9.4

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A Nasa official estimated that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket cost less than $400mn to develop, and that Nasa would have spent 10 times that to build the rocket under a cost-plus system.

Before the industrial revolution, there had been a significant increase in machinery use in Europe. Why not in China?

The Mondragon Corporation, as it’s known, is a voluntary association of ninety-five autonomous coöperatives that differs radically from a conventional company. Each co-op’s highest-paid executive makes at most six times the salary of its lowest-paid employee. There are no outside shareholders; instead, after a temporary contract, new workers who have proved themselves may become member-owners of their co-ops. A managing director acts as a kind of C.E.O. within each co-op, but the members themselves vote on many vital decisions about strategy, salaries, and policy, and the votes of all members, whether they are senior management or blue-collar, count equally.

Rather that asking someone what party they are in or who they are voting for, we should ask them what the most important things are for them this election season. It may not be scientific, but it offers a glimpse into the context and complexities that go into their decision. And it tells us more about how people are actually feeling than the raw numbers do.

It seems that Canon is actively preventing 3rd parties from releasing mirrorless lenses for RF mount – take a look at this conversation between a customer and the Chinese lens manufacturer Viltrox:

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and a vocal proponent of young founders, has railed against what he sees as an increasingly old population less willing to shoulder the risk necessary to change the world. He accuses a “finance gerontocracy” of standing in the way of what he considers the revolutionary youth movement of cryptocurrency.

The Hacker News website hasn’t been redone in some bloated, unnecessary Javascript framework like so many other websites today. It loads fast and gets the job done. They nailed the intuitive-ness and the simplicity on the website. I don’t think it should, or will ever change.

The St. Lawrence Seaway transported 514,000 tonnes of grain out of the Great Lakes between March 22 to the end of July this year. This represents a 37% increase from the same period last year.

The photographs and video footage that were taken using the DJI Mavic 3 are simply breathtaking. The almost three-minute video presents us with some of the most stunning views of Mount Everest and several peaks in its immediate vicinity.

Natural gas prices are 10 times the usual—upending industries, angering consumers, and panicking politicians.

The US Open is the only major where men and women use different balls and, in the build-up to this year’s tournament, a number of players have echoed Swiatek’s comments.

US officials have told Nvidia to stop selling to Chinese companies two of its chips designed for artificial intelligence work, the company said in a filing on Wednesday. The government is imposing a licence requirement on any products containing its A100 and forthcoming H100 integrated circuits used in the machine learning processes that enhance AI systems.

“Do those federal tax credits tip the scale? Absolutely. There’s going to be all kinds of industries that pop up to chase those tax credits and those dollars,” he said. “But if you ask me do I think we need those tax credits, no I don’t.”

Actually I was surprised that the crash did not happen earlier. Normally crypto bubbles last around 6-9 months after surpassing the previous top, after which the rapid drop comes pretty quickly. This time, the bull market lasted nearly one and a half years. People seemed to adjust into the mentality that the higher prices are a new normal. The whole time, I knew that eventually the bull market will end and we’re going to get the drop, but I just did not know when. Today, it feels like people are reading too much into what is ultimately cyclical dynamics that crypto has always had and probably will continue to have for a long time. When the prices are rising, lots of people say that it’s the new paradigm and the future, and when prices are falling people say that it’s doomed and fundamentally flawed. The reality is always a more complicated picture somewhere between the two extremes.

Originally, my grandfather Saleh owned three knives. They had come from my father’s father—who’d inherited them from his own father. I didn’t know exactly how many generations back they extended—but it was enough to have spiraled into history. Though my father’s family now lived in the city, if you looked over their shoulders, you’d see a long line of sheikhs, poets, and Bedouins. Each generation had their trusted tools, secret paths, and shared stories.

8.28

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How did our medieval ancestors use dove faeces, fox lungs, salted owl or eel grease in medical treatments? A Wellcome funded project at Cambridge University Library is about to find out

Lumber size standards came into being almost a century ago to meet the need for a common understanding between the mill and markets that were separated by increasing distances of rail or water transportation. Early concepts called for rough lumber to be of full nominal size, often in the dry condition. After World War I, the increasing demand for construction lumber led to the first national size standard in 1924. This was revised in 1926, 1928, 1939, and 1953, while still another revision is proposed for adoption in 1964

Fellow Democrats in the State Legislature have now sent him a bill that would allow the nation’s broadest experiment with supervised drug-injection sites, in the hope of reducing a deluge of opioid overdoses. Local governments that serve more than 11 million residents — including San Francisco and Los Angeles — could authorize centers that offer clean needles and have staff who can intervene quickly when an overdose occurs.

My subscribers will receive the book in installments. And I will continue to do lots of other articles too—so this is a plus for them. What they call a lagniappein New Orleans. I hope and expect to pick up more paid subscribers, so I benefit too.

