Two young German travelers expected their Hawaii trip to be the highlight of a months-long world adventure. Instead, their visit ended in handcuffs, jail time, and deportation — a stark reminder of the risks some international visitors face at U.S. borders. (more)
This reliance on readily available solutions, particularly for familiar problems, creates a real risk: engineers may inadvertently atrophy their own problem-solving skills, hindering their ability to tackle truly novel challenges.
A podcast on epic systems.
“No one would build a volume that’s a void like that anymore,” says Paul Aferiat, a former employee of Gwathmey’s, whose firm Stamberg Aferiat + Associates was tasked with expanding the barn in 1995 when it was bought by new owners Dana and Paul Caan. Gwathmey recommended Aferiat when the Caan’s asked who would be a good fit to work on the barn as they had run out of bedrooms for their three daughters.
The only thing the Fed seems to be good at is using its vast powers to inject trillions of dollars of liquidity into the financial system to bail out banks from a problem the Feds often “help” the banks create. Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke even called the subprime mortgage crises “largely contained” as late as May 2007 when the crisis was turning into an economic tsunami.
What has gotten less attention is that his case is an example of the self-defeating absurdities of our immigration system and, in particular, of how it hands out “humanitarian protection.”. When Abrego Garcia avoided deportation back in 2019, he didn’t take
Consider where we are in this debate: 20 years ago the cry from LGBT activists was “leave us alone, let us live our private lives.”. Now it’s “you will bake me the cake, and you will force your children to sit through our curriculum, regardless of your religious beliefs.”
DeepSeek represents a profound threat to our nation’s security. Although it presents itself as just another AI chatbot, offering users a way to generate text and answer questions, closer inspection reveals that the app siphons data back to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), creates security vulnerabilities for its users, and relies on a model that covertly censors and manipulates information pursuant to Chinese law. Equally troubling, the model appears to have been built using stolen U.S. technology on the back of U.S. semiconductor chips that are prohibited from sale to China without an export license and when it was released, PRC-affiliated social media accounts amplified and celebrated the model, according to Graphika research. This report documents some of the risks DeepSeek poses and explains how its development is based on common Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tactics designed to unlawfully undermine U.S. technological leadership and critical American policies to protect national security.
Should we expect a gale of chaos to continue blowing through American tariff policy for the next four years? Yes, we should. By imposing punitive tariffs and threatening to retract America’s security umbrella, Trump hopes to coerce the world into sharing what he sees as the burdens of providing public goods like the global dollar system and military protection. Within Trump’s White House, at least three factions are vying for influence on these matters. Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, holds the most aggressive and hawkish views. The titles of his books, like The Coming China Wars (2006) and Death by China (2011), give a flavor of his approach, as does a document he circulated within the White House during Trump’s first term alleging that a “weakened manufacturing base” would cause a “higher abortion rate,” a “lower fertility rate,” and “increased spousal abuse.” The administration’s more technocratic figures, such as Miran and J.D. Vance, have a clearer set of goals and a more coherent, but still predatory, worldview. Their thinking rests on a nationalist critique of global finance, which they blame for deindustrialization and the long-term unemployment left unaddressed after 2008. Both camps are in tension with Elon Musk, the South African industrialist, whose multinational corporations will suffer from trade conflicts. At the moment, however, Navarro seems to be ascendant.
SpaceX raised $10B. NASA spent $450B. Only one is reliably sending humans to orbit. I was bored this weekend so did some digging on where NASA’s $450B went since 2002.
A new profile on billionaire heir and socialite dilettante @AlexanderSoros details the noble and inspiring ways that the Democratic Party is combatting the evils of oligarchy (by @svzwood in @NYMag):
A Practical Way to Get More Out of Limited Foreign Assistance Budgets
Grades for Water Quality-Health, Infrastructure & Operations, and Finance are based on data provided by Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC) for the years 2022 and 2023. Grades for Communication are based on data the WWEP team collected in 2024. Some inaccuracies in grading may be due to accidental misreporting or errors in the underlying data. Water customers are encouraged to contact their utilities with questions or concerns.
Let’s summarize:
? Allies are being asked to pay
? IMF is being retooled
? U.S. assets are being monetized
? Tariffs are a negotiating tool, not a tax policy
? Dollar is being gradually reweighted
This is the setup year. The real game is 2025–2029.
NTT Corporation (Headquarters: Chiyoda, Tokyo; President and CEO: Akira Shimada; hereinafter “NTT”) has become the first in the world to successfully trigger and guide lightning using a drone. This experiment also demonstrated, under natural lightning conditions, the effectiveness of both the drone’s lightning protection technology and the electric field-based lightning triggering method. These results are expected to contribute to further research on the still-mysterious mechanisms of lightning and to help reduce lightning-related damage to cities and people.
