Matt Barnum:

Milton Friedman keeps alive his economic argument, which was for every kid regardless of income to have a voucher. Harvard professor Christopher Jenks has an idea of targeted vouchers for low-income children, as a tool of empowerment. There’s a small, sort of failed effort by the federal government in California to try out vouchers. 

There was a pretty solid push from a number of quarters in the ’60s and ’70s to provide some kind of government aid to religious schools, especially Catholic schools, because they were struggling during that time period. That didn’t end up going anywhere meaningful. 

In the ’80s, President Reagan was an advocate for vouchers. That also didn’t really go anywhere. Then the first modern school voucher program happens in Milwaukee in 1990. That’s when you start to see the beginning of this latest era.

Your book has many characters, but to me if there was a main character, it was Polly Williams. Can you describe her and her role in the school choice movement?

Polly Williams was a Black Democratic legislator in Wisconsin. She was kind of a contrarian. Probably the best explanation for her would be that she was a Black nationalist. She was very interested in education in Milwaukee, and she was very concerned that Black students were not being well served by the Milwaukee school district. She tried legislatively to do a number of different proposals to help Black students in Milwaukee. She was shot down at just about every turn, and so became kind of frustrated with Democrats, with her own party, and willing to look at alternatives.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

BMW AG is unveiling a fully electric platform for its Mini brand as the automaker looks to leverage its popular three-door hatchback to compete with a range of smaller Chinese battery-powered vehicles pushing into Europe. The new generation of the Mini Cooper EV will be on display at next week’s IAA car show in Munich, after BMW’s partner Great Wall Motor Co. helped develop the new all-electric underpinnings and will produce the car in China for import to Europe.

A common malicious functionality is to snoop on the user. This page records clearly established cases of proprietary software that spies on or tracks users. Manufacturers even refuse to say whether they snoop on users for the state.

Hidden in plain sight across the way from the Harris Ranch Supercharger’s main stations, behind a Shell station, is a small diesel plant that has helped power Tesla’s footprint.

Honda’s wordsmiths offer “rugged and sophisticated” to describe the stylists’ intent—like freeze-dried Chateaubriand.

Under the CAB, any changes in fares required its consent. Fares were set that virtually guaranteed labor costs would be covered. With new route authority often taking years to wind through the CAB’s bureaucracy for approval or disapproval, US carriers were well insulated from free-market competition. Those airlines that did fail were subject to mergers with stronger carriers, which needed access to the failing carrier’s routes, planes, and facilities in order to grow. The complete shutdown of a failing carrier was a rarity. Under deregulation, failing carriers were allowed to fail. Other airlines might buy assets, such as slots, gates, and planes, but the freedom to move into new markets was unfettered. Buying international routes still required government approval, however. With freedom, and in some cases, stupidity, management’s ability to cut fares below costs in a desperate effort to generate cash meant the underlying cost structures had to change. And labor’s cushy, decades-long ability to hold management hostage came under attack.

Cable TV has become too expensive for consumers and providers, Charter Communications said in an 11-page presentation to investors on Friday, adding that cord-cutters and rising fees are contributing to a “vicious video cycle.”

Then the pandemic wiped out this beloved sector. Today, trucks are back on the National Mall serving hot dogs for tourists. But the gourmet operations dishing up barbecue, Thai, Indonesian, Salvadoran and soul food are still missing downtown. There is perhaps no better vital sign of how D.C.’s recovery is going than the story of specialty food trucks. They follow the people. And they adapt fast. Many are operating again — in the suburbs. Instead of serving office workers lunch, many have found lucrative gigs dishing out dinner at weddings, block parties and other events. Instead of parking downtown, they’re hanging out at housing developments in Arlington, Alexandria and Bethesda, according to an analysis of Roaming Hunger data on where trucks are located.

FINRA is a nominally private non-profit corporation that regulates the securities brokerage industry subject to oversight by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). But it wields vast legislative, executive, and adjudicatory powers over more than 600,000 individual brokers and thousands of broker-dealer firms nationwide. In a typical year FINRA bars hundreds of brokers from the securities industry and imposes tens of millions of dollars in aggregate fines against industry participants. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia concluded that FINRA is not a “state actor”—leaving the regulator unbound by most constitutional restraints when it investigates, prosecutes, and punishes alleged wrongdoers. That conclusion unwittingly confirmed, however, that FINRA violates both Article II of the Constitution, which prohibits empowering private law enforcement without close Executive Branch supervision, and the “private nondelegation doctrine,” a vital judicial principle that reserves binding federal power for the federal government alone to wield.

Will their upheaval succeed? All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries. The people are not. And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country.

“You look at the existing financial system, then you look at what’s been built outside the existing financial system by crypto, and the crypto version is better,” Lewis said.

Bankman-Fried’s other turns onstage at the conference were similarly mindless. He stumbled through an interview with the former British prime minister Tony Blair and Clinton, who at one point extended a fatherly hand of support. He exchanged banalities about charity with Gisele Bündchen, with whom he’d posed for an FTX ad campaign that ran in Vogue and GQ, and platitudes about leadership with her husband, Tom Brady. “Does it ever get boring to win so much?” a moderator asked. “I get a little desensitized,” Bankman-Fried said. “I never get tired of winning,” Brady said.

Our investigation found that a consumer signing system crash in April of 2021 resulted in a snapshot of the crashed process (“crash dump”). The crash dumps, which redact sensitive information, should not include the signing key. In this case, a race condition allowed the key to be present in the crash dump (this issue has been corrected). The key material’s presence in the crash dump was not detected by our systems (this issue has been corrected).

People constantly using First Premises as arguments who do so compellingly basically establish cults. If you don’t believe we have cults within the photographic community, you’re not paying attention. Try asking someone “who makes the best lenses?” and see what happens. As a broad question, that can’t be answered, yet I see many trying to claim they have the answer.

Underlining how far Michelin has come from its roots in French fine dining, the inspectors raved about AJ’s Pit Bar-B-Q in Denver, where “cornbread leans inventive, and trust us when we say that you want the custard-stuffed version”. guide.michelin.com

Andreas Raptopoulos, chief executive of Matternet, a dronemaker that supplies UPS, said the exemption would allow a pilot at the company’s remote operations centre in Kentucky to fly drones in Florida.

By 1972 vending machines were the main channel of selling canned coffee, but most vending machines only had one mode: cold. Pokka collaborated with a vending machine manufacturer to build a “hot-and-cold” vending machine which could sell both hot and cold beverages simultaneously.

‘If they can extract the lithium in a very low energy intensive way, or in a process that does not consume much acid, then this can be economically very significant,’ says Borst. ‘The US would have its own supply of lithium and industries would be less scared about supply shortages.’

The 5,000-square-foot house sits on 3.3 acres with obviously gorgeous views. Le Carré’s writing room is in a detached studio building; the library features “bespoke joinery and a feature window at one end, glazed with what is believed to be part of the canopy” from a WWII fighter plane. Of course, there’s also a safe room. You can’t write that many espionage novels without getting just a little bit paranoid. Take a peek here:

“World’s Use of Pockets: Men’s Clothes Full of Them, While Women Have but Few . . . Civilization Demands Them” blared an 1899 New York Times headline. The reporter traced a startling divergence: “Man’s pockets have developed, improved, and increased with the advances of civilization. Woman is actually retrograding—losing ground and pockets.” The article joined a flurry of press coverage in the late 19th century, as women demanded “equality in pockets,” as an editorial in the Baltimore Sun put it, along with—gasp—the vote.

The very worst offender is Nissan. The Japanese car manufacturer admits in their privacy policy to collecting a wide range of information, including sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic data — but doesn’t specify how. They say they can share and sell consumers’ “preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes” to data brokers, law enforcement, and other third parties.

Open Terms Archive publicly records every version of the terms of digital services to enable democratic oversight.