Before they cautioned Buttigieg against going too hard, Biden’s aides had been planning his own big speech at the end of July, in Wisconsin — until aides to Gov. Tony Evers, who’s in a tight reelection fight, urged him not to come so they could avoid being together. White House aides had decided to go through with it anyway, until they realized that the necessary security measures would force them to cancel the local favorite Oshkosh Air Show. Now that big Biden speech is being planned for shortly after Labor Day. Aides are preparing a hard-hitting kick off for midterm campaigning, with the President touting tangible, long-talked-about wins like lowering prescription drug costs and gun restrictions while hammering Republicans for being extremists who are in the pocket of special interests. The hole Biden is hoping to crawl out of is deep, and it’s dark. Around the time when the Wisconsin speech would have happened, top Democratic operatives were quietly passing around numbers that left them depressed but not surprised.Biden’s disapproval rating was higher than his approval rating in Delaware — the state he represented for 36 years in the Senate, where they named the main rest stop and the train station for him years before he was elected president.

US private equity group Blackstone is vying to buy Pink Floyd’s back catalogue, a big bet on music rights that could value the band’s songs at almost half a billion dollars

Cotsworth had figured this out and in 1907, formed the International Fixed Calendar League, an organization to gain support for the idea of a fixed calendar internationally. Here’s what his calendar looked like:

The safe bet is that undecided voters will swing toward the opposition party in the closing days of the campaign. In this likely scenario, Biden’s dismal approval rating will bring down the Democratic congressional majorities. That, after all, is how the world works. And yet the world hasn’t been working as expected for the last six years. The most unpopular candidate in the history of the Gallup poll became the first U.S. president with no experience in government or the military. That president became the first chief executive to lose reelection in 28 years. We have had a once-in-a-century pandemic, the largest single-year jump in violent crime ever recorded, the breakdown of the southern border, the worst inflation in 40 years, the first cross-border invasion in Europe since 1945, and a Supreme Court decision that reversed a half-century-old precedent. Things are weird. And if I am right about the new politics of bifurcation, things are about to get weirder.

That’s not how tech works. But I think that’s code that they’ll be cutting their tech team in a pretty aggressive way. Their software development team has 1,000 people, which is mind-boggling for a real estate brokerage. I think they’re on track to spend around $360 million on tech this year. So there’s a huge cost there.

In most cases, if you find a price unfair, you wouldn’t agree to it, so if someone does agree, that’s evidence that they find it fair, which is evidence that it is fair. Furthermore, even if it wasn’t fair to begin with, the agreement makes it morally privileged, since the two people both have the right to decide on what terms they conduct an exchange. (Assuming this exchange isn’t immoral for some other reason – e.g., maybe there’s no fair price for assassination.) But almost none of the people who talk about fair prices would like this; they think a huge range of voluntary transactions involve unfair prices

The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, and the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order. While ancient gods could have their share of travails and difficulties, they remained in that special class of gods. But Jesus was the first ancient deity who suffered the punishment of the slave, the lowest ranking member of the human race. And the sect that succeeded him generalized such glorification of suffering: dying as an inferior is more magnificent than living as the mighty. The Romans were befuddled to see members of that sect use for symbol the cross –the punishment for slaves. It had to be some type of joke in their eyes.

8.21

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My favorite Sun Tzu quote might be: “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.” First, it suggests I can win at life by doing three of my favorite things:

making no effort
enjoying a water feature
relaxing

Liverpool was the first stop on Grant’s two-and-a-half-year trip around the world. After eight years in the White House, with no ancestral home to return to, Grant and his wife, Julia, decided to indulge their wanderlust and take a long-desired tour overseas. The trip also solved the immediate problem of what Grant, a spry man of fifty-five, should do after leaving the White House. He didn’t have a plantation to run like Andrew Jackson, nor did he want to design buildings or found a university like Thomas Jefferson. He’d turned down the chance to run for a third term. By leaving the country, Grant also believed he would be giving President Rutherford B. Hayes, who’d barely squeaked into the White House, a chance to govern without reporters constantly running to his predecessor for comment.

The Augustinian friars of Medieval Britain pledged themselves to a life of poverty, but their friaries offered a pretty high standard of communal living. The monks dwelled in buildings with sophisticated stone and glass work, studied in libraries, and dined on the products of bountiful gardens. When nature called, they enjoyed dedicated latrines and hand-washing facilities, complete with running water systems that were rare even among the era’s wealthiest households. But new research on human remains from a friary buried below the University of Cambridge shows that the monks suffered greatly from a gastrointestinal affliction—worms.

