2.11

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Greens try to flip the script: Blame conservatives, not the Green Deal. ‘The farmers are protesting decades of conservative farming policy,’ one official argued. That case will be a hard sell amid a cacophony of green-bashing.

Bombing is not diplomacy, but politicians like it because it conveys the impression of substantive action. Bombing is neither a strategy nor a simple exercise in virtue signaling. Bombing is an act of war. Bombing does not contain conflict, nor does bombing deter an opponent from future action. If anything, bombing escalates tension and leads to all-out war.

At no time in Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia were American bombings, sea-based operations, or ground incursions truly effective in deterring enemy moves or in preventing more and more destructive war from breaking out. The North Vietnamese simply absorbed the losses and escalated their attacks wherever U.S. forces were weakest on the ground.

These measures of fitness are important because they allow us to make an apples-to-apples comparison of how hard the riders were pushing. The amateur was slower, but was he pushing just as hard relative to his fitness? Not quite—which isn’t surprising, since the pro was racing for his livelihood while the amateur was on vacation, and also since the amateur was spending twice as long on his bike each day. Here’s the distribution of relative time spent in seven different intensity zones:

Even so, the results of consolidation are always the same: less competition and, ultimately, higher prices. And sometimes deteriorating service as well.

There is another alternative and it deals with the way corporations are chartered in the United states. We could go on about this for many pages, but the key points are:
1. The idea of the corporation was invented by the Dutch in 1602 as a way of getting more ships into the water to compete with the larger European countries during the Age of Exporation.
2. The British sorta copied the Dutch idea, blending it with their then old concept of an appointment by the crown to be a supplier to the crown and its ministries. Charters were granted by the king and could be revoked just as easily.

That Protasiewicz was boosted in 2023 by Emily’s List, End Citizens United, and Family Friendly Action PAC is likely to prompt further calls from the GOP for the justice to step away from the Elias Law Group’s motion, which seeks a new congressional map in time for the election this November. Protasiewicz waved away requests from conservatives last year for her to recuse from lawsuits in connection to the state’s GOP-drawn legislative maps, which the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled were unconstitutional in December 2023. Democrats have a 4-3 court majority.

Comparing Large Language Models Against Lawyers

Workers’ posts online and details from a company Q&A session on Friday, as reported by the Verge, paint an ugly picture of the Mountain View tech giant’s current employee-boss relations. Long known as a bastion for innovation and a cushy environment for engineers, Google and its work culture are now getting skewered as overly corporate and generally aimless.

Saudi Arabia has threatened to imprison the bankers and consultants it works with if they cooperate with a probe by US lawmakers into the planned merger of the PGA Tour with LIV Golf.

A similar opportunity exists today in maritime transportation; all we need to do is ignite it. Optimally, the prize should encourage a radical rethinking of maritime transport, including its form factor, materials, power plant, and crewing. The award should also be large enough to attract many entrants and encourage bold thinking. If successful, the outcome of this prize would be;

It is with great sadness that we announce John’s death on Friday, February 2, 2024. He was born in Maryland, USA to William and Bertha Walker, who preceded him in death. John is survived by his wife Roxie Walker and a brother, Bill Walker of West Virginia.

There is a shortage because our lone factory’s maximum capacity is 28,000 units (i.e. 24 ku) per month in the face of Ukraine asking for 600,000 units (600 ku) per month.

A cryptocurrency firm has lost a bid to force BC Hydro to provide the vast amounts of power needed for its operations, upholding the provincial government’s right to pause power connections for new crypto miners.

A woman in Connecticut suddenly began getting mail advertisements for cremation services soon after she completed chemotherapy, according to a startling anecdote in a new report by the state’s attorney general’s office. According to the report, she was added to a marketing list for the cremation company by a data broker. 

Daily Trader Joe’s Price Tracker.

« These men, and they were all men, kept the faith: they continued to assert that communism was a better system, and though it had disintegrated it would win out in the end. ». An interview w Australian author Anna Funder about her 2003 book Stasiland…

What can be anticipated from #Putin’s #interview with. @TuckerCarlson? Understanding the context is crucial. Putin perceives 2024 as a pivotal year, viewing it as a window of opportunity for Russia to potentially shift the dynamics of the war in Ukraine in its favor. He anticipates a temporary gap in Western military support, with ammunition production expected to ramp up only by early 2025. Concurrently, the U.S. election cycle might lead to a less decisive American geopolitical strategy towards supporting Kyiv, and the European Union, facing its own internal disagreements, is unlikely to compensate for this support on its own. Moreover, Ukraine could be grappling with significant internal political challenges, especially with the anticipated resignation of Zaluzhny.

It’s striking how little of my lived experienced “dealing with health issues” over the past four years really shows up in the broad strokes of the data. Though it looks like clinical notes are missing from my EHI export, so that obscures some of the story.

Biden ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer deleted Joe Biden’s audio files after learning about the special counsel probe. Zwonitzer wrote wrote extensively about the Biden family and their work in Ukraine and might’ve accessed (classified?) records. The Biden DOJ is not charging him. More.

In its Form 990, In-Q-Tel makes it clear that it does not disclose its financials to the public, so where does the oversight of In-Q-Tel come from? The 990 states that: “IQT receives regular oversight from the CIA and other client agencies, who keep Congress informed of the company’s activities.”

As economist Alan Blinder said at the 1988 Nobel Prize ceremony, “The ideas here seem obvious with the passage of time. But someone had to think of it first.”

I left my VW Polo at home, hopped on a train and made by way to Central London where I met the legendary car journalist and TV presenter James May in London to discuss what made German cars so ‘nice’, what they mean to people in Germany and around the world and where he thinks this is all headed. A history enthusiast as well as a car man, James is ideally placed to give us a whistle-stop tour of German cars from Benz and Beetle to Trabant and TT. Enjoy!

Robinson is one of the greatest living Christian novelists, by which I don’t just mean that she’s a Christian—though she is an active one—but that her great novels (five so far) and her versatile, morally stringent essays (four collections and a book of lectures, on subjects including Darwinism and the Puritans as well as her own childhood) reflect a deep knowledge and love of Christianity. Robinson, who has taught Bible classes and preached at her church in Iowa City, Iowa, is a learned lay theologian of the Calvinist variety. In many of her essays and particularly in Gilead, she makes us aware of a John Calvin who does not at all conform to his reputation as a dour ascetic.