Over the past five decades, the venture capital industry has become a notable force in fueling the start-up, growth, and impact of many innovative tech companies that have changed the world. Though the majority of startups do not receive funding from venture capitalists, in Silicon Valley they have invested in and helped launch and grow companies like Intel, Apple, Google and Uber, profoundly changing how billions of people live, work, and play.

Electricity maps.

Fourteen major American cities are part of a globalist climate organization known as the “C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group,” which has an “ambitious target” by the year 2030 of “0 kg [of] meat consumption,” “0 kg [of] dairy consumption,” “3 new clothing items per person per year,” “0 private vehicles” owned, and “1 short-haul return flight (less than 1500 km) every 3 years per person.” C40’s dystopian goals can be found in its “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World” report, which was published in 2019 and reportedly reemphasized in 2023. The organization is headed and largely funded by Democrat billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Nearly 100 cities across the world make up the organization, and its American members include Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Seattle.

George Bush was mauled for merely flying over New Orleans as citizens drowned during Katrina.

Ted Cruz was mocked in a week-long news cycle for leaving Texas during its electricity crisis.

Not only hasn't Biden visited Maui, but twice vacationed and has barely spoken on it. https://t.co/t3BJ0DhKUe

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 21, 2023

By my count, there are currently 8,291 different vehicle license plates offered by the 50 states and the District of Columbia. States now offer a vast menu of personalized plate options for a dizzying array of organizations, professions, sports teams, causes and other groups.

The problem—whether or not you accept the premise that climate change threatens civilization—is that carbon-removal technologies are ineffective, and solar and wind power are nowhere near able to replace fossil fuel-based energy. The only way to achieve net-zero is by dramatically reducing carbon emissions, which would punish the American economy and destroy the capacity to develop technologies that might reduce the need for fossil fuels. “Think about the year 1970,” Mr. Huntsman says. “That’s the year we hit a trillion-dollar GDP, and the year Jimmy Page and Robert Plant wrote that great song ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ A great year, right? Well today we’re emitting roughly 6,500 million metric tons of CO2. Same thing we were emitting in 1970. And look how much more electricity we’re using, and look how many more transportation and miles we’re driving. We’ve expanded the economy 30 times over, nearly, and core CO2 has stayed flat. We should be celebrating this achievement, shouldn’t we?”

Four weeks ago, I was feeling guilty for spending so much time inside playing Tears of the Kingdom, so I took it on myself to plan something for the National Day long weekend. That something turned out to be a hike from the westernmost point to the easternmost point in Luxembourg.

Archaeologists affiliated with the University of Chicago discovered the tablets in the 1930s while excavating in Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire. However, the institute has resumed work in collaboration with colleagues in Iran, and the return of the tablets is part of a broadening of contacts between scholars in the two countries, said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.

Garg has personally guaranteed any losses the Japanese conglomerate may suffer if it chooses to sell the debt. Meeting the terms of the guarantee could force Garg to sell his Better shares and drive down the stock price, a filing warned.

I have been on the boat – submarines are always called boats, never ships – for less than 24 hours and am writing this log at a depth of 60m. Sorry, I spoke too soon. We are just rising to periscope depth – 18m below the surface – and the tall desk on which I am typing has started to list. At least I’m not in the toilet. I joined HMS Triumph in Crete for the final week of its 10-month deployment. I had never been on a submarine before and don’t especially like confined spaces. I plan to get off at Gibraltar six days from now, though the captain warns me this may not be possible if there is fog as the launch can’t come alongside.

The origins of baklava date back to ancient times. Around the eighth century B.C.E., people in the Assyrian Empire, which spread across parts of modern-day Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Syria and Turkey, arranged unleavened flatbreads in layers, with chopped nuts in between, to be enjoyed during special events. Centuries later, the Ancient Greek and Roman “placenta cake” (the Latin placenta coming from the Greek word plakous, or “cheese cake,” not the unsavory afterbirth) was a dish consisting of many layers of dough, filled with cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves. However, the earliest versions of baklava as we know it today came around 500 years ago, during the Ottoman Empire.

It turns out that one simple message to the large and diverse Sun community is actually quite hard to craft. Even for a big mouth who is always ready with a clever quip. The community includes our resellers and customers, our current and former employees, their friends and families who supported our employees on their mission to change the industry, our investors, our supply and service partners, students and educators, and even our competitors with whom we often collaborated.

I made a 800 square feet garden in San Francisco’s Mission District. Planning started in 2015 and we finally planted in January 2017. The process involved tearing up concrete, pouring a new sidewalk, hauling in clean soil, and patiently waiting for the wet season to plant.

Tiago thinks notes should be organized by actionability, and that each note should go in one and only one place in the following categories: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives. Conor thinks that notes should go everywhere, and that there’s no single top-down structure that can encapsulate all note-taking.

In the first interview since his appointment to Aria, Gur told the Financial Times that much of the agency’s success or failure would depend on its eight newly appointed programme directors who will select and fund projects. They will each have a budget of about £50mn. Aria expects to unveil the identities of the directors next month and Gur said: “They are empowered to take bold, not safe bets. We have an opportunity here to create something that could have a world-changing impact for future generations.”

What is this book about? Why is it not very good? Acemoglu and Robinson (AR) argue that countries are rich or poor because of their political institutions, not culture, geography or policy ignorance. I’ll do this as much as possible in AR’s own words. Why Nations Fail was written during the Arab Spring, so the preface begins with Egypt.

All of these people, who spent decades sending the youth of America off to foreign lands to die for ‘democracy,’ when faced with the choice to defend it with their persons, tucked tail and ran. Bear in mind, these were the stakes they themselves outlined in subsequent accounts; Trump was trying to destroy the American government; he was trying to overturn the Constitution. Fair enough, but what did they do when faced with that threat? By their own admission they didn’t know if the country would survive Orange Hitler’s assault and they couldn’t know police would shortly restore order. According to them, they faced the greatest threat a country could face . . . and they ran away. They hid under their desks and the world watched them do it. The hero of the republic was an incompetent diversity hire cop who shot an unarmed woman in the neck. That’s it. There was no insurrection. No one was armed and no one tried to take over. That accusation is idiotic. No less pathetic than the MAGAgeddon, however, was the response, to simultaneously call it the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor and to flee in terror from their posts. Our nation faces a mortal threat and the people charged with meeting it are moral and physical cowards. Trump’s normiecon followers, people who send money to Hannity but wonder if that Matt Walsh is a little extreme, shuffled diabetically into the seat of power and walked off with trophies like Alaric in the Forum. They pushed, and the shell cracked.

The inspector of Abu Ghraib. I first learned of the tortures and other abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib late in 2003 while interviewing an ousted senior officer of the Iraqi air force. He took a dangerous seven-hour taxi ride from Baghdad to Damascus, where we met in an out-of-the-way hotel for three days. He wanted a way out of Iraq for his wife and two children, and I passed his name and contact information to various officials in Washington. One evening he brought up Abu Ghraib, about which I knew nothing, and told me that the US military, desperate to learn about the opposition in Iraq, had taken to seizing mothers and their children and jailing them there. The women were sending messages asking family members in Baghdad to come and kill them because they had been sexually abused by their American guards and interrogators.

OPEN LETTER from a San Francisco legacy business. This letter, a full-page newspaper ad published today. It summarizes what majority of residents lament. pic.twitter.com/2WlcSHTrxR

— Richie Greenberg (@greenbergnation) August 13, 2023

Have you ever asked yourself what happens when you upload your PDFs to one of the many sites that offer PDF modifications on the internet? You should! We modify your PDF files in your browser, no upload required.

I first heard about the rescue of Pisces III about fifteen years ago from a ship’s captain while on a cruise around the Aeolian Islands, off the coast of Sicily. I filed it away and two years ago decided to dust the idea down and explore if it would work as, what I imagined, could be a ‘non-fiction thriller.’ What appealed to me was not only the plight of the men at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean but this international ‘Brotherhood of the Sea’—teams from Britain, Canada and America—who all came together to work on the rescue mission.