After a few years of sailing on French ships, the market closes up for him because technically he’s not supposed to be on French ships without having the formal permission of the Russian authorities. This is, again, one of the ways in which the issues of empire, belonging, citizenship, and labor markets come together in Conrad’s life, in the way that they do in people’s lives today. He ends up not being able to find work. He also is running out of money and is hit with an attack of what we can only call now clinical depression. It culminates in a suicide attempt in Marseilles, an episode that a lot of biographers don’t say a lot about because they’re interested in talking about other things

In April, prosecutors failed to win a single conviction in one of the government’s biggest domestic terror investigations in decades. A jury acquitted two men—Brandon Caserta and Daniel Harris—on every count after defense attorneys successfully argued their clients were entrapped by the FBI..

Why Read The Bible In Hebrew? Let’s talk about one of the most influentialt stories *ever* for thinking about the nature of human progress—the Tower of Babel. What exactly did Babel’s builders do wrong? A thread (for non-Hebrew readers too!)

8.14

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“It shocked the crowed when it happened, from the angle the pilot got out of that plane at, with the ejection seats at that time it would have shot him almost straight down into the ground. Then when they saw the seat come out and shoot straight up by the rockets changing the thrust vectors, boy that made a huge difference. Western engineers didn’t even know that the Soviets had such technology, and they got to work very quickly to have that on our own seats.

But then I started studying the publishing industry. Why, of all possible book worlds, had we ended up with ours? Once I posed that question, I could see that Danielle Steel was a cosmic accident whose story revealed the hidden logic of contemporary publishing, what I call the conglomerate era for reasons I will explain in a moment. This is to say, at first my interest was professional. How long could it stay that way, though, given the life she’s led and the books she’s written? The more I learned about her, the more obsessed I became. Soon she was the only topic I wanted to talk or tweet about. I went out with friends and harangued them for hours: Claude-Eric, Supergirls, the Vacaville wedding; the vault into superstardom; novels with titles such as Message From Nam, The Klone and I, and Toxic Bachelors. Eventually we’d arrive at the difficult present.

The facts of the hypocrisy are these: What they’re preaching. They have rightly warned against the virulent danger of Trump’s election lie and are working with a few Republicans to expose that danger in the January 6 hearings. What they’re practicing. They are simultaneously engaged in a strategy to pump up Trump-backing, election-denying candidates in key primary races with the aim of winning moderate voters in November.

Many early ancestors of computers were controlled by punch cards. The ancestor of these machines, in turn, was the Jacqard loom, which automated the production of elaborately woven textiles. It was the first machine to use punch cards as an automated instruction sequence.

For Teslas built since mid-2017, “every time you drive, it records the whole track of where you drive, the GPS coordinates and certain other metrics for every mile driven,” says Green, a Tesla owner who has reverse engineered the company’s Autopilot data collection. “They say that they are anonymizing the trigger results,” but, he says, “you could probably match everything to a single person if you wanted to.”

The Wolf moves fast because they can avoid the encumbering necessities of a group of people building at scale. This avoidance of most processes related and exceptional engineering ability allows them to move at a speed that makes them unusually productive. It’s this productivity that the rest of the team can… smell. This scent of pure productivity allows them further to skirt documentation, meetings, and annual reviews.

The U.S. government is bankrolling favored businesses at the expense of taxpayers and other businesses. Again. By continually involving itself in the market, government is impeding economic growth and the potential of industries to reach their full potential. That must change. Congress recently passed the CHIPS Act, which is a $280 billion spending boondoggle that will provide funding of $52.2 billion to computer chip manufacturers. To sweeten the pot, Congress is also offering a 25% tax credit for semiconductor fabrication, which could cost an estimated $24 billion over five years. And these subsidies could support production in other regions, such as China and Europe.

Today I read an astounding exposé by Felix Krause, in which he discovered the Facebook and Instagram iOS apps inject JavaScript into all web pages that are viewed in their webviews. You should read and process this. Facebook has a sterling reputation to uphold, so I’m sure they wouldn’t do anything horrible here. But more nefarious apps could steal passwords or perform other types of attacks. The more I think about it, the more I cannot believe webviews with unfettered JavaScript access to third-party websites ever became a legitimate, accepted technology. It’s bad for users, and it’s bad for websites. But fortunately, I think something can be done about all this.

Law enforcement sources say Delcid also has several juvenile arrests, including for an alleged attempted murder charge — but no convictions. Earlier this year, he pleaded guilty to felony charges of domestic violence and residential burglary after beating up and attacking his girlfriend, according to court documents obtained by Fox News Digital. He was sentenced to six months in county jail and four years of felony probation.

If the best the current U.S. and Chinese governments can manage is statecraft as usual—which is what we’ve seen this past week—then we should expect history as usual.

It’s not ego, it’s economics. Smaller light-duty trucks were regulated out of existence by tighter fuel standards. Because regulations were made looser on larger vehicles, the easiest way for automakers to meet the standard is to build a bigger truck.

During the investigation, it was determined that a Cisco employee’s credentials were compromised after an attacker gained control of a personal Google account where credentials saved in the victim’s browser were being synchronized.

