10.10

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Touching the Third Rail: The Dangers of Electricity Market Design

New study reveals iPhones aren’t as private as you think

Walmart heirs have spent heavily to promote their view that water markets are the best way to deal with a dwindling supply

Spending on PCR tests in China soared months before first COVID-19 cases revealed: report

Revealed: The secret notes of Blue Origin leaders trying to catch Space – “They’ve got a ton of money, and they’re not doing a lot,”

McKinsey Never Told the FDA It Was Working for Opioid Makers While Also Working for the Agency

Salesforce Accidentally Teaches Us About Visual Weight

The Apple A15 SoC Performance Review: Faster & More Efficient

Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet

Robots Take Over Italy’s Vineyards as Wineries Struggle With Covid-19 Worker Shortages

Jony Ive on What He Misses Most About Steve Jobs

The Covid money tracker.

What American Christians Hear at Church

Americans’ Trust in Media Dips to Second Lowest on Record

I wouldn’t ask for a raise if i made 13.2 million dollars either

Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller: A 21st century Billy Mitchell

The Off-Grid Laws of Every State in America

Biden mocked for ‘Truman Show presidency’ over fake White House set

10.3

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Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA’s secret war plans against WikiLeaks

In the midst of unprecedented crisis, Boeing sales chief embraces optimism

SpaceX satellite signals used like GPS to pinpoint location on Earth

Officials in Beijing have a distrust of younger American officials, whom they consider hostile to China and focused too much on ideological competition. They prefer to deal with trusted “old friends” such as Thornton, who is among very few to have maintained ties and access to some of China’s most powerful officials.

From Varlam Shalamov “Forty five things I learned in the gulag”

Over an 18-year period, China has granted or loaned money to 13,427 infrastructure projects worth $843bn across 165 countries, according to the AidData research lab at William & Mary, a university in the US state of Virginia.

Revisionism on Deborah Birx, Trump, and the CDC

EyePhone: How one doctor is using the iPhone 13 Pro’s macro capabilities to remotely assess patients

How did 30,000 Haitians get to Texas?

The Opendoor Memo: Keith Rabois on The Origins of Opendoor from a Conversation with Peter Thiel, Why Cash is Not a Competitive Moat for Startups Today and What People Misunderstand About Black Swan Events in Real Estate and How it Impacts Opendoor

We are not doing an in-depth dive into Gov. Evers ‘People’s” Commission maps at this time for 2 reasons: 1) The Commission omitted the Voting Rights Act from its criteria. And in the drawing of their maps it appears this cornerstone of American civil rights was ignored

The Chinese are very happy to see woke culture spread in America.

Clarifying the structure and nature of left-wing authoritarianism.

Weyerhaeuser cites crime in Pioneer Square for delay in reopening its Seattle headquarters

“The fact that the president came to the Hill and whipped against his own bill is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”

9.26

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The Democrat-backed plan seeks to reform federal EV incentives by resetting manufacturer quotas and upping the ante to a $12,500 electric vehicle tax credit. Conservatives have bashed the plan as anti-competitive and socialist, citing that the money coming from taxpayers should not be used to soften the financial blow for electric-car buyers that have typically been higher earners anyway. The updated policies are also embedded in a $3.5 trillion social spending bill Republicans have alleged is too broad. Meanwhile, supporters of the bill have claimed it’s the most direct way of ensuring EV adoption among low-income groups and will likely speed up the nation’s transition to alternative energy vehicles.

“In his later years, however, he spoke and wrote at length not only about his belief in God but also, with more reluctance, about his opposition to abortion.”

The paper lifted my reporting about the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist without any attributionpp

Confessions of a Michelin Inspector

How to Deal with Complexity Like a Pilot (Part 1)

9.19

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A woman is suing S.F. for $50 million over a parking ticket, saying tire chalk is unconstitutional

Now is a good time to remind people that the Saudi government would not be spying on activists’ phones with no-click 0-days without knowledge and approval of the Israeli government, who could put a stop to NSO Group’s sales right now.

Looking at this photo and wondering when people in the west will recognise this as a modern, extremely right-wing and highly aggressive political movement. Not traditional culture. (And you can do that without judging the individual women in it.)

If you spent your whole life trying, you couldn’t come up with a better illustration of woke progressivism as smokescreen for class that perpetuates inequality than the progressive avatar at the pinnacle of conspicuous consumption being feted with a cheeky slogan across her back.