The pilot was forced to spend about two hours flying over the desert and the sea to dump around 80 tons of kerosene to enable the aircraft to land safely, prompting questions about the environmental damage caused by the Green minister’s trip.

Today, Judge Andrew Macrae reported that he and other judges on the Hong Kong Court of Appeal unanimously overruled the convictions against Hong Kong pro-democracy activists Jimmy Lai, Martin Lee, Margaret Ng, Lee Cheuk-yan, Leung Kwok-hung, Cyd Ho and Albert Ho for organising an unauthorised assembly in 2019. Their convictions for participating in an unauthorised assembly were upheld.

Take time to listen to President Eisenhower’s 15-minute-long farewell address.

Here are 4 clips of what he warned us about that have all come true. Amazingly prescient.

— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) August 14, 2023

Developer experience is how much your (present and potential) devs want to work on a specific project. Poor developer experience is a byproduct of dissonance between perceived complexity of a project and tangible complexity of the systems and processes related to it.

2 tracts sold $30K/acre today on James R. and Mary Ann Weisenborn Trust virtual online farm land auction in Adams County, IL by @bidsullivan. Video clip of Dan Sullivan selling. Info: https://t.co/3gmV1ZDfOT pic.twitter.com/K1Nd0dPt3f

— Greg Peterson (@MachineryPete) August 15, 2023

The origin of this disaster is now becoming clear:  massive amounts of dry, dead fuel (mainly grass), strong downslope winds produced by strong trades interacting with local mountains, and human ignition, most probably from powerlines.

That means she explored the thousands of new food and consumer brands, picked the best ones, and helped them launch and scale their products in Whole Foods stores — a life-changing opportunity for many businesses. Also an incredible experience in data-gathering, deal flow, and network-building for a future investor. 

Brandon Johnson on August 2:

“I’m becoming popular because other, like, you know, major stars are saying like ‘what’s going on in Chicago,’ people are excited about it.”https://t.co/jULP1avlJz

— Chicago Contrarian (@ChicagoContrar1) August 16, 2023

Stanley McChrystal probably should have left this bit out of his memoir.

Yes, all the big Al Qaeda attacks of the 1990s were directed by a Special Forces sergeant based at Fort Bragg who was also a CIA and FBI asset. But that was a long time ago. Better to not mention it. pic.twitter.com/TtzyT3Np9e

— Seth Harp (@sethharpesq) August 16, 2023

Last week, CNN announced the hiring of Jamaal Simmons, fresh off his role as Vice President Kamala Harris’s communications director. Her office has yet to replace Simmons, seemingly aware that CNN is taking on that job for Harris. Only two weeks prior to the Simmons hire, CNN announced that former Biden White House communications director Kate Bedingfeld had been hired as an on-air commentator and contributor.

According to @BryceSpaceTech, SpaceX lifted nearly 10 times as much mass to orbit in the second quarter of this year as its closest competitor, the nation of China.https://t.co/2HXcqt9wYe pic.twitter.com/L6QtJCsaZd

— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) August 16, 2023

Chang thought the tech companies should focus on designing the microchips, and outsource the actual manufacture to a company that specialises in it. Chang suggested this to Texas Instruments over and over, but they never budged. Eventually, he was shifted sideways into a dead end role, and he quit.

Nearly 6,000 data request orders “complied with” in 2022. To ProtonMail’s credit, the organization publishes a transparency report going back to 2017. In it, we find the following statistics detailing legal orders for user data.

yup this is true pic.twitter.com/mAe7j32ORb

— CarDealershipGuy (@GuyDealership) August 19, 2023

It’s funny how the only people who even try to defend first the Australian and now Canadian news link laws really don’t understand the issues.
They always start by saying it’s “paying to publish news” and when you point out that’s untrue they go straight to insults and deflection

— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) August 20, 2023

As a result of the crash, a large crowd gathered and multiple people began to obstruct paramedics, firefighters and police, according to MPD.

Courtney McLain

Ninth Circuit Court Judge Milan Smith interjected during attorney Daniel Ortner’s remarks with a jest on the state of higher education in America, as seen in a recent clip uploaded to X.

An attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Ortner is seen presenting an oral argument defending conservative students’ free speech rights against California’s Clovis Community College.

“This court, and the Supreme Court, have repeatedly said that universities are bastions for free speech. They are important places for freedom of expression and debate …” states Ortner 

“Does it matter if that’s not true anymore?” Judge Smith jokingly interrupted.

CANCELING CANCEL CULTURE?

Here’s how @elonmusk could make this idea work in a cost-effective way.

1) Curation. First, the word “unfairly” gives him discretion to curate which cases they’ll take on. Twitter sets up a form where people can apply for legal relief by submitting… https://t.co/Pk42egyEBB pic.twitter.com/Efnjk84BSC

— Balaji (@balajis) August 6, 2023

Almost 16 million trees have been chopped down on publicly owned land in Scotland to make way for wind farms, an SNP minister had admitted amid a major drive to erect more turbines.

I have followed all the steps for turning off the “login with google” popup window, but it very irritatingly still popping up! How do I make it stop? It’s REALLY ANNOYING!

So instead, we let the ultra-wealthy transfer what should have been a write-down of their private debt onto the backs of the general public. The apparatus of the Federal Reserve was used to buy huge amounts of their bad debt at face value. The monetization of this debt, euphemistically referred to as “Quantitative Easing”, has been going on ever since—to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per month. The Fed’s balance sheet expanded from approximately $4.2 trillion in late 2019, for example, to over $7.4 trillion by the end of 2020.

“I do think that some of the people are going to jump into the race at any time. But that is not my concern,” she said. “Rather than sitting on the couch, watching TV and complaining about it, I want to do something. That is the reason I am running.”

AG was very composed [during the meeting],” an employee told The Post. “He said ‘The Times faced a crossroads years ago and found ways to be innovative.’ He said: ‘We can’t be stuck in amber. We can’t keep trying to pursue this one model.’”

Amazon has confirmed it now plans to launch the first two test satellites for the company’s Kuiper broadband network on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket as soon as next month, shifting the payloads off of the inaugural flight of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket.

“The attorney general’s deliberative approach has come to frustrate Democratic allies of the White House and, at times, President Biden himself. As recently as late last year, Mr. Biden confided to his inner circle that he believed former President Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted, according to two people familiar with his comments. And while the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6,” the paper reported.  

City Brewing Co. announced Monday the beer will once again be brewed in La Crosse starting in November as part of a long-term deal with Pabst Brewing Co., which now owns the brand.  Pabst, based in San Antonio, Texas, owns multiple beer brands, including Pabst Blue Ribbon, which are made under contract by other brewers. Old Style is brewed currently in Milwaukee.

Henrik Fisker “The window of opportunity for success as an electric car manufacturer is closing”

“In the next two years, the biggest pieces of the car market pie will be distributed. If you are not broadly positioned by then, you will have lost the race.

I agree, but it’s not… pic.twitter.com/zU8roR8jcJ

— Alex (@alex_avoigt) August 8, 2023

I still don’t get the draw of Whataburger, however, until late in the week, when I realize I’ve mistakenly focused on the food and not the Idea of the Food. Throughout my adventure, I invited colleagues to dine with me, but most refused, which I took as a tacit admission of distaste for the chain. Then, one day, I ask one of the bigger Whataburger partisans in our office, who declines my invitation but, in doing so, gives me a breakthrough. 

.@VivekGRamaswamy: “An open border is not a border. The remarkable thing right now is that we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to protect somebody else’s border from an invasion halfway around the world when we have an armed invasion across our own southern border… pic.twitter.com/sQaTJtL0bl

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) August 9, 2023

A petition has been created, calling on senators and members of Congress to block the visas needed to bring in their foreign workers …

Schmitt is coming to Tesla from Bosch, where he had a more than 25-year career in engineering and manufacturing. The doctor in physics led several factories in Germany, China, and Mexico.