This is sadly the story of our entire HC system—poor incentive structures layered on top of each other in an increasingly wobbly manner rendering the whole system unfit for purpose and on the verge of collapse. I should note here that this also targets one of the few industries where the US is still the undisputed global leader—can we really afford to do that? Especially when pharmaceuticals are less than a fifth of US HC spend, and the real drivers of out-of-control healthcare spending are guilds like the AMA and local monopolies (hospital systems that have consolidated heavily and are the largest employers in many congressional districts and even states, giving them both outsize negotiating power against insurers and lobbying clout in Congress).

“China Price” China EVs < $30K accounted for 74% of deliveries in July.

Why Germany won’t get tough on Beijing — even if it invades Taiwan

“SpaceX I would say is the more operational of those and certainly one of the back-up launches we are looking at.”

It’s not fixed in amber.

The facts are that the overwhelming majority of the new money – came right out of our bank accounts. Using the Federal Reserve as its intermediary, the U.S. government reached into the bank accounts of the nation, took out trillions of dollars, and then sent those dollars back out to the nation in redistributed form. Indeed, this was the largest, fastest redistribution of wealth in U.S. history, and to this day, almost all of the people whose wealth got redistributed – still don’t realize that it happened

Recently, when pompompurin visited ShitExpress to send a token of appreciation to Troia, the hacker realized the website was vulnerable to SQL Injection.

I leave you with one thought: neither God nor Nature owe the United States of America a democracy. If citizens give away all their freedoms, eventually they will have none. When the powerful have all the options and you have none, you are toast.

Fast fashion grew out of quick response manufacturing (QRM), a production system developed in the United States during the 1980s and ’90s. In the traditional fashion business model, a company will design a collection for many months before producing samples to show to store buyers at an industry tradeshow. Once those store buyers place their orders, the brand will go into production and then deliver the units to these stores six months later. As a result, the lead time from design to delivery can be as long as a year, sometimes more.

8.7

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This is why I have supported the election (and more recently the re-election) of prosecutors who support reform. I have done it transparently, and I have no intention of stopping. The funds I provide enable sensible reform-minded candidates to receive a hearing from the public. Judging by the results, the public likes what it’s hearing.

Argentina’s central bank delivered an outsize 800 basis-point hike to its benchmark interest rate, the largest in three years, as inflation accelerates amid a growing political crisis. The monetary authority increased its benchmark Leliq rate to 60%, it said in a statement on Thursday. The effective annual rate, which accounts for compounded interest, reached 79.8%.

The Federal Trade Commission today took action against online home buying firm Opendoor Labs Inc., for cheating potential home sellers by tricking them into thinking that they could make more money selling their home to Opendoor than on the open market using the traditional sales process. The FTC alleged that Opendoor pitched potential sellers using misleading and deceptive information, and in reality, most people who sold to Opendoor made thousands of dollars less than they would have made selling their homes using the traditional process. Under a proposed administrative order, Opendoor will have to pay $62 million and stop its deceptive tactics.

There’s an interesting and revealing contrast in the ways that Tesla and Edison, respectively, presented themselves and their power of invention. Both men were adept at self-promotion and took advantage of every opportunity to put themselves and their inventions in the public eye. The inventive selves that each presented to the public were very different ones, nevertheless, and are revealing of the range of ways in which innovators could be imagined at the beginnings of modernity.

One of the coolest patterns in history is something called “the multiple.” It’s this spooky phenomenon where someone invents something or makes a new discovery and then, at roughly the same time, someone else invents the same thing or makes the same discovery independent of the first person. Consider:

It remains to be seen how efficiently the U.S. funds will be spent. The disbursement of tens of billions of dollars in the coming years is likely to raise many questions about how those investments are allocated. And it may touch off more jostling among semiconductor companies that spent more than $20 million on lobbying in the first half of this year alone, according to their disclosures. The 10-year ban on investments in more cutting-edge facilities in China has been particularly controversial, with firms arguing that it would make them less competitive globally and ultimately set the United States back in a race against Chinese competitors.

Quadratic voting (or QV) requires more complex calculations than regular rank choice voting, but with the right interface, it is an intuitive and simple-to-use mechanism. Voting using QV is done in two parts.

Designing a chip is a complex process. First comes laying out there the chip, making sure the design works, then preparing all the files required for the foundry, and when they come back from the fabs there is a lot of work involved in getting the chip debugged and working. It has gotten increasingly easy to do that first bit – designing a chip, but the rest of it is still a fairly laborious process, and the big chip companies think they can help others get through all of that.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund is one of the largest liberal dark-money organizations and poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the 2020 election. America Votes, another dark-money group, received most of its funding from the Sixteen Thirty Fund in the 2020 cycle, according to Politico.