Seven Possible Causes of the Next Financial Crisis

More fallout from how we’re defunding Seattle police backward, this time in Pioneer Square

NEW: We’ve learned that the FAA just implemented a two week TFR (Temporary Flight Restrictions) over the international bridge in Del Rio, TX, meaning we can no longer fly our FOX drone over it to show images of the thousands of migrants. FAA says “special security reason”.

On Thursday night, Mayor London Breed was in clear violation of the order as currently written while enjoying live music at the Black Cat nightclub in the Tenderloin. Per the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mariecar Mendoza, Breed was maskless for the duration of the indoor event, as were other attendees. (SFGATE and the San Francisco Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but operate independently of one another.)

“A predominantly remote future will challenge the need for layer upon layer of bureaucracy in American work by rejecting the assumption that ‘management’ is the only way to grow” @edzitron theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… // Don’t agree w/generalized view of “manager bad”…thoughts 1/

The app, created by allies of the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, vanished from online stores, reflecting a new level of pressure against U.S. technology companies in the country.

Dating experts explain how courtship has changed during the pandemic

The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion?

Rahm Emanuel and lobbying….

Raul Emanuel and lobbying.

9.12

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Telehealth’s Limits: Battle Over State Lines and Licensing Threatens Patients’ Options

Dane County Board Chair Analiese Eicher told the Cap Times Monday that the resolution is “injecting unnecessary politicization into a very real public health crisis that is impacting our lives in so many ways.”

How to Look Up Prices at Your Hospital, if They Exist

Hunger in the Heart of Empire: Pellagra in the United States

what features or design decisions would it pick that PostgreSQL and MySQL cannot adapt for historic reasons?

Incident: China Airlines A333 at Taipei on Jun 14th 2020, all primary computers, reversers and autobrakes failed on touchdown

The CDC reported 11.3 million wasted COVID-19 vaccine doses in 8 months

The Lessons of Defeat in Afghanistan: After twenty years, it hardly needs saying that America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were disastrous to U.S. interests and standing.

For millennia strategists have said that in war, simplicity maximizes the odds of success. But here is the strategy devised by our scholar-soldier General Petratus. It will be mocked by military historians for centuries, perhaps longer.

This one was fun – the Court was pointing out that Dr. Hanssen testified that 30-43% of respondents in a survey he did “regularly” use Windows phones, even though MSFT has 0% market share in 2018 and no longer sell phones!

9.5

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A Right-Wing Troll Appears To Have Tweeted About An FBI Investigation Into The Michigan Kidnapping Plot Before It Went Public

A mind-blowing graphic in today’s Times on what $85bn worth of lost equipment means in practice for the Taliban:

Thanks to the printing press, Martin Luther could distribute this document broadly and start the Reformation. Within a matter of years, everybody knew about his theses. They had traveled across Europe, with every copy conveying exactly the same message.

The Oasis of Palmyra Unearthing the history of the ancient city-state.

The details: NASA Administrator Bill Nelson was excused from rules that would have barred him from working with Lockheed Martin, for which he was a paid advisory board member.

Today, React Native is a polarizing framework.

To Defeat Delta Variant, Experts Recommend Doing All The Things That Didn’t Work The First Time

One of my biggest problems with the Web today is the lack of separation between documents and “apps”.

They teach you that in school. What they don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified.

Dutch Entrepreneurs avoiding negative interest by opening multiple bank accounts

The leadership’s unshakable attachment to the viability of the Afghan government and the success of nation-building wasn’t based on evidence. It was a belief based on a political and institutional need that it be true. It was necessary to maintain the illusion that the U.S. was there to modernize and globally integrate Afghanistan at the political level. Institutionally, it was needed to justify the losses (thousands of U.S. lives) and vast expense (trillions of dollars) already consumed by the venture and protect the careers of those involved with it. As a result of these imperatives, dissenting voices were ground into dust by the national security bureaucracy and by political factions committed to the social-reform effort there.

Amazon asked FCC to reject Starlink plan because it can’t compete, SpaceX says

Bird Photographer of the Year 2021 Winners

Churchill’s wartime tunnels under white cliffs of Dover open to the public

Joe Rogan’s podcast offers a vital canvas for new perspectives and critical thought

Stop Death Shaming: Mocking the unvaccinated dead does not save lives.

