henry Ford, you can get it in any colour as long as it’s bloated, lavishly over-funded and entirely dysfunctional. And yet and yet… it’s hard to believe even these guys (plus their bevy of five-foot-two-eyes-of-blue Keystone chorus girls) could be this crap. Assuming for the purposes of argument that the body on the roof is actually that of the perp, a goofball barely out of high school hatched a plan to have Donald Trump’s head explode in close-up on live TV – and, wittingly or otherwise, the world’s most flush money-no-object security state did their best to help him pull it off.

WithSecure assesses with HIGH confidence that due to geopolitical turbulence and low international relations with Russia, the Paris Olympic games will face an increased risk of malign cyber activity compared to previous Olympics.

In our interview last summer and on an accompanying Check 6 podcast, he doubled down on the likelihood that Boeing might not roll out a new passenger jet before 2035—nearly 25 years after the company’s last clean-sheet aircraft, the 787, entered service. “The notion that we should be looking at niche opportunities or competitive dynamics—when you’re going to invest tens of billions of dollars in a program for 50 years—is just silly,” he maintained. His claim in March that development of a new airplane would cost $50 billion was met with widespread derision.

Short story: an accelerating amount of income is leaving MN vs coming to MN. Net migration of income has risen from $215 million in 2017, to over $2.19 billion in 2022.

The Thiel-Hoffman Face-off in Sun Valley

This isn’t then, but the old have difficulty noticing. Add a Congress incontinently ignorant of anything but the politics of Washington and of their home states There is nobody on the House China committee who reads, speaks, or writes Chinese. Yet Congress inveighs fiercely against Beijing like a swarm of feral hamsters. What if, for example, the Russian fleet shows up in support of China? If North Korea seized the chance and invades South Korea, giving Washington two major wars at once? If China sinks tankers going to Japan and Taiwan, neither of which has oil? If Washington insouciantly bombs the Chinese mainland, which it will, and China or Russia hits the Pentagon and Capitol with sub-launched missiles? What does the sole superpower then do?

13. Higher education has been a traditional Democratic stronghold, and it remains one.  Yet its clout and credibility have fallen significantly in the last few years. 14. The Democrats made a big mistake going after “Big Tech.”  It didn’t cost them many votes, rather money and social capital.  Big Tech (most of all Facebook) was the Girardian sacrifice for the Trump victory in 2016, and all the Democrats achieved from that was a hollowing out of their own elite base.

Why? Because all will be held in the Seine River in the centre of Paris. The swimmers – including four Australians – will pass famous landmarks such as the Musee d’Orsay as they swim through the historic heart of the city. This will have enormous scenic appeal for spectators.

There truly is no general policy. One of my chief mandates for our two wine directors is ‘no Excel spreadsheet wine list,’ meaning: no taking a wine and multiplying it by 3x or 4x no matter what the wine is. We buy wines with the knowledge that they will fit into the program economically, not the other way around. We look at all markets (auction, retail, wholesale year-over-year) and attempt to find value in wine purchases. Then we compare those same markets to competitive wine lists in our micromarket. Whenever we can, we seek to offer the best price possible.

Within gender-marriage cohorts – single women are the most anti-Trump; and – divorced men are the most pro-Trump.

“Do not tell the prospect that they are not permitted or unqualified to purchase or sell property because of information you obtained from Forewarn,” a company executive said at a recent training webinar with Illinois real estate agents. She emphasized that potential buyers “do not get notified” when they are screened with the app, a question she said many real estate agents ask.

Houston-based tech company Lancium and Denver-based Crusoe Energy Systems announced on Thursday morning a multibillion-dollar deal to build a 200-megawatt data center just outside Abilene, Texas, that is designed to “meet the unique needs of AI companies.”

In the talk, Steve Jobs predicts that by 1986 sales of the PC would exceed sales of cars, and that in the following ten years, people would be spending more time with a PC than in a car. These were absurd claims for the early 1980s. Describing what he sees as the inevitability that this would be a pervasive new category, he asks the designers in the audience for help. He asks that they start to think about the design of these products, because designed well or designed poorly, they still would be made.

That Biden will likely remain as president until January 20, 2025, should remind the country the Left is more worried about its own next four-year continuance in power than the fate of the country that now admittedly will be guided in the next sixth months by a president judged unfit by his own supporters to run for the very office that he will still keep holding.

Further irony arises when those who, as supposedly guardians of democratic norms, pontificated to the country the last nine years about the Trump-Hitlerian threat to democracy. Yet now they so cavalierly work overtime on how: a) to pull off the removal of their candidate from the November ballot on grounds of senility, b) but not the removal of the same president from office (their own fate is more precious than our collective fate as a nation), c) while trying to select, rather than elect, a replace candidate, d) without every offering any explanation, much less an apology, how a Democrat president from January 20, 2021, was daily declared vibrant, dynamic, and engaged but suddenly one day after June 27, 2024, was remanufactured as not?