That is why the media is now recalibrating. That was most evident in the recent statement of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “I know The New York Times felt it didn’t pursue it originally as much as it wanted to; then it followed up, as I recall.” Friedman does not explain what overrode that journalistic interest in the story or why the “follow up” came a year after the election of Joe Biden.

Sources within Apple, a company notoriously shy of making public statements, have briefed media outletswith news of more advertising opportunities for those eager to promote their wares in the App Store.

The bones of a good story, according to Bartell: “It’s an element of my curiosity, the visuals and finding the right character,” he says. “I love oddities. People who do their own thing or have gone through a lot of adversity.” But sometimes, he admits, the story isn’t there right away.

“naturally occurring affordable housing”

7.31

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What started as a free (yet limited) tool was OpenAI’s strategic move to gather millions of users and data. This set up the pathway for their latest enterprise solution opening up a 100 billion-dollar market. And it also spells the beginning of the end for a human design workforce as AI will eventually replace low-to-medium-skilled graphic designers. In the not-so-distant future, all types of workers will be displaced as AI upends industries. Are you going to be replaced by an AI? The short answer is: yes–it’s only a matter of time. The long answer is more complicated as it varies on the type of work you do and the rate of AI development. And, how can we predict when specific jobs will be automated by AI? To answer that we need to travel around the world, figuratively.

But Mansa Musa was only the second ruler to come along bearing the wisdom of Solomon. The wisdom to keep quiet about the true nature of your ‘lost mine of Ophir’. The wisdom to know that your secret mines will be hidden in plain sight and that the Devil himself has your back. The wisdom to know how to leverage two separate sets of cultural tradition, into one inferential knowledge, and an advantage over all other nations.

“We were in a motel dining room somewhere in Texas. Paul laid his knife and fork down soon after he had started his meal. ‘I don’t know whether to thank you or not,’ he bellowed. ‘Most of my life I could eat anything anywhere, but now look what you have done to me. This damned rubbish …’ With that, he pushed his plate back in disgust.”

“Before Diana’s books, not even people in Mexico thought their food was a big deal,” says Iliana de la Vega, a chef from Oaxaca who knew Kennedy and co-owns the restaurant El Naranjo in Austin. (De la Vega was recently named Best Chef: Texas by the James Beard Foundation.) “Mexican food was eaten at home,” she adds, “and in the markets, but not in fancy restaurants—or really in any restaurants at all.” At that time in Mexico, fine food was European, especially French. “Diana was one of the first people to take Mexican cooking seriously,” she said. “The work she did, traveling around the country, was amazing.”

Hospitals last year came under a similar directive, which stems from the Affordable Care Act, to post what they’ve agreed to accept from insurers — and the amounts they charge patients paying cash. Yet many dragged their feet, saying the rule is costly and time-consuming. Their trade association, the American Hospital Association, sued unsuccessfully to halt it. Many hospitals just never complied and federal government enforcement has proven lax.

These ‘beautiful and impressive photos,’ as Mr. Yamaki says, are the byproduct of the proprietary three-layer design Sigma’s Foveon sensors use. Rather than the Bayer filter mosaic most conventional sensors use, which consists of arranging Red, Green or Blue color filters atop each photo sensor, Foveon sensors capture light with different energies at three different depths in the sensor, then reconstruct the red, green and blue information. This structure results in full color detail at every pixel, and eliminates the softness that comes from the demosaicing process used to fill in the color gaps in the Bayer design

Photographer and visual artist Reuben Wu, whose shot campaigns for the likes of Audi, Google and Samsung, was tasked with capturing a well-known prehistoric monument for the August cover of National Geographicmagazine. Wu always takes an unconventional approach in his work, so it’s hardly surprising that he showcases Stonehenge in a way never seen before with the help of drones.

The study, published Tuesday by the Epic Health Research Network, used data from Epic’s Cosmos database, which includes records from 149 million patients at hospitals and clinics in all 50 states.

Researchers assessed how often Paxlovid is being prescribed and how well it worked for the patients who took it, which in turn provides evidence about the effectiveness of the federal Test to Treat plan, said Dr. Jacqueline Gerhart, vice president of clinical informatics at Epic Systems.

Wait said he logged onto MyVote Wisconsin on Tuesday and entered the names and birth dates of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) and Racine Mayor Cory Mason (D) — two officials with whom he has repeatedly clashed, especially on voting-related issues. Posing as them, he asked to have their ballots sent to his own home.

In a letter addressed to the US Congress last month, President Joe Biden confirmed that Washington deployed troops to Yemen to provide military support for the Saudi-led coalition. “A number of American military personnel are deployed in Yemen,” the US president said, “to conduct operations against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS, as well as provide military advice and information to the Saudi-led coalition.”