With cloud costs and complexity higher than expected, many enterprises are making a U-turn and putting applications and data back in traditional systems.

Let’s start off by reminding everyone that Elena did not come through qualifying, nor did she appear out of nowhere to win her Wimbledon title. She has been one of the WTA tour’s most promising prospects for the last few years. She’s had a slow and steady climb up the rankings and reached the upper echelon of tennis without the backing of the Russian government (she was born in Moscow). In 2020, right before the pandemic hit, Elena made 4 finals in less than 2 months and was on the fast track to the top 10. She was actually set to reach a career-high ranking of number 5 in the world, but the rankings froze because of Covid. She had a difficult time finding her sparkling form again once the tour resumed.

2.4

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Sales and use tax rates change on a monthly basis. This chart is for informational purposes only. Specific questions should be addressed to your tax advisor. Rate information is gathered from various State Department of Revenue materials and various rate providers including Thomson Reuters and Vertex, Inc.

Nothing in Going Infinite is subtle. Lewis deals us heavy-handed metaphors, endless cliches, and contrived plot devices. Sam’s lair is the Dragon’s Hoard, lifted from his favorite video game Storybook Brawl. The entire architecture of the FTX offices is designed around a $250,000 tungsten cube?—?which then goes missing. Sam’s stuffed animal Manfred represents his need for emotional attachment.

Finally, amid all of this, Apple is also ramping up its in-house personal finance efforts to reduce reliance on third parties like Goldman Sachs. Internally, this is called “Project Breakout” and would bring things like lending, fraud analysis, and credit checks in-house.

Their mentor’s playbook relies on threats, playing one set of stakeholders against the others, to win concessions from all. Asking Calhoun to make peace with his unionized workforce may be simply too much to ask.

As more shopping is done online, experts say consumers are now looking for retail that is close to the road and fast to get in and out of. Shoppers who seek out strip malls are hyper-local and loyal customers — “the regulars.”

Kaiser Permanente, Oakland’s largest private employer, has issued a memo directing workers in downtown Oakland to stay in their buildings for lunch and work, in response to street robberies of workers who went out to grab something to eat. Workers are told to bring their own food or have it delivered.

As they collect and analyze massive amounts of genetic sequences from plants, animals, and microbes, biologists keep encountering surprises, including some that may challenge the very definition of life. The latest, reported this week in a preprint, is a new kind of viruslike entity that inhabits bacteria dwelling in the human mouth and gut. These “obelisks,” as they’re called by the Stanford University team that unearthed them, have genomes seemingly composed of loops of RNA and sequences belonging to them have been found around the world.

What happens when environmentalists and sympathetic lawmakers fail to see the downside of too much legal review

Wisconsin Retirement System benefits are based on your 3 highest years of pay, your years of service and age. As a judge, Lena Taylor will make $164,000 a year – up big from $57,000. I wonder how much extra she will get in retirement thanks to Evers?

But some neighbors opposed the project because it eliminated the former commercial use and was too tall for its setting, could cause traffic safety hazards and more. They appealed the commission’s decision to the City Council. In May 2022, the council voted 17-0 with two abstentions to uphold the commission’s decision. Then, five residents filed a challenge in Dane County Circuit Court. It contends the city erred in allowing the project to exceed the maximum number of housing units because it’s not a functional “mixed-use” building envisioned by ordinance; failed to enforce a zoning regulation that requires commercial block buildings to locate parking behind or on the side of the structure; failed to enforce a prohibition against blank walls facing a public street; and failed to enforce a zoning regulation requiring commercial storefront for a minimum 40% of the facade.

“one can say that Boeing held $40bn in funds from airlines and it cost them $10bn in borrowing costs to do so.”

“And that’s when I met Rob LoBreglio, the brewmaster for Great Dane [and a co-founder], and get to talking and telling him about this idea that I want to do,” Dawson says. “And he’s like, ‘I’ve had this idea for 30 years. I want to do it. I’m happy to help you. Let’s work together.’”

Pretend you are a banked individual, which in the U.S. context means that you have a checking account in your own name trivially available to you. You are handed a physical check. You would prefer to have money. What do you do?

Each facility’s Epic (the dominant EHR) has a distinct interface. Painstakingly built menus, phrases and unique shortcuts developed in one context cannot transfer to another. Orders have different names and codes. Muscle memory is useless. (In contrast, the VA’s 1983 VistA designers, knowing clinicians rotate through services, focused on only two goals: patient care and rapid adaptability). It is time-consuming and none of this is actual patient care.

More solar energy powered Texas than ever before on Sunday morning, with over one third of the electricity running on the state’s power grid coming from the sun. Experts say it’s a Texas record that’s not expected to last very long.

Deere confirmed at CES 2024 that the See & Spray software-as-a-service (SaaS) pricing model will vary by customer but said it is currently charging $4 per acre in the test run with corn growers, according to analysts at J.P. Morgan, in a Jan. 11 note to investors. See & Spray tech has been used on 1 million acres so far, saving 8 million gallons of chemicals.

The San Francisco of my youth was full of small shops whose friendly eccentricity felt like part of the place. Some of them still exist but they’re rarer now. Many had old photographs of the business or the neighbourhood, some had artefacts of the past or pieces of the owner’s art. The little liquor and grocery store in my old neighbourhood had a wall of pictures of locals attending its annual barbecue and a ledger in which the proprietor recorded transactions with elderly locals who bought their groceries on credit and paid up at the end of the month. The exchanges between people who knew one another were non-commodities these small businesses offered along with whatever was for sale.

“You cannot change demand for energy by destroying supply,” it wrote. “If the United States did indeed curtail LNG exports, it would just drive customers into the arms of competitors such as Australia, Qatar, Algeria, and, yes, Russia. Quite possibly, some potential customers would choose to meet their needs with coal instead.”