That the Director of the Secret Service actually claimed in public that they couldn’t put agents on that roof because its slope created “safety concerns” — something so stupid it’s hard to believe someone said it — yet still has her job, shows how accountability-free DC is.

Apparently, leaked memos show that J.D. Vance is so hardcore against wokeness that he froze dozens of ambassador nominations over their views on gender transition and DEI. Incredible.

Why undertake anything so obviously cockamamie? The reasons are several. Start with the insular complacency of a city long-accustomed to immense international power and unable to see that it no longer has it. Many who hold the reins in the city are old men who remember the world of decades ago when an aircraft carrier could intimidate almost any country, including China. This isn’t then, but the old have difficulty noticing. Add a Congress incontinently ignorant of anything but the politics of Washington and of their home states. There is nobody on the House China committee who reads, speaks, or writes Chinese. Yet Congress inveighs fiercely against Beijing like a swarm of feral hamsters.

Arlines already use mobile devices for gate checkin, lounges, and kiosks. Hotels are the same. Even TSA. Hospitals already use connected systems via browser and/or Citrix. From now, the only strategy that is not negligence is to move critical infrastructure to mobile devices.

The best photos from the 19th stage of this year’s Tour de France. #TDF2024  

A new show about the Cold War, “Not All Propaganda Is Art,” reveals the dark, sometimes comic ironies of trying to control the world through culture.

This is known as the Steel Man Technique. Put simply, it’s building the best form of the other side’s argument and then engaging with it. It’s being charitable and patching up the weaknesses in the other side’s proposition so that he can bring the best counter-argument to your point of view.

This tileset would be both the beginning and the end of the story, if not for one catch: it’s a commercial tileset, hosted by Stadia Maps and offered on a subscription plan. (I’m not affiliated with Stadia Maps and I’m not getting any incentive to write about them.)

Figure out what side-impacts the automation may have on your results. I could write a dissertation on all the “automation” that is undocumented or even mostly unknown that comes into play with both our cameras and our post processing workflows. The “average” user, on the other hand, wants to use automation as much as possible because there are too many variables that should be controlled to make you a perfect craftsperson (or deviant artist).  

David Axelrod is hammering Biden nonstop. Speaking for himself, or channeling Obama?

Milwaukee radio station says it agreed to cut out parts of their interview Joe Biden that made him look bad after the Biden campaign called and demanded it.

Nearly 250 years after the publication of Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ and the West has lost the economic plot.

The drone ascended ~3,500 meters from the base camp to the summit of the highest mountain in the world.

Now here’s the kicker: In response to questions about the reliability of their study, Newstead and Hill reanalyzed their data and published a follow-up report (2022) which found no significant change in population abundance of piping plovers at Boca Chica over time. A decreasing trend in abundance over the first three years of the study was balanced by an increase in the final year of the study (once data from additional survey visits was added to the analysis).

For our part, we have conducted nine years of monitoring using a protocol developed with US Fish and Wildlife Services, and for the past two years we have ensured consistent sampling throughout the year by surveying monthly. The findings show little to no strong evidence of trends, either increasing or decreasing, for any of the target species, including piping plovers.

The American System.

In one of the most significant data breaches in recent history, hackers stole AT&T customers’ call and text metadata spanning several months.

The financial record also needs to be complete. More specifically, both the sub-ledger and the general ledger are a complete representation of all business activities that occurred at a specific time. If there is an event that occurred but is not in the financial record, than the system is not complete. Note, that this doesn’t imply eventual consistency not acceptable. You just need to know when your data will become complete, to notify stakeholders that data has settled.

(Do we remember the rodeo clown who merely wore an Obama mask during a bull riding contest and was punished by being permanently banned by the Missouri State Fair authorities?)

The effort was turbocharged by disclosures that several senators made very profitable trades in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when members of Congress were getting classified briefings that warned of how disastrous the virus could be for the U.S. economy. The FBI launched insider trading investigations into three senators, but eventually ended the probe without making any charges.

Often the best solutions are relatively simple. Greece, for example, has been forced to introduce new laws to protect its beaches from over-commercialisation. Regulations introduced earlier this year mandate that umbrellas and deckchairs must be at least 4m from the sea and that they can’t be rented out on smaller beaches. Beaches are being monitored by drones; so far fines of almost £300,000 have been issued.

The true story — as best I can remember — of the origin of Mosaic and Netscape.