The typical reasons for the Chinese government imposing an exit ban that prohibits a foreigner from leaving China is for allegedly committing a crime, allegedly owing money to a Chinese company, or being in some other sort of dispute with a Chinese company or individual.

Scotus remains a polarising figure, but his humanist detractors would be horrified to learn that here in the 21st century we are witnessing a Scotus revival. Philosophers, theologians and intellectual historians are once again taking Scotus seriously, sometimes in a spirit of admiration and sometimes with passionate derision, but seriously nonetheless. Doubtless this is due in part to the progress of the International Scotistic Commission, which has in recent years completed critical editions of two of Scotus’s monumental works of philosophical theology: Ordinatio and Lectura. As these and other works have become more accessible, Scotus scholarship has boomed. According to the Scotus scholar Tobias Hoffmann, 20 per cent of all the Scotus scholarship produced over the past 70 years was produced in the past seven years. This explosion of interest in Scotus offers as good an occasion as any for introducing this brilliant and enigmatic thinker to a new audience.

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OpenStreetMap is the largest open-source geospatial project of all time. There are 18 formally established OSM chapters and dozens more local communities, collaborating on hundreds of communication channels, in more than 50 languages, in most of the countries of the world.  The map and its data is world-recognized as an essential source of geospatial ground truth. The API is used by millions of people, and the community is motivated,  multi-talented, and culturally and geographically diverse. OSM even welcomed its first paid site stability engineer a year ago in recognition of the size and scope of the project.

For decades Germany and Japan have jostled for position as the world’s leading car exporter. But their dominance is coming to an end https://t.co/yz8AnPFkft

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) August 10, 2023

Except it doesn’t. Just look at the future line-up that Fisker, an ev startup, unveiled on August 3rd. It included: a souped-up, off-road version of the Ocean, which Henrik Fisker, the carmaker’s Danish co-founder, said would be suitable for a monster-truck rally; a “supercar” with a 1,000km (600-mile) range, and a pickup truck straight out of “Yellowstone”—complete with cowboy-hat holder. Granted, there was also an affordable six-seater called Pear. But though Fisker says sustainability is one of its founding principles, it is indulging in a trait almost universal among car firms: building bigger, burlier cars, even when they are electric.

“We said sure, but how do we make fritters?” Brown said. “Farm Trails arranged for us to get together with a couple of well-known local chefs at the home of one of them, and he had a bunch of recipes. … We practiced and tasted and picked a recipe, and so that was where it originated.”

Their absurd policies have turned Seattle into a playground for anarchists and criminals, and they seem utterly unconcerned with the devastating consequences of their actions,” wrote Jessica Taylor, who joined the force in 1998 and resigned last week. “If you haven’t noticed, the criminals are running this city.” Taylor refused to fill out a standard exit form and instead submitted the 15-page letter to chief of police Adrian Diaz, who she says “has brought this department and this city to its knees,” adding that the department “has transformed into a cesspool of corruption.”

This the thoughts and recountings of events that transpired during and after the release of information about the United States National Security Agency (NSA) by Edward Snowden in 2013. There are four perspectives: that of someone who was involved with sifting through the information to responsibly inform the public, that of a security area director of the IETF, that of a human rights expert, and that of a computer science and affiliate law professor. The purpose of this memo is to provide some historical perspective, while at the same time offering a view as to what security and privacy challenges the technical community should consider. These essays do not represent a consensus view, but that of the individual authors.

But don’t just consider the implementation cost. The real cost of increased complexity – often the much larger cost – is attention.

I fixed a bug that was in production for 2 years the other day. My boss said thank you, the UX researcher that called it out two years ago and was told it was not possible to do on our end said thank you. The product manager that had tried to tackle the issue a few times but gotten nowhere with their devs said thank you. It turns out that it was one of the biggest customer complaints and for some reason it had been neglected? ignored? idk. The change was about 20 lines of code, as they usually are, but had an outsized impact on customer satisfaction ratings. Why?

Still, LTCM seemed an unlikely candidate to spark a global financial panic, managing just $4.8 billion at the beginning of 1998. But it had also “amassed an amazing $100 billion in assets, virtually all of it borrowed,” Lowenstein writes, with most of Wall Street’s and Europe’s biggest banks on the hook. What’s more, thousands of derivative contracts—“essentially side bets on market prices”—added up to more than $1 trillion in market exposure, according to Lowenstein.

America’s strong populist tradition and distrust of “monied interests” has produced critics from Andrew Jackson to Donald Trump. Why should wealthy corporate executives and shareholders be rescued while the rest of the nation gets no relief from financial turmoil they create, they ask? “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon is said to have told President Herbert Hoover—according to Hoover, anyway—after the Crash of 1929. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system.…enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

FIVE MINUTES before we boarded the plane to Africa, Al Sharpton called the group into a circle to pray. It struck me as a fine idea. Sharpton’s plan to lead a delegation of American civil-rights activists into the middle of the Liberian civil war clearly was going to require some divine support. And that was assuming we even got there. A man in the departure lounge at JFK had just finished telling me a long and disturbing story about Ghana Airways, the carrier we had chosen for the eleven-hour flight over. Apparently, much of its fleet was in Italy at the moment, impounded for debt. The rest was aging, creaky, and, given the virtually bankrupt condition of the company, spottily maintained. “Ghana Airways probably won’t even exist a month from now,” the man said. I was all for praying.

NIH Secret Third-Party Royalty Database Uncovered

The officials also wanted to know why DuPont would agree to a deal with Huafon despite earlier misadventures with Chinese partners, including intellectual-property disputes involving Sorona that prompted Chinese authorities in 2017 to raid DuPont’s Shanghai offices and demand passwords to its research network.

How about a MiG-17 and MiG-29? Two generations of Soviet fighters put on a display at yesterday’s night air show. #OSH23 pic.twitter.com/Odhx3E7rnp

— EAA (@EAA) July 30, 2023

But it’s one thing to build a good product; it’s entirely something else to get users to try it — especially if they have to quit the easiest and most ingrained thing on the internet to do so.

Disciplinary eccentricity, and restless work ethic that set him apart. In 1905, after working on a handful of comic properties, he debuted what would become his signature strip, a sprawling full-page color adventure called “Little Nemo in Slumberland.” The series was an elegant fantasy in which the young title character, whose name means “no one,” is drawn from his bedroom into boisterous adventures in Slumberland, where walking beds, Godzilla-sized turkeys, and races through the stars were common fare. Each full-page story ended with Nemo suddenly waking up in his own bed, begging the reader to consider what might be real and what might be a dream. Film scholar Tom W. Hoffer notes that in Nemo, either

Llama 2 is the latest commercially usable openly licensed Large Language Model, released by Meta AI a few weeks ago. I just released a new plugin for my LLM utility that adds support for Llama 2 and many other llama-cpp compatible models.

Headwind #2 is that San Francisco has tried to commit suicide, including out-of-control crime, cost, complacency, chaos, and some would argue communism. A wealthy friend recently told me that the state might as well tax you 100% because anyone who’s still living here obviously doesn’t care about taxes.

Need more “I’m a scientist, dammit, not a politician’ https://t.co/fvk76yuYY8

— John Robb (@johnrobb) August 2, 2023

Wild story.

A Ford dealer in the Midwest charging EVs with a diesel generator.