The internet is littered with digital ghost towns—premium domains once associated with thriving businesses, now sitting dormant or parked, waiting for their next life. Some of the biggest companies in the world have made strategic acquisitions, only to shut down the businesses they bought, leaving behind valuable domain names that are either redirected, held indefinitely, or simply left in limbo. Let’s take a look at some high-profile cases where major corporations scooped up valuable domains, shut down the original companies, and left the URLs in the digital graveyard.
First BETA-collection of Berlin-based DeepTech Startups
Pick the cheapest geocoding API provider for your project. An impartial comparison of pricing for HERE, Google Maps Platform, Azure Maps, OpenCage, TomTom Maps, LocationIQ, and Nominatim.
The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Lionel Trains.
Sons had tried to disinhert murderer’s girlfriend,
their adoptive sister. The adopted daughter of Dr. Beth Potter and Robin Carre has settled out of court with her two siblings over the slain couple’s contested will. Miriam’s boyfriend, Khari Sanford, was convicted of their murder in 2022 and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Sanford and a young accomplice abducted the two from their beds on the near West side of Madison on March 30, 2020. Sanford held a handgun on them as he directed the driver to the north entrance to the UW Arboretum. That is where Sanford shot each in the head, execution style, trial evidence showed. Joggers found the two the next morning, still in their night clothes on that frigid morning, Dr. Potter was alive but barely. She died in a hospital emergency room hours later.
Yet, in an era of airlines placing loose bets on aviation startups, United’s investment and interest in JetZero’s design stands out from its previous venture capital investments, which have been in aircraft whose market niches don’t target a spot in its current fleet. Notably, this JetZero investment is the first to offer a potential direct challenge to the Airbus and Boeing duopoly.
Yet even as the Chinese argument has some surface plausibility, many of its claims are dubious. While it’s true that China has sought to forge a new economic order through initiatives such as the BRI and agreements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership—and that its exports to BRI countries now exceed those to the United States, the European Union, and Japan combined—these figures tell only part of the story. A significant portion of these exports are transshipments ultimately destined for the U.S. market. These transshipments can take various forms: simple repackaging of Chinese-made goods, basic assembly using Chinese components in third countries, or even falsified export documentation listing obscure jurisdictions like Heard Island and McDonald Islands as the country of origin. As a result, the apparent decline in China’s direct exports to the United States—from 19.2 percent in 2018 to 14.7 percent in 2024—is likely overstated. In reality, the volume of Chinese goods reaching the United States might not have fallen much, if at all.
The IRS Tea Party scandal is about as black-and-white a scandal as you can imagine. All the information is out there and uncontested. If you think it’s fake, that is a problem you have with being able to digest plain factual information over partisan talking point.
The victims were in the courtroom ready for the pre-trial conference; they were waiting for justice. Judge Dugan found out that ICE agents were in the hallway. She put Flores-Ruiz in the jury box (unusual) & went to confront the federal agents in the hall.
How did we end up with a more than 5000 pound BMW M5 in the year of our Lord 2025?
The ex-ATF informant, Carol Howe—who warned her handlers in early 1995 that neo-Nazi extremists in Oklahoma were planning to attack federal buildings—had vanished in the late 90s after being acquitted from explosives charges. In the remaining years of her life, she was reportedly living in Sparta, Tennessee under the name “Sarah Collins.” She died in a house fire on Jan. 6, according to documentarian Jon Ronson.
‘I have an assumption that my chromosomes are probably XY but I don’t know.’
Arthur John Keeffe, ‘Practicing Lawyer’s Guide to the Current Law Magazines,’ 48 American Bar Asso. J. 491, 491 (1962) (explaining that during the American Civil War, federal authorities arrested Judge James L. Bartol of the Maryland Court of Appeals and Judge Richard Bennett Carmichael of the Maryland Circuit Court, and the “latter was arrested while conducting court”).
What is described above happened under President Obama and under President Lincoln. Judges are not above the law; judges cannot interpose their courthouse and personal rules and policies against federal officers. And when state judges violate the law, they must be arrested . . . like you and me and anyone else. We all know that—or, at least, we should.
I must admit I did not realize that if you are a prior deport, you do not need to appear before a judge. I also learned that some who are not prior deports can be removed without a judge as part of the Expedited Removal System created by Bill Clinton in 1996. (verified by the American Immigration Council)