We’ve released a new dataset, Newswire https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09490 2.7M unique newswires reproduced 32M+ times over a century (1878-1977). Articles have location and topic tags and person ids (from Wikipedia). Fun fact: see the prohibition related crime spike in the 1920s

Foreigners make up 8% of the French population but account for 24% of prison inmates. They committed 77% of rapes in Paris, 54% of street crimes in Niceand 40% of vehicle thefts, and 38% of burglaries and 31% of muggings across France. And in recent months, the stark reality of mass immigration, the glaring lack of social integration, and, to be blunt, what happens when Western nations import people who hate who we are has been further highlighted by a series of shocking atrocities.

Probability of losing per passenger

If you take a walk around Washington or a Western European capital today, there is no feeling of looming catastrophe. The threats are too complex, with many moving pieces and overlapping layers of risk adding up to a larger danger that is less obvious. People can be forgiven for not seeing the cloud hanging over them, for feeling that all is well — even as in Eastern Europe they are digging in for war. But this complacency is itself part of the problem, making the threat more difficult to foresee, to manage, or, potentially, to avert.

A gallery of U.S. state welcome signs

The terms of the deal show that Volkswagen is paying $1 billion by the end of the year to acquire Rivian stock. Half of this sum is locked at a Rivian stock price of $10.84 per share, which was likely the price when the deal was inked. The rest will reflect the share price closer to the deal completion date but not earlier than December 1, 2024. Even if the stock skyrockets by then, Volkswagen is projected to become Rivian’s second-largest shareholder, behind Amazon.

Still, Mickey entering the public domain brings up the question: what cartoon characters enter the public domain next? Below is a list of 10 major cartoon characters entering the public domain over the next decade, with the year they enter the public domain in parentheses. Note these are the earliest versions of the characters entering public domain; like “Steamboat Willie” Mickey, they likely won’t have most of their familiar modern aspects. (So while you can use 1938 Superman when he enters public domain, you’ll have to wait another two decades before you can show or mention his cousin, Supergirl.)

But recently they’ve deteriorated further, mostly due to Jill Biden.

It also contains a project named Protego ( wikileaks.org/vault7/#Protego ) which is not a malware but a missile control system, that can, if used in a specific way, can cause a missile launch to fail.”

Every time you transact in property, you will notice a variety of ticky-tack transactional frictions added to a (hopefully) itemized list. The largest, by a substantial margin, are agent commissions, which have come under substantialscrutiny for their set-by-a-disciplined-cartel character.

Common knowledge is why coronations and executions are held in public – not so a crowd can see the new king or the hanged man, but so a crowd can see a crowd seeing the new king or the hanged man. Common knowledge is why sitcoms have laugh tracks, why American Idol has a live studio audience, and why professional sports teams pipe in crowd noise. Common knowledge is why the Egyptian government fell in 2011 after a televised protest in Tahrir Square, why the Romanian government fell in 1989 after a televised protest in Palace Square, and why the Chinese government will arrest you today if you distribute pictures of a 35-year-old protest in Tiananmen Square. Common knowledge is why inflation has been non-transitory and persistent, why the US withdrawal from Afghanistan collapsed into a fiasco, and why the US response to Covid was so heavy-handed and ineffective. Common knowledge is why the 2024 Biden/Harris campaign has collapsed.

The historical left is in full meltdown…. They don’t understand that the MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than President Trump. They will look back fondly at Donald Trump. They’ll ask: Where’s Trump when we need him?

Conceptually the Portable Data Transmitter is essentially a 5G Xperia phone that can only send and receive data, rather than making phone calls. In practice it’s a little more complex than that: adding direct HDMI and LAN inputs and dual USB-C sockets so that it can stream data and video directly from cameras to the internet using its 5G cellular connection.

Japan’s well-known population collapse issues foretell severe labor squeezes in the coming years, and one specific issue this project aims to curtail is the continuing rise in online shopping, with a forecast decline in the numbers of delivery drivers that can move goods around. The country is expecting some 30% of parcels simply won’t make it from A to B by 2030, because there’ll be nobody to move them.

“So what I’m saying is enlarge the pie,” he said. “We have the smallest U.S. active duty military that we’ve had since the eve of World War II. …We are in a major crisis, a 1930s-style crisis, and we’re making decisions that we don’t need to be making about a small amount of resources when we can increase that amount of resources.”

Japan’s kei cars are a common sight on the country’s streets. Today kei trucks, the hard-working cargo versions of the kei car, are increasingly seen offroad and in camping areas as users find ways to customize them for adventurous outdoor use.

Carville advised donors who want Biden out of the race to cut off money to politicians who won’t take their side.