Alan Haig, one of the top Dealership Buy-Sell Advisors in the country, explains Ford’s struggle to transition to EVs in < 90 seconds: pic.twitter.com/vS3hx2DQfF

— CarDealershipGuy (@GuyDealership) August 2, 2023

 “AS THE PRICE OF MEDICAL CARE MOUNTS, health insurance has become a necessity; but insurance premiums are becoming more expensive too, while benefits dwindle as rapidly as the costs of medical treatment increase. Money aside, the consumer’s major problem is finding his way about an increasingly impersonal, fragmented, irrationally arranged set of health services.” While this could be a quote from today, it was written in The New York Review of Books in 1970, just a few years after Lyndon B. Johnson introduced federal health care insurance for the elderly and the poor. Medicare and Medicaid were necessary, but the new multibillion-dollar programs had few guardrails; doctors and hospitals saw them as guaranteed subsidies.

Through a string of unchecked acquisitions over 30 years, Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS USA Holdings, and National Beef have gained control of roughly 85% of the total hog, cattle, and poultry processing market. For brevity, we’ll call these four meat processing corporations “BigAg” (or “the cartel”).

On the other hand, the long fuselage, with a fineness ratio well over 10, is not structurally optimal (too long and thin). The weight of the fuselage employed in a real aircraft is, therefore, higher than for the shorter and more optimal dual aisle fuselage.

Part 2 of our interview with Devon Archer is over an hour long and is out this morning.

Check out Part 1 if you missed it. https://t.co/HyjB7YzN7a

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 4, 2023

MUST WATCH? 20 minutes of mainstream Democrats, computer scientists, and election security experts warning that America’s election system is online, easily hackable, and often running on Windows 7 or older operating systems.@joerogan@patrickbetdavidhttps://t.co/MUCppioeE5 pic.twitter.com/v2NRvagKun

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) August 4, 2023

“One thing we added that’s actually pretty unique is we created parking spaces in the shop for our road technicians’ trucks,” he says. “It keeps the trucks out of the weather, and it makes the technicians more efficient, because all their tools are right there with them in the shop.”

Did you also see the NYT’s letter submitted in San Bankman-Fried’s trial?@elonmusk https://t.co/8JKPbjHvPN

— Zack Guzmán (@zGuz) August 4, 2023

Before the pandemic, the vast majority of Chinese households and smaller private businesses relied on an implicit “no politics, no problem” bargain, in place since the early 1980s: the CCP ultimately controlled property rights, but as long as people stayed out of politics, the party would stay out of their economic life. This modus vivendi is found in many autocratic regimes that wish to keep their citizens satisfied and productive, and it worked beautifully for China over the past four decades.

Automation is often a solution in search of a problem. It is a choice people have made, not an inevitability and certainly not a necessity. For instance, the United States faces a scarcity of truck drivers. The American Trucking Association has estimated that in 2021 there were 80,000 fewer drivers than the total needed and that, given the age of current drivers, over a million new ones will have to be recruited in the coming decade. To deal with this deficit, many tech moguls, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, have invested in the research and development of self-driving vehicles, technology that would reduce the demand for drivers. For Bezos, such technology makes corporate financial sense; Amazon relies on low shipping costs to keep its prices down. But it does not make wider economic sense because millions of people would be happy to drive trucks in the United States—they just need to be allowed to work in the country.

All three admitted they flagrantly lied either under oath to Congress or to federal investigators. The three were never indicted for their false and perjurious testimonies.

Three decades ago, James Carville, the American political adviser, quipped about wanting to be resurrected as the bond market because “you can intimidate everyone”. Since then, the market has grown fivefold. Tighter regulations on traditional lenders resulting from the recent rash of bank failures in the US will force even more borrowers towards bonds.

Shall a penny have more weight in my heart and give me more courage than God himself, who holds heaven and earth in his power, who gives us the air we breathe and the water we drink, who makes our corn to grow and gives us all things? It is so scandalous that it cannot be uttered, that God should not amount to as much with us as a hundred guilders. Why not think that God, who has created me, will surely feed me, if he wants me to live? If he does not want this, very well, I shall be satisfied.

Andy was the CISO for Maersk Line when they were hit by Notpetya in 2017. He told what really happened to the audience of the t2 conference this May. Video here: https://t.co/SBY9ZSvjX0 pic.twitter.com/P4EEo06cWp

— @mikko (@mikko) July 23, 2023

She gave them over a trillion dollars with the CARES Act, and now she’s bragging the IRS collected $38 million from them. ???? https://t.co/j8bK4VudWA

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) July 23, 2023

Elections rarely end the way people expect them when they start. In spring 2015, everyone expected the presidential showdown to be Bush vs Clinton 3: Rise of the Megadonors. Donald Trump’s rise as a serious candidate and victory surprised everyone (especially me), showing outsiders can influence the byzantine swamp of DC. Earlier this year the general consensus expected 2024 to repeat established themes with Trump vs Biden 2: Geriatric Wars. Ron Desantis looked as though he would overtake Trump but started flaming out in March, beginning with his flip-flop on Ukraine.

It is important to note, however, that while a location like Kosovo may provide added protection, it is not a guarantee against censorship or attacks. Hosting content that is controversial or politically sensitive always carries some level of risk, and it is important to carefully consider the potential consequences before hosting such content. In practice while some internet related laws exist in Kosovo they are not enforced by lack of competent officials (that are also underpaid, and often not paid on time at all), in fact the central government in Pristina does not even have control over its Serbian majority east where militias and the Serbian government hold a tight grip on everything, heavily armed and prepared for war at any time. Serbian authorities do not cooperate with Kosovo.

By any standard, mainframes are enormous. Today’s mainframe can have up to 240 server-grade CPUs, 40TB of error-correcting RAM, and many petabytes of redundant flash-based secondary storage. They’re designed to process large amounts of critical data while maintaining a 99.999 percent uptime—that’s a bit over five minutes’ worth of outage per year. A medium-sized bank may use a mainframe to run 50 or more separate financial applications and supporting processes and employ thousands of support personnel to keep things running smoothly.

There are 1,847 Tesla Supercharger stations in the U.S. housing 20,040 Tesla Supercharger ports, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Energy. That’s roughly a quarter of all DC Fast (the quickest type of EV charger) EV charging stations in the country and nearly two-thirds of all DC Fast EV charging ports.

Their stories animate the complex relationship to place: What happens when you stay, what happens when you leave, and what of the multitude of moments in between. The stories transport readers to different parts of the state, whether stretches of roaming tumbleweeds, the parking lot of a subdued strip mall, or a coastal one-light municipality. “Just empty, windblown charm. The same tiny town I remember,” Kimberly King Parsons writes in “Whiskey Sour.”

The madness of crowds aside, it is worth reflecting on what we concretely know about LLMs at this point in time and how these insights sparked the latest AI fervor. This will help put into perspective the relevance of current research efforts and the possibilities that abound.

NASA also said that two old MD-90 airframes that will be used to build the prototype have been taken out of storage at a desert airfield in Victorville, Calif., and moved to a facility in Palmdale, Calif., for conversion. Both jets were formerly operated by Delta Air Lines.

Wait, I thought Elon built a series of tremendous blowout startup businesses to earn that wealth? Isn’t that what we are supposed to be doing? Prior to Elon, Twitter was a cesspool and worked hand in hand with the US Government to kill free speech. That’s called fascism. I bet the same professor isn’t upset with the way the Washington Post and New York Times operate. I don’t think taking class with him would be all that productive. I saw an article about how the current US Presidential administration has turned the US military academies into woke factories instead of leadership factories designed to create career officers. Not really a surprise given what they have done everywhere else in the government. My friend Jeff has a piece up on how the military falls far short of goals. I liked the military better when they had the motto “when you absolutely, positively have to blow things up.” Here is an old USMA Men’s Volleyball t-shirt. Do you think they could wear it today when we are instructing cadets to refer to their parents as guardians and not “Mom and Dad” so as not to offend anyone?

We heard some frantic voices calling out that the tow line had snapped, that the vessel was adrift and headed for the rocks,” said Beaudoin, who remembers a split second of silence on board the aircraft as the news sunk in. Bonomi doesn’t recall the exact words the Sea Tow captain shouted into his radio as he watched the Privateer being swept away by the waves and current. But he said it was something to the effect of: “Coast Guard, you’ve got to do something!”