Japan needs a lot more tech workers. Can it find a place for women?

Use of artificial intelligence for image analysis in breast cancer screening programmes: systematic review of test accuracy

The future needs files

The Persistent Gravity of Cross Platform

How did the plain green lawn become the central landscaping feature in America, and what is the ecological cost?

Seedless blackberries with a year-round growing season? Gene editing opens up new doors for radical improvements in the long-stagnant berry market

Lest you think that a multiple of forward sales of ninety-three is normal, or that a price-to-sales-to-growth ratio of one is normal, I can tell you that historically speaking, it is not normal.

Italy Seeks to Shield Supercars From Combustion Engine Ban

ANA, JAL plan drone services to boost remote areas, own bottom lines

8.29

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Machine learning’s crumbling foundations. Doing ‘data science’ with bad data.

ASML is the most important company you’ve never heard of.

You’ll hear a lot of utilitarian nonsense about $2.2 trillion etc. but that’s just the price tag you see. What you don’t see, as Harry Hazlitt reminds us, is where the real costs are — the lost opportunities, the Afghan and American lives spent, the bureaucracy empowered, the capital diverted from productive work — that come with prosecuting endless war for impossible democracy.Before Afghanistan was there a Dept. of Homeland Security? The Patriot Act? The Military Commissions Act? A Global War on Terror?Are those part of that $2.2 trillion? No. They aren’t. And yet we paid them anyway.

Censored COVID commentary.

Hospitals and Insurers Didn’t Want You to See These Prices. Here’s Why.

I Was There: When the DC-8 Went Supersonic

Meet the Real-Life Inspiration Behind “Mr. Toad”

More than anything, the Beetle demonstrated the tremendous advances robotic manipulators made in practical applications. This directly lead to the invention of RUM in 1960 (Remote Underwater Manipulator), which could crawl along the ocean bed 20,000 feet from the surface. The lessons learned in testing and improving Beetle and RUM lead to their prized relative in 1964: the Deep Sea Vehicle (DSV) Alvin. Among Alvin’s stunning exploits…being the first manned sub to explore the Titanic in 1986.

Terms of Service, didn’t read.

Outgoing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo marked his final day in office Monday by handing out four sentence commutations and one pardon. He also made a parole board referral for a 76-year-old man over his role in the deadly 1981 Brink’s armored car robbery. David Gilbert, a Weather Underground member who was convicted of three counts of second-degree murder and four counts of first-degree robbery for his role in the crime that resulted in the deaths of Nyack police Sgt. Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly Brown as well as Brink’s guard Peter Paige. He was serving a sentence of 75 years to life in prison with no possibility of parole until 2056. Gilbert’s son, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, had lobbied Cuomo for his release

The real reason you’re not more productive at work? It’s not boredom—it’s bad UX Surprise! Enterprise software still stinks.

Silicon Valley’s driverless car dream is on the road to disaster

Open-Source Insulin: Biohackers Aiming For Distributed Production

Is Hacker News a Good Predictor of Future Tech Trends?

California’s leaders are turning the state into a third world nation complete with shantytowns. Somewhere around half of all fires in Los Angeles and the Bay Area are in tent cities and shantytowns euphemistically referred to as “homeless encampments.” In them, the strong are allowed to prey upon the weak. Many of the fires are started deliberately as revenge and retaliation for violence and crime.

The answer, it turned out, is Googlespeak™.

Nike’s End of Men: Why Nike no longer wants us to Be Like Mike

The issue of safeguarding against exploitation also applies for surrogacy, which is why most surrogacy agencies recommend that a surrogate limit the number of her pregnancies to no more than four times. Yet, according to Tober’s study, many fertility doctors and surrogates ignore these recommendations and push the limits of their bodies for financial gain. Some countries have enacted policies to counter that ability. In 2015, India, which used to have a thriving international surrogacy program, placed restrictions on the program because of popular protests led by women’s rights activists who pointed out that these programs were putting poor, uneducated women at risk of exploitation by the rich. Many of these women lived in substandard housing that were essentially foreign baby mills. Now surrogacy is only available to Indian couples or single people who need a surrogate to carry a baby.