These outcomes make no sense in climate terms, naturally. Nissan is giving up its pioneering electric Leaf in favor of a big electric SUV aimed at affluent shoppers. One manufacturer that speaks confidently of profits in the near term from electric vehicles is Porsche—whose cars don’t rack up Camry-like mileages, don’t displace gasoline-powered trips to the Shop-Rite, and don’t stand a snowball’s chance of offsetting the emissions involved in producing their powerful batteries.

7.24

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During the first half of 2022, Israel received 832 mentions in New York Times reports, while other Middle Eastern nations received far less attention: Turkey was mentioned 619 times, Iran received 518 mentions, and Syria appeared 498 times.

We love electric biking. Three years ago, we set out to make autonomous, self-delivering bicycles so that more people would try ebiking. Since then, ebikes have exploded in popularity. Now, we’re releasing an ebike with the best riding experience we have ever had. We invite you to experience the same.

This conflict is existential for most modern Western elites, who are failing and losing the trust of their populations. To divert attention they need an enemy. But most Western countries, not their presently ruling elites, will perfectly survive and thrive even when this liberal globalist imperialism imposed since late 1980s will vanish.

But the scale of America is incredibly well suited to the potential gifts of the automobile. There is a necessary mixing between cities and states and regions that can happen by car and never by any scheme for high-speed railroads, let alone the hapless and costly versions on offer from our existing transportation bureaucracy. The virtues involved in being a good driver — the mix of independence and cooperation, knowledge and responsibility — really are virtues well suited to citizenship in a sprawling and diverse republic. And if driving makes some people distinctly anxious, learning to do it well, or just well enough, is also a tonic for anxiety, an easily available antidote to the sense that the world is pure chaos, beyond anyone’s control.

Fast forward to last week. As January 6th hearings, a presidential fist-bump, and a Kardashian spawn’s gender reveal gobbled attention, the House quietly passed a monster $839 billion defense package. It was “the definition of a bipartisan bill,” chirped Alabama’s Mike Rogers, as 180 Democrats and 149 Republicans joined to smash by tens of billions previous records for military spending. With this already underreported story, just one news outlet, Roll Call, described a “first of its kind” report published by the Department of Defense Comptroller’s office, which revealed at least $58 billion of “congressional additions” above Joe Biden’s budget request.

Taken together, state law is explicit that clerks have only two options when they receive a ballot with missing address information. Clerks may return the defective ballot to the voter to be cured and then count the ballot if it is returned in a timely manner, or not count the ballot. But in recent years, WEC interpreted state law to mean if the address is not contained on the envelope that clerks may add the missing information to the ballot envelope if they are reasonably able to discern it and then count the ballot. The Legislative Audit Bureau’s position, as documented in an October 2021 report on election administration, is that WEC must promulgate a rule on ballot curing if it intends to interpret the statute to allow for corrective action by clerks. But the language of the statute does not permit the clerk to take any “corrective actions” whatsoever. Instead, it directs the clerk not to count the ballot if the address of the witness is missing or return it to the elector to correct the information.

At a wedding, Xie usually pretends to be the bride’s best friend or a classmate. The couple generally cover the travel and accommodation costs. A typical daily rate is between 500 and 2,000 yuan ($74-$296).

When traveling by train, though, the atmosphere is completely different. There was a sense of community aboard the California Zephyr. After all, there aren’t many places where Mennonites, a Japanese student, smiley newlyweds, parents with their kids and grandkids in tow and retirees are all bundled together for such a long period of time, sharing their life stories.

Instagram, TikTok and YouTube teenagers’ top three news sources

The question is how the thieves got into the truck and whether they knew in advance about the valuables inside. Given the less than half an hour window, he said, “we believe several thieves had to be involved.”

California went big on rooftop solar. Now that’s a problem for landfills

7.17

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They show how ex-EU digital commissioner Neelie Kroes, one of Brussels’ top officials, was in talks to join Uber before her term ended – and then secretly lobbied for the firm, in potential breach of EU ethics rules.

We seem to be in an era where we don’t want to think (or learn) any more. Just let the machines do the work. My car wants to keep itself in lanes, but has a real problem when the lines start to widen at off ramps. It also prioritizes centering in the lane despite a vehicle encroaching on an adjacent lane. Autofocus systems aren’t any different. They see general problems decently, but the marginal problems—of which more exist than you might realize—aren’t the focus AI’s forte, for sure.

Like Turner, Rishi is now worried that identity thieves will just hijack his Experian account once more, and that there is nothing he can do to prevent such a scenario. For now, Rishi has decided to pay Experian $25.99 a month to more closely monitor his account for suspicious activity. Even using the paid Experian service, there were no additional multi-factor authentication options available, although he said Experian did send a one-time code to his phone via SMS recently when he logged on.

We’ve asked BMW for the exact details of this roll-out, but it was unable to say when the subscriptions had been launched in which countries. It’s no surprise that BMW isn’t trumpeting the news, though. Since the company announced in 2020 that its cars’ operating system would allow for microtransactions on features like automatic high beams and adaptive cruise control, customers have decried the move as greedy and exploitative.