I think it’s the other way around. Apple is taking us into the future, into a new era of computing. Some of us are running as fast as we can to get there, and others are being dragged, kicking and screaming. But we’re all going. We’re going to the moon, and we’re going to look around at the ghostly luminescence of ancient dust under a black, star-studded sky, and we’ll just know that this is the future of computing and entertainment and apps and memories, and that this apparatus wrapped around our head will change everything.

I thought most of us were going to die from the climate crisis. I was wrong.

In funds provided by the State Department and U.S.-backed United Nations outlets, religious-based and other humanitarian groups are paving “migration trails” with cold cash and free “loans” to help ease the hardships immigrants face as they head to the border, like over 300,000 did in December.

In her remarks at the Hyatt in Minneapolis, Omar also spoke of the return of “missing territory” to Somalia in an apparent nod to the push to unite ethnic Somalis across the Horn of Africa, including those living in land controlled by Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya. Asked if she was calling for Somalia to gain control over those lands, Omar said, “no.”

That’s right, I’m not adding menus and controls willy nilly. It’s not that kind of camera. It’s Quality with Convenience. If you want some “menu like” things, check out what the app can do. It’s where any added camera features would appear.

Taylor, Travis, And Taxes: Addressing The Environmental Cost Of Private Jet Travel

To worship at the altar of mega-scale and to convince yourself that you should be the one making world-historic decisions on behalf of a global citizenry that did not elect you and may not share your values or lack thereof, you have to dispense with numerous inconveniences—humility and nuance among them. Many titans of Silicon Valley have made these trade-offs repeatedly. YouTube (owned by Google), Instagram (owned by Meta), and Twitter (which Elon Musk insists on calling X) have been as damaging to individual rights, civil society, and global democracy as Facebook was and is. Considering the way that generative AI is now being developed throughout Silicon Valley, we should brace for that damage to be multiplied many times over in the years ahead.

“There was a time when compact equipment didn’t exist,” notes the history section of construction equipment manufacturer Bobcat. “Machinery only came in one size: Big. If you were trying to tackle a tough job in a small space, your only choice was a shovel and a wheelbarrow. There wasn’t anything that was both compact and powerful.”

The first presentation of the FL Grand Jury investigating COVID. Note: they state they aren’t finished yet. I will offer perspective and thoughts once I’ve read this.

Phil Connors finds meaning, real meaning, next-level amor fati meaning, in a little garden of a town, a kind of Brigadoon outside of time and space. He finds meaning not by changing everyone around him but by helping them be and do the things they want to do. Connors is not some Nietzschean ubermensch who imposes his will on others or overthrow conventional morality. He doesn’t redefine or remake Punxsutawney. He learns to love Punxsutawney for what it is. He doesn’t revolutionize traditional morality, he embraces it. Which is why, at the end of the movie, he decides he wants to live there.

What the heck, I’ll just do a quick thread to open-source what few people know but don’t want to admit: How this op often gets run in Washington. (thread on how to “work” the current system in DC)

Japan will create the system to accept “digital nomads” who can work from anywhere they happen to be, envisaging that it will attract, among others, workers and owners of consulting companies abroad and YouTubers earning advertising fees from overseas companies.

Redistricting reformers have proposed many solutions to the problem of partisan gerrymandering, but they all require either bipartisan consensus or the agreement of both parties on the legitimacy of a neutral third party to resolve disputes. In this paper, we propose a new method for drawing district maps, the Define–Combine Procedure, that substantially reduces partisan gerrymandering without requiring a neutral third party or bipartisan agreement. One party defines a map of 2N equal-population contiguous districts. Then the second party combines pairs of contiguous districts to create the final map of N districts. Using real-world geographic and electoral data, we employ simulations and map-drawing algorithms to show that this procedure dramatically reduces the advantage conferred to the party controlling the redistricting process and leads to less-biased maps without requiring cooperation or non-partisan actors.

The West’s humiliating electric car climbdown has begun. Ambitious plans for an electrification-led industrial revolution are in full-scale retreat.

Google’s CEO faces employee questions about layoffs / At this week’s all-hands meeting,

“We are partisan D” Investing in Us’ Dmitri Mehlhorn (Reid Hoffman): “Tech and America’s $30bn election year”. Related “fiscal indulgences”.

I’d never seen this until @AlexLuck9 posted it: Tom Clancy giving a talk on the writing of The Hunt for Red October at the National Security Agency in 1986. Just him on a stage for three quarters of an hour, being very entertaining and interesting. youtu.be/VS54M5Mqa9M?si…

Here’s what he says: I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one. This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius.

Minnesota coach Bob Motzko didn’t shy away from offering an opinion. “They’re both goals,” he told The Rink Live, adding in a second-period review that went against his team. “I mean, c’mon, everybody in hockey knows that they’re both goals. It’s too bad.”

Keurig Dr. Pepper workers vote out Teamsters union at three Wisconsin facilities

1.28

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“I cannot see how Boeing can continue like this,” said longtime industry expert Adam Pilarksi, of aviation consulting firm Avitas. “They are getting killed.”

Meanwhile, Acts 29 itself has struggled with pastors in the network breaking off in a variety of different cultural and theological directions with some going more progressive while others have taken a reactionary conservative turn.

The marketing departments of the camera companies long ago lost the thread on all this. Japanese continuous iteration engineering will always extract a little more with each generation of product. They’ve been doing that most of my life now in tech, and I don’t see them stopping. However, the first few generation gains are the most dramatic, and once we’re in the tenth or later iteration, the gains are so minimal that the marketing teams can’t even see them, let alone describe them.

Why did this happen again? There is no doubt that as the suppliers of flawed technology, Fujitsu have a case to answer. During my time in government, it was made clear to me that they and the Post Office would be following the same playbook they always had, regardless of how often that had been shown up as inadequate. They had no interest in embracing the new ways of working GDS was advocating for. -and- no more “big IT failures”.

The “stuff” that is CES are all the products and technologies that influence everything that gets built. Stuff that looks silly today might very well vanish, but even if it does it will influence the stuff that shows up and transforms the world. There was an incredible timeline of CES on the wall from LVCC to the Westgate hotel illustrating “stuff” from every year of CES (it was too difficult to photograph). Likewise, the IEEE (yes that one) had an exhibit of long but forgotten gadgets from decades past, even voting on which one should be erased from our memories. In reality as silly as some of these look today, such as the laser disc player or cable TV tuners, each were just part of “gadgets and stuff” that came in past years. If you ever want to wind me up, then say there was nothing transformative at CES.