For folks not interested in dropping thousands on an Apple headset, the IR cameras could offer other perks, including bringing “in-air” gestures to AirPods, per Kuo. The IR module could be similar to the receiver that powers Apple’s facial recognition feature, FaceID. The analyst’s report follows a from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, which noted that Apple was looking into the idea of camera-powered AirPods.

Between 1945 and 1960, RAND operated as the world’s most productive research organization. Initially envisioned as a research arm of the Air Force, RAND made century-defining breakthroughs both in basic science and applied strategic analysis. Its members helped define U.S. nuclear strategy, conceptualized satellites, pioneered systems analysis, and developed the earliest reports on defense economics. They also revolutionized much of STEM: RAND scholars developed the basics of game theory, linear programming, and Monte Carlo methods. They helped conceptualize generalized artificial intelligence, developed the basics for packet switching (which enables data transmission across networks), and built one of the world’s first computers.

I’m thinking about what *I* want, as a capable, curious adult. I want to use its ideas to invent enabling environments for myself—to help me better think, learn, and create.

Immersion

My most cherished learning experiences have involved diving into a topic, trying things, getting my hands dirty, living and breathing it. In the real world, this kind of learning is somewhat rare. Many topics just seem too abstract. Or, when I try to “just dive in”, I’ll struggle to find an effective way to engage. But this is mostly how we see Nell learn: through immersive, hands-on action.

You can now short the Party with cryptocurrency.

VP Kamala Harris career timeline. Market action.

This website wants to document the technical tools used by the Spanish government to censor official informative websites about the referendum in Catalonia to be held on October 1, 2017. 

Were algorithmic “gotcha” questions still asked? Were the questions easier? Was the bar just higher?

So, the ID. Buzz GTX is facing some stiff competition – and early impressions suggest Volkswagen isn’t competing in the same league. It might be faster than the E-Transit in a straight line, but it doesn’t stop, corner or ride anywhere near as well, which I think rather defeats the point. And that’s before I address the practicality limitations.

Are Democrats even capable of running a presidential campaign without massive hoaxes, disinformation campaigns and election interference involving corruption of government officials and complicity of the mainstream media? This should be offensive to every voter.

The Democratic Party crushed all opposition during the primary with behind-the-scenes arm twisting and threats to discourage potential candidates from running, legal challenges to prevent NoLabels, @deanbphillips, @RobertKennedyJr and others from getting on the ballot in many states, and unprecedented limitations on the recent debate (which enabled the exclusion of @RobertKennedyJr) to limit the possibility of a third-party candidate successfully running for president.

A small group of local reporters (including me) were set to travel with President Biden to a handful of other stops today. We’ve now been told we don’t have transportation and won’t be doing so.

The solution to the software crisis will not be a reversion to more constrained platforms, but a constraint on the number of layers of abstraction we are allowed to apply, as well as the requirement of information preservation between these layers. We must narrow the (semantic gap) so that everyone may scale it.

All new vehicles sold in Europe – including Northern Ireland but not Great Britain – will be fitted with a mandatory speed limiter from 2024 to keep cars within the limits and boost road safety.

The funds, announced Tuesday by the U.S. Economic Development Administration, will create a new shared health database, send a fleet of cancer screening vans to underserved neighborhoods, provide lab space for science startups and help biohealth businesses develop apprenticeship programs.

But there is another dimension, too. Like East Germany, Prussia has left a mark on Germany that didn’t vanish when the state did. There are historians today who constitute an ‘otherness’ of the country’s East based on the idea that it had already been ‘different’ when it was Prussia. Traditions of Prussian liberalism are ignored in this picture and the focus is on perceived attributes of militarism, autocracy and general backwardness. A line is still often drawn from Prussia to Nazi Germany, an image of continuity favoured by Hitler himself, who liked to put himself in line with Prussians like Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck and Paul von Hindenburg.

Funding isn’t an issue. Revolut had $22 billion of customer balances (including over $19 billion of deposits) globally at the end of last year but only $680 million of loans, primarily in the personal lending and credit cards space.

Nuno Cunha Barnabé, a tax partner at Lisbon law firm Abreu Advogados, said the inclusion of retirees in the previous regime had made Portugal an anomaly. “It was against demographics. It didn’t make sense,” he said. “We already have an old population. Attracting pensioners puts more burden on our health system. We need to attract young people.”

Niall Ferguson

The most impressive feature of Thursday’s debate between Brezhnev and Andropov—sorry, Trump and Biden—is that anyone watching was in the least surprised by what it revealed.

The president is senile. The former president is a blowhard. Both these truths have been obvious for years. Yet somehow The New York Times editorial board, the hosts of Pod Save America, and numerous other eminent liberal authorities were shocked by what CNN broadcast from Atlanta.