What Ponsin didn’t know was that Tesla employees had been instructed to thwart any customers complaining about poor driving range from bringing their vehicles in for service. Last summer, the company quietly created a “Diversion Team” in Las Vegas to cancel as many range-related appointments as possible. The Austin, Texas-based electric carmaker deployed the team because its service centers were inundated with appointments from owners who had expected better performance based on the company’s advertised estimates and the projections displayed by the in-dash range meters of the cars themselves, according to several people familiar with the matter.

It’s gonna be wild if Nigel Farage losing a Coutts account leads to more UK bank CEO oustings than, say, the 2008 crisis.

— Tracy Alloway (@tracyalloway) July 27, 2023

I am extremely concerned for you that those around you have led you to believe, or encouraged you in your own belief, that it is in any way ‘cool’ to be naked and licking sledgehammers in your videos. It is in fact the case that you will obscure your talent by allowing yourself to be pimped, whether its the music business or yourself doing the pimping.

The data also shows that eSIM technology is finding particular appeal among dual-SIM users, and is further driving the adoption of dual-SIM usage in a number of markets where the usage was previously limited or non-existent. The latter trend is particularly visible in the U.S. and South Korea – compared to a year ago dual-SIM penetration nearly doubled in the U.S. (+89%) and more than tripled in South Korea (+217%). The eSIM + physical SIM combination has opened up the door to dual-SIM usage in these two markets – among our dual-SIM users with an eSIM-capable phone, respectively 87.3% and 89.9% had an active eSIM alongside their physical SIM in Q1 2023. Taiwan’s share stood at 51.9%, but the market has an established and widespread penetration of dual-SIM usage (17.8% of all users had dual-SIM there in the same period). Indonesia, meanwhile, while having high penetration of dual-SIM usage (57.7%), is still at a very early stage of eSIM adoption, with only 2.6% of dual-SIM users with an eSIM installed, among eSIM-capable device base in Q1 2023.

On the evening of July 19th, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Sky watchers from southern California to Arizona witnessed a magnificent exhaust plume. At the San Francisco Volcanic Field north of Flagstaff, photographer Jeremy Perez saw something extra:

I find this explanation intelligent, informed, and interesting—yet unsatisfying, in the same way and for the same reasons as I find Robert Allen’s explanation unsatisfying: I don’t believe that industrialization was so contingent on such very specific factors. When you consider the breadth of problems being solved and advances being made in so many different areas, the progress of that era looks less like a lucky break, and more like a general problem-solving ability getting applied to the challenge of human existence. (I tried to get Devereaux’s thoughts on this, but I guess he was too busy to give much of an answer.)

Silicon Valley technical teams when they hear their BD people making promises to customers. pic.twitter.com/INWXXAEklg

— Todd Master (@MasterActual) July 28, 2023

Yes & CIA clandestine service officer turned NeverTrump lock-him-upper Will Hurd is now on OpenAI’s board.

OpenAI is a ticking CIA political warfare time bomb just waiting to go off https://t.co/5jckTBl74Y pic.twitter.com/oMuUd7fjoZ

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) July 29, 2023

Frustrated Oaklanders confront Alameda County DA Pamela Price over surge in crime

At a heated community meeting Thursday, residents of Oakland’s Montclair neighborhood had a chance to confront the DA and the Oakland police department over rising crime. @AndreaKPIX reports: pic.twitter.com/m3o1TYAAuB

— Betty Yu (@bett_yu) July 28, 2023

Some pretty magical moments happen right here at AirVenture! Congratulations to Rodrigo and Jessica, who got engaged this morning in front of the B-25 “Panchito”! ??

The couple traveled to Oshkosh from Mexico for their very FIRST AirVenture, one they’ll never forget.#OSH23 pic.twitter.com/cbnJn3vEgm

— EAA (@EAA) July 29, 2023

Willie Nelson was also on the bill that night, and seeing the way O’Connor was treated, invited her to join him in the studio the next day. The song they recorded, released on his 1993 album, Across the Borderline, was a cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up.” Gabriel’s original 1986 version was inspired by the Dust Bowl–era photography of Dorothea Lange, but written and sung from the point of view of a contemporary English miner left behind by the Margaret Thatcher economy. His narrator’s despair is palpable, but he finds the resolve to carry on in a prechorus sung by his wife—in Gabriel’s case, duet partner Kate Bush—who reassures him, “Don’t give up, you’re not beaten yet . . . you still have us.”

Welcome to The Hacker’s Dictionary, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.

A new study estimates ~800,000 Americans are permanently disabled or die each year from diagnostic medical errors. Concurrently, multiple reports look at ways this may be reduced, including artificial intelligence. In this edition of Ground Truths, I’ll review the scope of the problem and prospects for improvement that are desperately needed.

Frequent private jet passenger, John Kerry, admits that destruction of the farming industry is essential to achieving 'Net Zero':

"Agriculture contributes about 33% of all the emissions of the world. And we can’t get to net zero—we don’t get this job done—unless agriculture is… pic.twitter.com/1nlzrDFr6A

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) July 30, 2023

When the Vision Pro was finally announced, people working on it believed the development team would eventually be broken up and distributed across the company — matching the approach used by Apple’s other core devices. But the recent name change seems to imply that the current structure is here to stay.

The point is, it’s hard to say with any certainty whether this will truly be the moment when Hayao Miyazaki steps away from feature animation for good (he’ll likely never step away from animation entirely, directing a new short for the Ghibli Museum during his last retirement, Boro the Caterpillar). Until a few days ago, it was also hard to say what this mysteriously titled final film would actually be about, following a bold PR strategy of, well, not doing any PR. Only a single poster for the film featuring a heron was released before its theatrical debut, without so much as press or preview screenings, trailers, screenshots, or even a synopsis. Ok

“Global Airlines” – attention grabbing, sure; but here’s the reality:

Starting ANY AOC is a monumental challenge; even for the most experienced teams. I’ve been a part of start-ups & I’ve even failed with a start-up of my own. I have 2 friends who have succeeded with starting… https://t.co/TXIynT0u0g

— Steve Giordano (@JTTsteve) July 18, 2023

Domains like army?ml, pentagon?ml, navy?ml and af?ml all have Mail Exchange records pointing to 'handle?catchemail?ml'. https://t.co/Ep0NMTfEp4

— @mikko (@mikko) July 17, 2023

At the wave pool, which is lined with an artificial beach and ringed by cabanas and a small hotel, the Floridians ripped oceanlike swells for six hours before coming landside. They then congregated at the hotel’s mezzanine bar overlooking the waves to rip righteous tequila shots. “It’s nice to do something fun and then go out and drink,” one partyer told me, “rather than just drink.”

So, what has NASA abandoned? Late last month, the agency pulled the plug on the X-57 electric airplane before the first flight. NASA concluded that the electric and battery technology for the X-57, a small airplane, is too dangerous. NASA wouldn’t even authorize test flights.

The idea seems to be that the MLS is so important, so critical, and an institution that drives equality and social justice that it should be left alone. But what we’re likely to get is the exact opposite of being left alone.

Now, the proof is getting stronger that a lack of flexibility can hurt in the long term. Companies with flexible work policies are growing more quickly than those that require people to be in the office full-time, according to The Flex Index, released July 18, which collects office requirements on more than 4,500 companies with 30,000 locations and that employ more than 100 million people globally.

The Selway is a storied river to whitewater enthusiasts, though not many have floated it due to the limited access the US Forest Service allows. The water is only high enough for rafts to embark confidently in late May through early August, and because it’s such a coveted river with a National Wild and Scenic River distinction attached, only one group can launch per day. Obtaining a permit is among the most difficult in the Forest Service system; entry into the yearly lottery yields odds of under 1% as over 10,000 people seek around 60 spots.