Altogether, this illustrates the fact that it’s not common for our sweet receptors to get activated by small calorieless molecules, and chemists must have eaten a lot of weird things to find the synthetic sweeteners we currently use. This is when things get out of control.

…and so on! The remaining bytes yourself are for you to practice on. You can stop when you’ve read the number of characters indicated by the length field previously.

It’s the second time Boeing turned to an admiral in connection with 737 MAX crises.

This middle class, however, is feeling less sure these days, as the economy keeps getting whacked. The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things. Are housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving many of them to default and triggering a collapse in the confidence of homebuyers hasn’t improved matters. Does big tech have too much power? Fine, but taking the scalps of entrepreneurs and stomping out their businesses isn’t boosting confidence. Does the government need to rein in official corruption? Definitely, but terrorizing the bureaucracy has also made the policymaking apparatus more paralyzed and risk averse. It’s starting to feel like the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.

Other times, you might want to ask more complex questions about what you see. Let’s say you’re browsing social media and come across an image of a delicious corn dog with some unique toppings. You’ve been seeing a lot of these online and are curious to learn more.

The Boeing inspector recorded in CMES that the repair was not done properly, that the Spirit team “just painted over the defects.” As a result, the repair job was reopened. Looking at it anew, the Spirit mechanics then discovered that, in addition to the problematic rivets, the pressure seal sandwiched between the plug and the airframe was damaged and needed replaced. “The big deal with this seal,” the whistleblower wrote, was that the replacement part was not on hand in Renton and needed to be ordered, which could threaten to delay the jet’s delivery schedule.

To think about Apple’s commercial, one really has think about the context of the start of the year 1984. The Orwellian dialog was omnipresent. Of course as freshman in college we had just finished our obligatory compare/contrast the dystopian messages in Animal Farm, Brave New World, and 1984 not to mention the Cold War as front and center dialog at every turn. The country emerging from recession gave us all a contrasting optimism.

“The U.S. Constitution foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats.”

Jen O’Malley Dillon, the new campaign manager for President Biden’s 2024 reelect, previously worked as a consultant to Bill Gates’s VC arm and Mark Zuckerberg’s personal charity foundation. Here’s her disclosure from her work during 2020.

This sobering letter from former FBI, Homeland Security, and other law enforcement officials describes the chilling reality of why @POTUS’s open border is a clear and present danger to America.

Publishers: Ditch Google search addiction or die
Google’s switch to generative AI-written search results could send many publishers out of business.

10 of 10. The DEM maps disenfranchise between 600,000 and 751,000 citizens. By contrast, the courts in ’92 and ’02 kept disenfranchisement below 260,000. In an earlier case, Justice Dallet said that true neutrality requires that the effect of disenfranchisement is kept minimal.

Last year the US surpassed Qatar and Australia to become the world’s leading supplier of LNG, which is natural gas supercooled and condensed so that it can be economically carried on ships. Its seven operating terminals can produce as much as 87mn tonnes a year — enough to satisfy the combined gas needs of Germany and France.

“This is a worst-case scenario, which is currently trapping thousands of well-healed residents who took out large mortgages,” says one Chicagoland residential real estate investor. “Northside condos appear to be taking the biggest hit,” he observes.

Our aim is to expand the universe of ideas that policymakers can consider to restructure the airline industry. We offer a set of policies that take seriously the problems in the industry and are designed to address them. These policies fall into four categories:

(1) Resilience, Competition, and Geographic Access

(2) Fair and Transparent Pricing

(3) Protecting Passengers and Ensuring Safety

(4) Oversight and Enforcement.

In each of these areas, we offer concrete proposals for how policymakers can improve the flying experience for passengers, workers, communities, and the country.

“but that’s because they’ve pulled in men from those groups who respect strength and are repelled by victimology”

Their business model seems pretty focused also. Flying to lots of smaller regional airports with quick turnaround times – so high utilisation rates, flights from 0600-0100, loads of auxiliary revenue, lots of advertising paid for by the destination and the airport operator owns the risk of flight delays – so if a flight gets delayed due to an airports ground handling turnaround time being missed, Ryanair will get a rebate which it doesn’t have to pass on to passengers?
I really don’t see U2 being so focused as FR.

The wealthiest American cities in 1949.

It was the inspiration for Emeryville-based Pixar’s hit movie “Toy Story.” “After 75 years of gratefully serving the San Francisco community, the store will be closing next month. The store has been struggling for a number of years, due to the perils and violence of the downtown environment, inflation, the decrease in consumer spending and the demise of retail across the world. The family is saddened it has come to this and we’ve explored all other options to try and keep the business going. The leadership of the City of San Francisco and the Downtown Association have their work cut out for them on how to revitalize what was once a vibrant and fun downtown experience,” said Ken Sterling of Sterling Venture Law, attorney for the family. “We are working through this complex situation with the landlords and creditors and at this time, I’ve advised my clients to not be interviewed by the press.”

Complexity, Quality and “out of the crisis”

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I recently recommended Deming’s book: “out of the crisis” to a friend.

The Boeing mess offers a front row seat:

The Boeing inspector recorded in CMES that the repair was not done properly, that the Spirit team “just painted over the defects.” As a result, the repair job was reopened. Looking at it anew, the Spirit mechanics then discovered that, in addition to the problematic rivets, the pressure seal sandwiched between the plug and the airframe was damaged and needed replaced. “The big deal with this seal,” the whistleblower wrote, was that the replacement part was not on hand in Renton and needed to be ordered, which could threaten to delay the jet’s delivery schedule.

Well worth reading!

Bonus: Deceased Boeing Engineer Joe Sutter’s book is worth a deep dive as well.

And:

For years, Boeing management was accused of focusing on money rather than products, performance or people. Between 2014 and 2018, it gave away $53 billion in dividends and buybacks. But that shareholder focus no longer works. Boeingis the only large-cap aerospace company in the world with a flat share price throughout the remarkable demand surge the industry has seen over the last three years.