Brad Jones, the interim chief executive of ERCOT, who was brought in after the 2021 blackout fiasco, has pointed to mining Bitcoin as a way to harvest that surplus electricity in lieu of forcing power plants to sit idle and lose money. “We can use cryptocurrency to soak up the excess generation when there’s a lot of that and really provide a home for more wind and more solar to come to our state,” he told CNBC on March 18. ERCOT has a vested interest in incentivizing energy generators to continue building in Texas, despite the frequent gluts. Climate change and the state’s booming population make it likely that the grid will continue to experience ever-greater record peaks of demand each summer and winter. For those precarious days, maximizing the available power matters.

I take it you’re not interested in retiring.
No, I think retirement is going to happen to me unwillingly. But I swim a lot and I work out. I’m pretty healthy, though I have started forgetting stuff a little bit. I’m insanely focused on the work, more than on my social life or my family life. That’s the priority.

We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you’re going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb.

7.10

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While we banned plastic straws, Russia drilled and doubled nuclear energy production.

As Ukraine war bogs down, U.S. assessments face scrutiny. The growing conjecture is fueled by U.S. assessments of other wars, notably Afghanistan, where officials habitually sidestepped questions of whether success was sustainable

But how much can Japan really expect in the way of returns from the subsidies?

“Dutch farmers turned out in their thousands to speak out against the World Economic Forum (WEF) climate change policies of their government.”

The council is accused of having secret, unannounced meetings, from which no agenda or minutes are ever published, in violation of the Local Government Act 1972.

A one-for-one replacement of the E2 for the E1, allowing a much “greener” airplane is good for the environment and the improved fuel economy is better for the airline’s bottom line as well—which, in theory, helps protect jobs. There are simply routes that do not support mainline jets. Switching to greener airplanes also reduces the ability of the Greta Thunbergs of the world to pressure commercial aviation to the detriment of jobs.

On top of this, construction on the first sub in the class began when design was only 10% complete. Inevitably, design requirements changed as development proceeded, causing further rework, delays, and cost overruns. There were also difficulties finding vendors who could meet the fabrication requirements of the components, forcing the shipyards to fabricate many of them themselves (at increased cost.) The initial submarine in the class (the USS Seawolf) would ultimately take 6 years to build.

Get in the habit of Fermi estimation, looking up key quantities, and using upper and lower bounds. I’ve noticed a lot of the smartest people I know do this: they don’t take any claims at face value, and check for themselves whether they’re plausible. This means, e.g. when they hear a fact, they’ll look it up to assure themselves that it’s true, because often people cite things that are false or partial.

Royal Mail’s stamps are finally entering the digital world, with printed codes that can be used to track letters or linked to videos. Collectors, traditionalists and royalists are not amused

On the campaign trail, Mr. Harden has gotten an earful from voters about maddening and arbitrary restrictions: Why are wineries in Maryland limited to serving only 13 kinds of food? Why does a woman who sells her grandmother’s cobbler have to cough up tens of thousands of dollars to build a commercial kitchen? Why does a federal inspector have to be on hand to watch wild catfish get gutted — but not other kinds of seafood? The short answer is that restaurant associations tend to wield more political clout than wineries, and catfish farmers in Mississippi are more powerful than seafood harvesters in Maryland. Big businesses can afford to hire lawyers to help them cut through red tape and lobbyists to bend government rules to their will. Small businesses, especially in rural places, get slammed.

Ridgely Walsh, according to Department of Justice filings, had not registered, and in response to Vox’s inquiry, the firm said it would change its status. “As a prudential matter, we’re gonna go ahead and register immediately to represent the Government of Ukraine on a pro bono basis,” Juleanna Glover, the founder and CEO of the firm, told me.

To my mind, the two primary accomplishments of the DMA are that 1) it restricts the scope with which platform operators can compete directly with businesses that utilize their platforms, and 2) it forces choice and alternatives for core platform functionality for both consumers and businesses (eg. payments and discovery). The restrictions of the DMA apply to so-called “gatekeepers,” as defined through qualitative and quantitative criteria (eg. “annual EEA turnover equal to or above EUR 6.5 billion in the last three financial years or has an average market capitalization of EUR 65 billion or higher”). Penalties for non-compliance are stiff at 10% of global turnover for initial infractions and 20% for repeated breaches. I outlined the DSA’s impact on digital advertising back in April, but the DMA was the more popularly annotated and interpreted legislation, in part because of the quixotic and, in some cases, impractical or unworkable requirements it imposes on feature interoperability. This article provides a thorough and even-handed interpretation of the DMA and its impact on large consumer technology platforms.

In the past 20 years—and particularly the last 10 to 15—the average age of actors appearing toward the top of the bill in film and TV projects has risen significantly.