“Dark Side” represented the culmination of the group’s struggle to extricate itself from the long shadow of original leader Syd Barrett, the textbook case of a 1960s rocker who went the chemical distance and never returned. As the new documentary makes clear, The Pink Floyd (as they were originally called, fusing the names of Barrett’s favorite American blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council) was very much a product of Barrett’s visionary acidhead whimsy, with bassist Roger Waters, keyboardist Rick Wright and drummer Nick Mason supporting the leader’s singing, songwriting and lead guitar. The magic lasted through the group’s eclectic first singles, but as early as the tour for the 1967 debut album “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” an LSD-addled, mentally ill Barrett was staring into the middle distance and playing one note for entire sets. He was barely present on the follow-up, “A Saucerful of Secrets” (1968), and got jettisoned from the band shortly thereafter, with guitarist David Gilmour already drafted to take his place. Fellow musician John Etheridge later remembered thinking that Gilmour should “enjoy it while it lasts, because without Syd that band’s going nowhere” — one of the great wrong calls in the history of popular music.

Investigations suggest that, in some fields, at least one-quarter of clinical trials might be problematic or even entirely made up, warn some researchers. They urge stronger scrutiny.

Microsoft still doesn’t know — or want to share — how China-backed hackers stole a key that allowed them to stealthily break into dozens of email inboxes, including those belonging toseveral federal government agencies.

Statistical arbitrage (stat arb) is a pillar of quantitate trading that relies on mean reversion to predict the future returns of an asset. Mean reversion believes that if a stock has risen higher it’s more likely to revert in the short term which is the opposite of a momentum strategy that believes if a stock has been rising it will continue to rise. This blog post will walk you the ‘the’ statistical arbitrage paper Statistical Arbitrage in the US Equities Market apply it to a stock/ETF pair and then look at an intraday crypto stat arb strategy.

“We are seeing for the first time what a megaconstellation means to the world,” Dickinson said. “That provides such resiliency and redundancy in terms of maintaining satellite communications in this example. That is powerful, and the department is moving in that direction.”

Satellite reconnaissance emerged as an irreplaceable source of U.S. intelligence during the Cold War. The vast resources required to build intelligence satellites quickly transformed space reconnaissance into an industrial-scale activity. Though satellite reconnaissance primarily served policymakers in Washington, two of its critical nodes for research, development, and operations were in Sunnyvale, California and Rochester, New York. In both places, a coalition of scientists and engineers in corporations, universities, and intelligence agencies collaborated to create satellites designed to penetrate the Iron Curtain. These technical experts were critical not only for the development of satellite reconnaissance systems, but also for their operation.

At United, bids for 978 captain vacancies, or about 50% of the vacancies posted, have gone unfilled in the past year, United pilot union data shows.

The leading companies are now profitable without subsidies. Protectionists, unions, and car makers that still aren’t good at making battery cars drive lobbying for subsidies.

“The best way to understand BLM is as a delivery mechanism for Black Panther ideology passed through a filter of marketing language that makes it palatable to American Elites.”

~ @realchrisrufo, America’s Cultural Revolution

— Josh Daws (@JoshDaws) July 19, 2023

Bundle a model’s weights, configuration, prompts, data and more into self-contained packages that run anywhere

The purpose of a Series A pitch is to show investors why they should invest in your business. It should provide a clear and concise overview of the business you’ve built, and then paint a picture of where that business could go and why raising money will help you get there.

Spending time in China is essential to avoid surprises. Its political environment may not be as welcoming to foreigners as previously, but that means more, not fewer, foreigners should travel there. Analysts, journalists, businesspeople and students need to be in China to plumb the complexity and nuances of the country and its politics.

For the record, if MSNBC contributor Dan Goldman handed me Don Jr’s laptop, and it looked the same as Hunter’s, I’d run it.

— Emma-Jo Morris (@EmmaJoNYC) July 21, 2023

ExxonMobil staked out its vision for its transition to a lower-carbon business model when it spent $4.9 billion to acquire Denbury, a smaller Texas oil and gas company with the U.S.’s largest network of pipelines designed to carry carbon dioxide. The acquisition signals the momentum growing behind “carbon management” as an enterprise that fits better with the traditional strengths of oil and gas companies than renewable energy.

Britain is suffering a decline in productivity and income which isn’t fully reflected in nominal GDP statistics. This could be because it’s expressed in a declining pound, rather than in declining nominal wages/profits. I don’t know enough economics to feel like I have good intuitions about declining currency values. It could also be partly because post-recession economic growth happened more in new employment than in higher wages for the already-employed. Potential causes are Brexit, a dysfunctional real estate market, and underinvestment in R&D – but low confidence in all of these.

iCloud is descended from a long series of features in older versions of Mac OS, going back to iTools in January 2000. It’s currently divided into two main functional services: CloudKit to handle databases, and iCloud Drive for storage of files. These appear to be implemented in the same vast distributed databases served by Apple’s own data centres and those of third-parties including Amazon’s AWS. macOS also includes some specialist tasks relying on iCloud such as the Find My service, and App Store apps are able to synchronise small shared dictionaries of key-value pairs such as preferences in an Ubiquitous Key-Value store.

Hun­dreds of doc­tors across the U.S. have en­trusted record­ings of their pri­vate talks with pa­tients to a startup promis­ing to turn the con­ver­sa­tions into us­able med­ical records through ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence. The tech­nol­ogy makes mul­ti­ple er­rors while pro­duc­ing the re­ports, such as fail­ing to use cor­rect med­ical ter­mi­nol­ogy and adding med­i­cines a pa­tient isn’t tak­ing, ac­cord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer work­ers.

Other chal­lenges are more ad­min­is­tra­tive. Fum­ble-free au­to­matic billing is one of the glo­ries of the Su­per­charger net­work. Tes­la’s Su­per­charg­ers haven’t pre­vi­ously needed in­put screens or card read­ers. Last year Tesla an­nounced a deal with the White House to open 3,500 new or ex­ist­ing Su­per­charger sta­tions to the pub­lic along ma­jor high­ways. How­ever, in or­der to be el­i­gi­ble for fed­eral in­cen­tives, pub­lic Su­per­charg-ers need to have some point-of-sale in­ter­face. Apart from charg­ing, con­sumers’ big­gest is­sue with EVs has been af­ford­abil­ity. In a Cox Au­to­mo­tive sur­vey, 51% of re­spon­dents said they were in­ter­ested in buy­ing an EV. 43% said they were hold­ing off due to high prices. Mean­while, a fleet of highly hyped mass-mar­ket EVs (Ford Mus­tang Mach-E, Ford F-150 Light­ning, VW ID.4, Cadil­lac Lyriq) are nailed to the show­room floors.

The history of the Citroën dealership in Moulins thus follows the evolutions of National Road 7 which gradually bypasses, site after site, the hearts of the villages. However, the intimate history of this family also unfolds in the shadow of the Holiday Road. Accidents, often fatal at a time when the seat belt did not exist, directly affect the family. Marie-Madeleine Dubois and Guy Dallois, died, together, in the car, in 1983.

Fascinating comparison between the diversity of US orbital rockets and those in China from @John__Holst.https://t.co/XoWFPhMWGN pic.twitter.com/p4VduNCJA4

— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) July 23, 2023

Following months of oversight work by the Ways and Means Committee, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Daniel Werfel informed employees in a new memo on Friday of their constitutional and statutory right to make protected disclosures to Congress. Previous communications by the agency to employees may have had a chilling effect on whistleblowers, as they failed to inform them that their rights included sharing concerns directly to Congress. A recent letter from attorneys for Hunter Biden may have had a similar effect for calling into question whether it was appropriate for these employees to come to Congress with their concerns.