1.21

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By analyzing data on tens of thousands of people across four continents compiled between 15 existing studies, a team of researchers has landed on a more comfortable figure: the optimal number is probably closer to 6,000 steps per day, depending on your age.

The foulest thing about the weekend wasn’t the miserable weather, but rather Bears fans’ collective mood after watching Love go from promising first-year starter to budding superstar in a 48-32 dismantling of the Cowboys.

The anti-inflammatory effect of exercise was much greater than most people had expected. That raised another question: whether inflammation might also play a dominant role in other lifestyle illnesses that have been linked to cardiovascular disease, such as diabetes and dementia.

Boeing’s Legacy Vanished Into Thin Air. Saving It Will Take Years

Chrome Users Now Worth 30% Less Money Thanks to Google’s Cookie Killing, Ad Firm Says

Scott’s dad had a couple of rules when collecting hats. They had to have a patch on them or an advertisement, they couldn’t be plain, and they couldn’t have any dirty sayings, Legried says.

With McCarthy, it was essentially the same. Running back Ryan Grant compared the dynamic on those Packers offenses to mankind’s relationship with artificial intelligence in my ‘19 B/R story: “When you put a quarterback in a position and you talk about how cerebral he is and you give him flexibility to make some changes, guess what? … You develop A.I., because it has the capacity to run without you. And then when it runs without you, it’s like, ‘Wait a minute!’ But in the same breath, if you’re not actually able to stay ahead of it, it’s going to outthink you and it’s going to say, ‘Me making the decision is the better decision.’”

In fact, back in August 2016, the Texanist, apparently weary of the unwavering heat, went off on the perpetrators of what he considered to be an exceptionally infernal utilization of the heat index. “Hey, meteorologists!” he wrote. “Enough with the damn heat index! ‘And we’re looking at a high of 101 degrees, but with the heat index it will feel more like 118.’ That’s like saying, ‘It’s going to be hotter than two rats making whoopee in a wool sock, but it will feel hotter than the devil’s nether regions.’ Or the other way around. Either way, it’s completely unnecessary. It’s hot. Can we just leave it at that?”

How to eliminate a political opponent. Here are 20 classic tricks. 1. Arrest & prosecute them.

It’s bad enough when people fail to consider events that obviously could happen but haven’t. But it’s even worse when people fail to consider events that have happened hundreds of times, treating each new instance as if it demands a massive update.

A self-styled glaciologist, Rabot undertook four expeditions to the Arctic in his lifetime; when he wasn’t voyaging to polar climes, he was writing about them in his capacity as editor of the journal La géographie or advising the likes of the prince of Monaco on their own itineraries. His written accounts theatrically capture the difficulty of life in these harsh climates, as in a description of the struggles of providing medical care in rural Scandinavia:

“Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.” That creates a problem as the software slows down despite the hardware’s improved processing power.

In Madison, other workers currently waiting for contracts include game testers at Middleton video game studio Raven Software, who voted in a union in May 2022; seamstresses and screenprinters at custom clothing company Crushin’ It Apparel, whose votes were tallied in November 2022, and bakers and bread sellers at Madison Sourdough Company, who voted in a union last April. Hundreds of office workers at Madison-based financial services company TruStage, who went on strike in May for the first time since unionizing in the 1940s, finally ratified a new contract in December after close to two years of negotiations – likely the longest lag in the company’s history.

A new report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office warns that loss of state fuel tax revenues could have dire consequences for the upkeep of roadways. Taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel now total about $14.2 billion a year. More than $4 billion annually could disappear by 2035, when the state’s ban on the sale of new fossil fuel cars takes full effect.

Red Ventures has been quietly approaching strategic buyers, mostly other large media holding firms, for several months to gauge their interest in CNET, but talks began to ramp up before the holidays, sources told Axios.

Google search really has been taken over by low-quality SEO spam, according to a new, year-long study by German researchers.

The researchers, from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, set out to answer the question “Is Google Getting Worse?” by studying search results for 7,392 product-review terms across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo over the course of a year.

They found that, overall, “higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality … we find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do.”

Chip and Joanna’s New Hotel Is Just One Reason to Visit Waco. The latest Gaines project, Hotel 1928, beckons Magnolia fans with its on-brand decor, thoughtful touches, and excellent location.

The Eagle Ford still produces more than a million barrels of oil (mmb/d) and 5 billion cubic feet of gas per day so that’s the first thing to expect about the future Permian. Plays don’t crash and burn but follow an undulating path downward over years or decades.

One should never underestimate the Houthis. They don’t fear disrespect.

I paged through, stopped and smiled when I saw it. There it was, the innocuous phrase that hid an $800 million secret: “expediting production.”

“Courtesy cards,” are cards given out by the NYC police union (and presumably elsewhere) to friends and family who use them to get easy treatment if they are pulled over by a cop. I was stunned when I first wrote about these cards in 2018. I thought this was common only in tinpot dictatorships and flailing states. The cards even come in levels, gold, silver and bronze!

“You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not jokin’.”

These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn’t been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself. Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafes had all drifted toward the same end point. The sheer expanse of sameness was too shocking and new to be boring.

The state’s current approach to valuing farmland amounts to a sort of double discount: the first is well understood and the second is unknown even to some experts. This approach is notable, especially in the context of the current housing affordability challenges facing many Wisconsin communities, since it puts more of the cost of government services onto residential and commercial property owners. The current approach may also distort to some extent both market values for agricultural land and state aid to school districts.

As Molly White said, “there are never purely technological solutions to societal problems”. To fight surveillance capitalism, we need E2EE, regulation, justice, and education.

One of my dreams is to someday convince the State Legislature to teach the curriculum they teach us prisoners, in elementary school, that people like me can learn it better without having to go to prison to learn it, I’m try my to convince some people to pitch it to legislators—if any one would like to help with that please let me know. It will help with more than just avoiding prison—it will help with all relationship conflicts, and who does not have those…? The prison parenting class should be taught in High School too…[page 23 follows]

Steep drop in electric sales in Germany was main factor in sending EU sales down for the first time in 16 months

The emergence of the New America is not just a move to red states but includes population shifts within blue states. In California, San Francisco and Los Angeles may be experiencing declines, but outlying areas such as the San Joaquin Valley and the Inland Empire continue to grow, a trend expected to continue for the next several decades.