“We’re not brain surgeons here — all we’re doing is finding the best spots and washing and delivering the sand,” said Brock, 34. “Frankly, that it took us this long to get here is pretty wild.”

“These are pyrrhic victories. The party’s death spiral is over, the body is there, but it’s a zombie,” Mike Madrid, the former political director for the CAGOP and a longtime Republican strategist, told me about the future of the party.

I posited that these actions by Microsoft bear a striking resemblance to both the “Embrace” and “Extend” portions of the famous “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy that Microsoft has used, in the past, to defeat other competition.

But the main takeaway—why Linux succeeded where many operating-system startups and projects failed—is: Too much organization leads to fragility. Too little organization leads to ineffectiveness. But the right level of grassroots, distributed community organizing can become unstoppable.

“I wouldn’t want an L.N.G. terminal next to my home,” he told Forbes in 2005.

7.3

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I decided to look into it further, and spoke to Jerome Hoffman, at UCLA. He was one of the few physicians on an American Heart Association lpanel to evaluate tPA who didn’t take any money from Genentech. Hoffman also happened to be one of the few physicians who voted against promoting tPA for stroke. The study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, but the lead author was funded by Eli Lilly, and the NIH wouldn’t give me the data to look at. So I was already aware of Eli Lilly funding that was promoting Prozac, and when I heard this episode of The Infinite Mind, I immediately realized that they had nobody critiquing Prozac. I thought, “This is just was way too rosy a picture, with absolutely no downside.” I decided to look into the financial conflicts of the speakers on the show and found that they had no one who was really independent.

We had lost nearly the entire launch market to the French, Chinese, and Russians in the late ’90s, and winning back that market share by paying [private US companies] to take cargo and astronauts to the space station was a big economic boom for the nation.

A court in Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, has sent artist Aleksandra Skochilenko to pretrial detention for using price tags in a city store to distribute information about Moscow’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

if you want me to care about your brand, you need to care about my use of your product.

A forthcoming article in the Columbia Law Review by Professors David S. Cohen, Greer Donley, and Rachel Rebouché surveys some of the new abortion “battlegrounds” we can expect to see. In this article they write:

In this post-Roe world, states will attempt to impose their local abortion policies as widely as possible, even across state lines, and will battle one another over these choices; at the same time, the federal government may intervene to thwart state attempts to control abortion law. In other words, the interjurisdictional abortion wars are coming. . . .

The article provides a useful overview of many of the legal issues that will arise in these “interjurisdictional abortion wars,” in which the central legal questions will not concern substantive due process, but the scope of federal preemption, the autonomy of federal lands and enclaves, and the ability of states to limit interstate shipment of abortion medications, constrain interstate travel, or otherwise extraterritorialize their abortion laws. As I noted here, the White House has been consulting with academics to examine some of these questions, and I expect we will see the first rounds of litigation on some of these questions quite soon. Perhaps anticipating some of these issues, it is notable that (as my co-bloggers have noted) Justice Kavanaugh made explicit reference to the constitutional right to interstate travel in his Dobbs concurrence. It may also be notable that Court’s conservative justices tend to split on questions of federal preemption (as we saw in Virginia Uranium v. Warren in 2019).

That was the first White House trip to the county in more than two decades.

But nowhere is the shift more pronounced — and dangerous for Democrats — than in the suburbs, where well-educated swing voters who turned against Trump’s Republican Party in recent years appear to be swinging back. Over the last year, far more people are switching to the GOP across suburban counties from Denver to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Republicans also gained ground in counties around medium-size cities such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Des Moines, Iowa

The foreboding image of an Iron Curtain still suggests darkness and tragedy—but from the standpoint of U.S. strategic interests (as opposed to popular American political aspirations), it was for many years preferable to a united, unaligned Germany playing Washington and Moscow against each other. What Walesa understood was that a reunified Germany would once again see itself as a “bridge” between East and West at just the moment the liberated peoples of the former Warsaw Pact were reaching for the long-awaited prize of self-determination: namely, membership in the West itself. Convinced of their own centrality to the drama, U.S. leaders can’t or won’t understand that many U.S. allies can’t and won’t stake their futures on whatever the American position happens to be at any particular moment—because according to the internal logic of American partisan warfare, that position will be reversed every few years.

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That could add to the frustration that Mitchell and others say employers have with the current health insurance system. More might try to contract with providers directly, only using insurance companies for claims processing. “We saw a lot of hospitals that just decided not to post files or make them difficult to find,” she said.

These allegations were submitted to the board by Jacquelyn Lopez of the Elias Law Group on behalf of the N.C. Democratic Party’s deputy get-out-the-vote director, Michael Abucewicz. The accusations — which include that the Green Party misrepresented itself to get some to sign and that they turned in fraudulent sheets of signatures — can be read here.

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