Yellen's sterile visit to China

This is how Yellen negotiated with China. She proposed to cancel the additional tariffs imposed during the Trump era, but required China to meet three conditions:

1. Buy $850 billion US treasury bonds

2. Withdrawal of China's counter-sanctions pic.twitter.com/5Wwx5C3wtm

— America-China Watcher (@PandemicTruther) July 9, 2023

New frontiers in campaign fundraising —

People supporting Vivek Ramaswamy can take a 10% cut on the money they raise for his campaign!

pic.twitter.com/9Xkc01jts1

— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) July 10, 2023

But Elon Musk is not one to trust someone else’s knots. He’s made his fortune by disregarding other people’s work and rethinking things from first principles. To his credit, he’s worked miracles in categories most entrepreneurs would never dream of tackling, from electric cars to rockets to satellite internet service. There may be only a handful of people who could’ve pulled off Tesla and SpaceX, and maybe only one who could’ve done both. When the game is man versus nature, he’s an obvious choice. When it comes to man versus human nature, on the other hand…

Sotomayor’s staff has often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children’s books, works that have earned her at least $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009. Details of those events, largely out of public view, were obtained by The Associated Press through more than 100 open records requests to public institutions. The resulting tens of thousands of pages of documents offer a rare look at Sotomayor and her fellow justices beyond their official duties.

When Peter Thiel emerged as the right’s potential heir to Sheldon Adelson during the ’22 midterms, a highly connected Democratic operative launched a guerilla opposition research campaign to chill his political influence. What happened next was sordid, and ultimately tragic, but also a telling reflection of a new era in political combat.

Ahead of FBI Director Christopher Wray’s testimony tomorrow before the House Judiciary Committee, I’m calling on Committee members to ask Wray the following 15 questions & hold him accountable:

1. If U.S. voters in 2024 elect a U.S. President who seeks to shut down the FBI,…

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) July 11, 2023

Lots of climate hair-on-fire about Montpelier Vermont flooding. It must be climate change, right?

Nope

Here is a list of top 40 crests in Montpelier. 1927 blows away everything including current 20ft

Lots of 1910s and 1930s on that list

Nothing outside natural variability pic.twitter.com/BRxwktGTnD

— ClimateCharts (@ChartsClimate) July 11, 2023

The layout of the Disney parks may not be something you think about except for at the end of the day when your feet are aching and sitting feels like the best ride ever. Or when you’re hiking around the Epcot World Showcase in the blazing sun and afternoon heat. But the ways the Imagineers have creatively designed the parks influence your experience more than you think, and in ways you might not have considered before.

The AD-BASED internet is DYING, and it’s getting WORSE in the process

We only include firms where we received 100 or more comparisons to other firms. We changed this from our first release where we had included firms with over 25 comparisons. To learn more about our change and the rest of our methodology, please view our FAQ here.

The free movie.

Cancer cells-to-be accumulate a series of specific genetic changes in a predictable and sequential way years before they are identifiable as pre-malignancies, researchers at Stanford Medicine have found. Many of these changes affect pathways that control cell division, structure and internal messaging — leaving the cells poised to go bad long before any visible signs or symptoms occur.

The late-night liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites on Sunday set a new record for the most flights by a SpaceX launch vehicle, with a first-stage booster flying for a 16th time. SpaceX now aims to fly its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 20 times, double the company’s original goal.

IN 1943, BRITISH NAVAL INTELLIGENCE and MI5 devised a cunning plan to fool German command into thinking that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia instead of the actual objective; Sicily. All the plan required was a floating corpse and a fake identity.

To me, though, it is a fascinating feat. It feels magical when a machine solves an abstract problem like that, with minimal input from me as a user! I was, therefore, delighted when the nice folks at Prefix.dev hired me to create an open-source dependency solver for the Conda package ecosystem. Not that I am an expert in the topic (far from it!), but I do know my Rust and I’m a quick learner. In fact, after 5 weeks the new solver is finally available as an experimental option in the rattler¹ project!

Since July 2022, health insurance companies have been required to publish how much they pay healthcare providers for nearly all health care services. In the past, these negotiated prices were kept secret, leading to wide differences in payments between providers. Patients and even doctors had very little idea how much was actually being paid for healthcare.

In response to a question from Rep. Deborah Ross about attacks on abortion services centers, Wray just said that the greatest number of violent cases involve attacks on pro-life targets. …

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) July 12, 2023

San Francisco institution Anchor Brewing Co., the godfather of steam beer, is shutting down after 127 years. The brewery was “losing millions of dollars a year,” said Anchor spokesperson Sam Singer. “Economic pressures have made the business no longer sustainable.”

The legacy press is doing just that and will likely continue to do so, handing politicians free rein to defame the whistleblowers. The question, then, is whether the House Ethics Committee will curb Goldman to send a message that whistleblowers aren’t political pawns.

In 1997, Wired magazine published an article called The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020 (archived). The subtitle reads: “We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?” As you might expect, the piece makes interesting reading here in the actual future, particularly the sidebar of “10 Scenario Spoilers”:

Pulling my site from Google over AI training.

Crouching in the shadows of the much larger Süleymaniye Mosque, the Rüstem Pasha Mosque is like a cave filled with hidden treasure. Built by the famous Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan for the extremely influential – and somewhat controversial – Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha, the mosque is unique in a number of ways.

Judicial Watch announced today that a Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit forced the release of anorganizational chart from the U.S. State Department Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, which shows that the office employs at least 45 people. Judicial Watch uncovered the record thanks to a FOIA lawsuit filed in September 2022, against the State Department for records related to travel costs, calendars, and organizational charts for the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:22-cv-02844)). The Biden agency is releasing responsive records in batches to Judicial Watch every six weeks.

In any event, she cites King once: “An individual has value because he has value to God. Whenever this is recognized, ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ pass away as determinants in a relationship and ‘son’ and ‘brother’ are substituted.” Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? 102–03 (Beacon Press 1968). Funny because the sort of quote I remember from that book is “White Americans must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.”

The AP separately queried more than 100 private colleges, universities and charities that have also hosted justices or organized events for them, requesting that they provide the same information that was asked of public institutions. Some confirmed basic details of the visits, but few provided substantive information.

Two paragraphs later, Microsoft said that Storm-0558 used the forged token to gain access to Exchange email accounts through a programming interface for Outlook Web Access (OWA). The researchers wrote:

Despite having four cylinder banks, the INNengine (depending on its configuration) actually has eight pistons. This is because the engine is an opposed-piston motor, meaning that each piston’s compression stroke is performed against a second piston placed in the same cylinder bank rather than a static cylinder head. It still only has four combustion chambers, though, which means it sounds similar to a four-cylinder engine.

Yesterday, a friend sent me a screenshot of an Instagram storyfrom mordlustderpodcast asking for an intuitive explanation of the Monty Hall problem (which, as I found out, is called the “Ziegenproblem“, or “goat problem”, in German). The basic problem is this:

The box of sweets was given to a schoolgirl to celebrate the 1902 coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra and has remained untouched for more than a century.

From defence secretary Ben Wallace to historian Tom Holland, our panel selects the greatest war movies to mark the release of Oppenheimer

Sending a thumbs-up emoji may now be considered the agreement of a legally binding contract, a Canadian judge has ruled. The thumbs-up emoji proved pivotal in a case involving farmer Chris Achter of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and a 2021 deal to sell 87 metric tons of flax to grain buyer Kent Mickleborough. Mickleborough signed the contract for the deal and texted a picture of it to Achter and wrote “Please confirm flax contract,” according to court documents. Achter responded to with a thumbs-up emoji.

After nearly five decades working at Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman department store, Betty Halbreich has helped a range of generations. Here, she reflects on what’s different—and what isn’t.

Wisconsin makes a couple appearances in the EJMR IP-matching study. For those unaware, EJMR (EconJobRumors) is essentially 4chan for economists, filled w/racist & misogynistic gossip. A couple researchers scraped the website & realized they could match posts to IP addresses.

— John D. Johnson (@jdjmke) July 19, 2023