Some of the world’s most important breakthroughs have come out of Bell Labs, including the first transistor, the laser, radio astronomy, the dawn of cellular and satellite communications and the beginnings of artificial intelligence. Bell Labs was also the birthplace of the UNIX computer operating system, C++ and numerous programming languages.

The perverse fisheries consequences of mosquito net malaria prophylaxis in East Africa

“Brilliant young female Czech player fatigue”.

If the proposal passes, which would still need to be approved by both chambers of the Legislature in the upcoming budget session, it gives legislative direction to the State Board of Land Commissioners to dispose of the Kelly Parcel directly to the federal Department of the Interior.

Same campaign stop 3 years later. That’s a 28% increase.

From new AI combating self-checkout shrink to digital shelf systems, vendors unveiled grocery innovations and new retailer tie-ups at the annual conference in New York. Here are some of the top ones.

“The fact that the Beltline is totally dry and surrounding jurisdictions have clear main streets is evidence that Madison could also have clearer main streets.”



University of Florida Pushes Back on Offer of Academic Credit for Pronoun Listing

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Jonathan Turley:

There is an interesting controversy brewing at the University of Florida after Professor Autumn McLellan offered academic credit for those who list their pronouns in class. The University has pushed back that “pronoun policing” is not a valid basis for academic credit.

The controversy arose after conservative groupsand sites reported on the offer.

Professor McLellan sent out a notice to class that:

“Guessing or assuming a person’s pronouns can lead to uncomfortable and unwelcoming environments. Displaying your pronouns helps others know how to address you respectfully, even if you feel like your pronouns should be ‘obvious’ to other people.”

McLellan teaches sociology and criminology with stated interests “Collective Action/Social Movements” and “Stratification/Inequality.”

Many faculty and students object to requirements or pressure to use alternative pronouns on political, religious, or biological grounds.

The University itself was quick to push back.

1.14

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The hero of Walt Disney’s ‘Steamboat Willie’ has entered the public domain but others deserve their freedom, too

In late 2011 a fresh-faced Elon Musk could not contain a chuckle at the idea that Tesla could ever be challenged by Chinese carmaker BYD: “Have you seen their car?” “I don’t think it is particularly attractive,” he explained on television then. “The technology is not very strong. And BYD, as a company, has pretty severe problems on their home turf.” A decade on, the Shenzhen-based company led by Wang Chuanfu has claimed Tesla’s crown as the biggest producer of battery-powered cars. In the fourth quarter of 2023, BYD, which was founded in 1995 and counts Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway as a shareholder, sold a record 526,000 battery-only EVs to Tesla’s 484,000.

The ruling sets a precedent for future cases involving Indigenous land rights and resource extraction.

Understanding how many people are involved in the creation of a robust Production System and its surveillance program, we finally get to ask the pointy questions.

Why it matters: Their differing approaches to the first contest of the 2024 primary season — the intensity of their campaigning, their number of public events and the communities they’ve targeted — shed light on how each candidate views Iowa, and their strategies for moving forward.

So how does Boeing build back its credibility with both the airlines and the flying public? “I think that will take showing integrity,” Robison said. “Part of the reason that Boeing struggled so much with the MAX crisis was that there were multiple moments when it was found to be saying things that weren’t true. There was a moment I described in the book where Boeing was claiming after the first crash that it was maintenance errors. But pilots in America knew that was not the case. Boeing, both in public and behind closed doors, needs to show absolute integrity.”

In 2008, a Dutchman played a crucial role in the United States and Israeli-led operation to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. The then 36-year-old Erik van Sabben infiltrated an Iranian nuclear complex and released the infamous Stuxnet virus, paralyzing the country’s nuclear program. The AIVD recruited the man, but Dutch politicians knew nothing about the operation, the Volkskrant reports after investigating the sabotage for two years.

But here is the main point: those © symbols on UK museum websites and catalogues are now redundant if the original artwork is itself out of copyright. There is no reason not to use these images for free (and nobody would argue against paying for new images, if needed). The National Gallery marks images “© National Gallery”, and in its terms and conditions forbids reproduction unless “expressly permitted under copyright law”. But since there is no copyright, reproduction is indeed permitted (expressly or otherwise, there is no distinction). No major UK museum has taken anyone to court over copyright of such images, and no sensible trustee will let them now.

Third, the high-density deployment of the Starlink project poses a serious threat to the security of space assets of various countries and affects the normal operation of satellites from other nations. In addition, the Starshield satellites can undertake suicide missions against space vehicles and carry weapon payloads for space strike missions, which poses a threat to space security.

Scale versus scope in the diffusion of new technology: evidence from the farm tractor.

Love how this just omits the entire Obama presidency.

To summarize, Michelle Mbekeani, who is the head of the Cook County state’s attorney’s office Conviction Review Unit, also appears to run a for-profit company, known as Period, that links inmates with wrongful conviction claims with private attorneys.

Our boat was permanently moored there on account of its being about to sink: it leaned heavily to the starboard, and I had to rig up a plastic chute around the bed to catch the unnervingly treacle-coloured leaks. In winter it was a little less well insulated than a cardboard box and the electric wiring around the hull was worryingly exposed. We were eventually evicted because the boat was rightfully condemned.

“The performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers,” Hart-Smith wrote. “These costs do not vanish merely because the work itself is out-of-sight.” 

1.7

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After two decades of paying as little as $200 an acre for farms across the plains of Kansas and Colorado, he now wants to rent all his farmland back to local farmers. If all goes as planned he will stop farming on roughly 130,000 acres in eastern Colorado and western Kansas, and let other farmers grow grain to store in his Weskan Grain elevator at Sheridan Lake near the Kansas border. “Because I can see that the farmer is affected by me making money off the land,” he says, noting how the price of acres has appreciated exponentially since he first began buying farms “and that’s money farmers could have made.”

Instead, implementing a knowledge graph as the background structure for a documentation site, with clear guidance about how to connect the nodes of the graph, has the potential to improve search results for readers and allow flexible categorization for writers.

Some of you may have been following our advent-style countdown calendar which revealed day-by-day through December our highlights for these new public domain entrants. The last window was opened yesterday, and while such a format was fun for the slow reveal, for the sake of a good gorgeable list we’ve exploded the calendar out into a digestible array below. Enjoy!

ASML Holding NV canceled shipments of some of its machines to China at the request of US President Joe Biden’s administration, weeks before export bans on the high-end chipmaking equipment came into effect, people familiar with the matter said. More.

The achievements of Tesla are even more incredible when contrasted with the continued struggle of legacy automotive manufacturers to ship a compelling electric car, or even stay out of bankruptcy. At the very end of 2023, it is telling that no other company has yet managed to ship a profitable car with better performance than the very first 2012 Tesla Model S. There are now several non-Tesla electric cars of comparable performance that are sold at a steep loss and/or at achingly low volumes.

The Harvard story covers the total systemic rot in every corner of the Left. It wasn’t “journalists” at big-ticket Gatekeeper of Truth media orgs that exposed the malfeasance, it was outsiders. Big media journalists fought to bury the story and are STILL trying to spin it.

The logistics of digital nomads can be challenging.

Hazards of mouth pipetting.

Our new analysis examines trends driving politics & policy: 10 takeaways from 2023, and 10 look-aheads for 2024. Bottom line: The biggest challenge today is lack of trust… in leaders, in institutions, in America. 2024 may test us in ways even 2020 did not.

Each consultant will be paid an hourly rate of $450, up to $100,000 total, but the state director of courts has the authority to exceed the maximum amount if she determines it is necessary, according to the contracts.

The suspect who left pipe bombs in Capitol Hill the night before Jan. 6 has still not been caught. Three years later, the Justice Department isn’t even taking questions about the investigation. What happened?

Philadelphia Police Department’s first DEI officer is fired

The Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Law Institute (ELI) created the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) in 2018, establishing a first-of-its-kind resource to provide “reliable, up-to-date information” about climate change litigation, according to the group. The project’s reach has extended to various state and federal courts, including powerful appellate courts, and comes as various cities and states pursue high-profile litigation against the oil industry.

On Christmas Eve, just before the deadline for public input on the proposed MAX 7 exemption, the Foundation for Aviation Safety — a lobbying group set up by former Boeing manager and whistleblower Ed Pierson following the two deadly MAX crashes — filed a submission calling on the FAA not to certify the airplane until Boeing fixes the safety defect.

“The report compared the FBI and Justice Department’s voracious investigation of Trump’s connections with Russia, to its allegedly lackluster approach to its Clinton probes ‘tippy-toeing’ around the former Secretary of State.”

His business in a snapshot:

5 BHPH dealerships
3,600 units sold per year
10,000 customer accounts serviced
$19K average sales price
$500/month avg customer payment
19.9% avg customer financing APR
40% of customers default on loan

What questions do you have?

There is no “Ingravescentem Aetatem” for American politics. The term “gerontocracy” was coined in 1828 by Jean-Jacques Fazy, a Swiss republican, in the title of his book De la gérontocratie. He jeered that, in political terms, “France has been reduced to seven to eight thousand eligible individuals, asthmatic, gouty, paralytic, impaired, and only aspiring to rest.” In the contemporary US, the gerontocracy seems even more exclusive and its membership even older than the one that was swept away in France by the July Revolution of 1830.

Manhattan is also close to the water. Why hasn’t the Sulzberger New York Times Company made plans to move?

She said that Wing deliveries typically take under 30 minutes, and have reached their destination in as fast as three minutes.

CJR admitted Russiagate was fake. Which means Democrats spent four years publishing false stories about a debunked conspiracy theory of 2016 Russian election fraud. The impeachment was fake. The Pulitzers were fake. It was all fake. Agree?

On July 29, a United plane was nearly totaled after a hard landing. Who was flying that aircraft? Was the co-pilot a former flight attendant who was FIRED and then rehired through United’s DEI program despite being on a list to not return to United?

The lawsuit argues that, based on prior incidents involving Lt. Byrd, the Capitol Police, Capitol Police Board, and ultimately Congress, as Lt. Byrd’s employer, “knew or should have known that Lt. Byrd was prone to behave in a dangerous or otherwise incompetent manner:”

ULA had tried to kill the baby. When SpaceX sought a launch site for its Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral in 2007, the parents lobbied the Air Force brass hard to stop the lease of Space Launch Complex-40 to Elon Musk and his rocket company. But the commander of the 45th Space Wing with oversight of Cape Canaveral, Gen. Susan Helms, approved the lease anyway. Since then, ULA and SpaceX have been uneasy bedfellows in Florida, working side by side at nearby launch pads. Some of the rivalry was good-natured. Every week, for a while, engineers from SpaceX and ULA would meet up at Hogan’s Irish Bar in Cape Canaveral for trivia night. They would vie for nerd supremacy, drinking Guinness and blowing off steam.

“No one can match BYD on price. Period,” says Michael Dunne, chief executive of Asia-focused car consultancy Dunne Insights. “Boardrooms in America, Europe, Korea and Japan are in a state of shock.” While the US government has responded with a slew of subsidies to encourage domestic manufacturing, the prospect of millions of low-cost, high-tech cars made by Chinese companies hitting European shores poses a dilemma for lawmakers there.

Just about a week after signing a controversial contract with the UK’s national health service, Palantir Technologies Inc. launched an influencer marketing campaign to counter criticism of the patient data platform it’s building, potentially breaching terms of the deal.

Additional notes on 1302 Midvale

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A few additional comments:

1. I don’t think any construction should happen at 1302 Midvale in the absence of an attractive plan for the Midvale/12-18 intersection. Cart before the horse. I know what that means with respect to a schedule.

However….

This is an opportunity to raise the design bar vis a vis our endless, more of the same rectangles simply designed to expand the tax base. Further, compare 1302’s proposed height and aesthetics to the Sequoya Library building.

2. I find current, nearby property assessments rather curious, placing large values on the buildings (really?) vis a vis the land.

3. Summarize the issues. I appreciate the long narratives that have been shared via email and social. I suggest consolidating them along with a succinct intro on a blog/www site, with a brief, easily shared domain.

4. Get the word out: share a QR code/link via postcards with the surrounding neighborhood.

5. With respect to the developer, entrepreneur Sam Jacobsen (PDQ, Bishops Bay) had a son named Jeff. Perhaps there is a relationship.

Photos and aerial vr scenes, here.

12.31

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Beginning January 1, 2024, T-Mobile is instituting three new fees for non-compliant traffic that result in a Severity-0 violation. A Sev-0, (Severity-0) represents the most harmful violation to consumers and is the highest level of escalation with which a carrier will engage with Bandwidth. This applies across all products (SMS or MMS, Short Code, Toll-Free, and 10DLC) that traverse T-Mobile’s network.

A potential labelling error was the latest in a series of concerns for the American Chestnut Foundation, driving the nonprofit to pull support for a genetically engineered tree meant resurrect an iconic American species.

An independent panel has been investigating Daihatsu after it said in April it had rigged side-collision safety tests carried out for 88,000 small cars, most of which were sold under the Toyota brand.

According to food scientists, it’s probably not in people’s heads. “There do tend to be differences,” says Greg Ziegler, a professor of food science at Pennsylvania State University who specialises in chocolate. But there’s nothing all that surprising about that. Geographically, tastes vary quite a bit, and food companies are in the business of satisfying them. “A lot of what you like depends on what you were exposed to growing up,” says Ziegler. It would be more unexpected if chocolate was the same everywhere. And anyone who has travelled will know this well – the same big-brand chocolate bar you can pick up in the UK might taste different in the US, Australia and Asia, even if the packaging remains the same.

Along with those few photos of a bearded Petrov, the park’s visitor center displays biographical information that gives his full name as Petrov (also Petro or Petroff) Zailenko, a man who was possibly born in 1914, and “is believed to have been a soldier for the Russian Army who was wounded and captured by the Nazis in World War II, (then possibly came to the United States) as a displaced person from a concentration camp.”

Beginning programmers are taught about linked lists — where every element in the list contains not only a value, but also the location for the next and previous elements. Knuth helped popularize a way of moving through those elementswhere “it just seems that these numbers in the computer are following an elegantly-choreographed dance, and so that’s why I call it dancing links.” Knuth discussed them in 2018, and this year’s lecture was described as a kind of sequel.

Private equity acquisition of hospitals, on average, was associated with increased hospital-acquired adverse events despite a likely lower-risk pool of admitted Medicare beneficiaries, suggesting poorer quality of inpatient care.

In 2022 and 2023, the city saw record housing approvals in the core Downtown, which will amount to nearly 3,000 new apartment units located within walking distance of the state Capitol, Stouder said.

We investigate the link between hospital performance and managerial education by collecting a large database of management practices and skills in hospitals across nine countries. We find that hospitals closer to universities offering both medical education and business education have lower mortality rates from acute myocardial infarction (heart attacks), better management practices, and more MBA-trained managers. This is true compared to the distance to universities that offer only business or medical education (or neither). We argue that supplying bundled medical and business education may be a channel through which universities improve management practices in hospitals and raise clinical performance.

Chris Doridas’ terrific Christmas playlist.

Given that I mostly write about ILC, I’m going to use the DCS as my starting point. That starting point in 1991 was 1.3mp, and in today’s dollars would approach US$30,000. The usual product that’s used as the signal of the consumer ILC market is the Nikon D1 (1999), which was 2.74mp and sold for what would be close to US$12,000 in today’s dollars. 

“Greece’s debt crisis and the crises it generated offer a clear warning to European policymakers not to allow public debt to pile up indefinitely,” he told the European Parliament in 2011.

“the homegrown industry is mounting a wide-ranging lobbying offensive against a leading Chinese rival that’s stepping up its own PR game.”

Without clumps, all of the brewing water comes into contact with the ground beans, reducing the amount of coffee that goes effectively unused and giving a more consistent brew.

The discovered vulnerability is a hardware feature, possibly based on the principle of “security through obscurity,” and may have been intended for testing or debugging. Following the initial 0-click iMessage attack and subsequent privilege escalation, the attackers leveraged this hardware feature to bypass hardware-based security protections and manipulate the contents of protected memory regions. This step was crucial for obtaining full control over the device. Apple addressed the issue, identified as CVE-2023-38606.

Having to pay Big Tech to ensure deliverability is unfair, especially since lots of sites self-host their emails for multiple reasons; one of which is cost.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was developed in the 1990s to extract natural gas from previously inaccessible shale deposits.1 Thanks to fracking, shale gas went from 2% of US natural gas production in 1998 to nearly 80% of American natural gas production by 2022.2 Today, next-generation geothermal companies are using advanced drilling and fracking technologies from the oil and gas industry. Perhaps ironically, technology developed for the oil and gas industry could be crucial in our effort to transition to zero-carbon sources of energy.

Flossbach pointed out that Italian luxury sports-car maker Ferrari, which is more than 50 times smaller than Volkswagen by revenues, has a larger market capitalisation than VW. “This just beggars belief,” he said.

ColdFusion, unlike something like Perl or Ruby, was created specifically for building websites. Without the need for tradeoffs that come with a more broadly applicable language, of the choices about how the platform, and its underlying programming language, worked were grounded in how the web worked.

To better understand what’s happening at the microbial level, researchers set up a cheddar-making experiment. They made multiple samples of cheddar using different starter cultures that contained varying combinations of bacteria, including Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactococcus cremoris and Lactococcus lactis. They made some of the starter cultures themselves and obtained others from industrial producers.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was developed in the 1990s to extract natural gas from previously inaccessible shale deposits.1 Thanks to fracking, shale gas went from 2% of US natural gas production in 1998 to nearly 80% of American natural gas production by 2022.2 Today, next-generation geothermal companies are using advanced drilling and fracking technologies from the oil and gas industry. Perhaps ironically, technology developed for the oil and gas industry could be crucial in our effort to transition to zero-carbon sources of energy.