Torrance police find 300 unopened recall ballots, with gun, drugs and mail, in sleeping man’s car

Why Innovation Heroes are a Sign of a Dysfunctional Organization

Surveillance of the Internet Backbone

Ukrainian historians say that hundreds of thousands of people were killed during Joseph Stalin’s violent repression of the 1930s, with other mass graves found in Odessa and elsewhere in Ukraine.

Increasing productivity with significant price deflation creates a depressing environment. Farmers have to invest in new methods and equipment just to stay even. Their debts are in dollars, not bushels of wheat, meaning it can be increasingly difficult to pay the bills. This impact is doubly true for tenant farmers (who skew young) that rent instead of own land. William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” and the Green Corn Rebellion are just two examples of how farm product price deflation leads to unrest and radicalism in rural areas. Once politicians could afford to pay off farmers with massive subsidy programs, they did.

Our work collectively shows that the confluence of vehicle electrification, vehicle automation and vehicle sharing may not – contrary to existing discourse – produce a favorable energy outcome.

China’s cyberspace watchdog, the CAC, just published a long (and unprecedented) set of draft regulations for recommendation algorithms. The short version: they will be tightly controlled. Key points below.

It was well known that the Taliban would come back. Afghanistan never had a functioning government and we should have prepared for the inevitable.

The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

Nvidia charges $10k for their datacenter GPUs, and they fly off the shelves. If Samsung or Intel were manufacturing, these would not be as powerful or efficient. Nvidia’s architecture prowess allows the portability of software and ease of use. It enables the new use cases for GPUs. Most power usage on GPUs is still burned on data movement and computation. Nvidia GPUs are enabled by TSMC’s prowess in leading edge silicon and advanced packaging.

How can you improve a process when you don’t know what the right process is?

Unhappy with her breast implant surgery, she wrote negative reviews. Now she owes the surgeon $30K

Scanning QR Codes in Restaurants: Why A Meal May Cost You Your Privacy

Missile Base for Sale

8.22

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With poor data, deficient requirements and little oversight, massive public spending still hasn’t solved the rural internet access problem

What about the events of the past few weeks has surprised you, and what was the predictable result of Biden’s policy announcement in April?

Many Americans aren’t aware they’re being tracked with facial recognition while shopping

Real Milk, No Cows Necessary

With ‘bounce tracking,’ web-sites can circumvent the cookie blocking built into many browsers.

Is it a stretch to assume that the DOJ decides that all mixers predominately exist to launder money and anybody who participates whatsoever can be charged with conspiracy to facilitate laundering? Does ownership of TORN itself make you susceptible to such charges? Does listing TORN on an exchange?

A letter sent by Digital Agenda committee chairman Manuel Hoferlin claims Apple is treading a “dangerous path” and is undermining “secure and confidential communication,” according to Heise Online. The letter to Cook urges Apple to not implement the system, both to protect society’s data, and to avoid “foreseeable problems” for the company itself.

In March, Petaluma in Sonoma county became the first city in the US to ban future gas station construction or any new pumps on existing sites. In July Sonoma county’s Regional Climate Protection Authority voted to explore ways to support the nine cities in the county considering bans of their own. A final vote on the resolution is scheduled for September.

Apple says researchers can vet its child safety features. But it’s suing a startup that does just that.

This is a far greater return than was available in the overall stock market over the same period. $10,000 invested in an S&P 500 index fund on September 18, 2001, would now be worth $61,613. That is, defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by 58 percent during the Afghanistan War.

Now, while the biggest US military failure in our lifetimes is going on—the final dishonorable chapter to a saga sparked by an attack that claimed more American lives than Antietam or Pearl Harbor—both the president and his spokesperson are simply, unbelievably just…not at work. Psaki, who had plenty of time to do Vogue covers and make TikTok videos with influencers, is simply not responding to email and is apparently on vacation. Biden himself hasn’t said or tweeted anything of substance either (as of this writing he’s scheduled a speech this afternoon). The progressive wing of the party in power—Bernie, AOC, the ‘squad’, the whole crew that normally tweets 10 times per day and has opinions on everything—goes absolutely mute when confronted by some hard, inconvenient reality outside the US liberal bubble like Cuba or Afghanistan. As the situation in Afghanistan worsened, the charismatic new face of progressive politics was…enthusing about public libraries. Yay!

Apple’s device surveillance plan is a threat to user privacy — and press freedom

One interesting thing about all this is that the same illiberalism that Orban’s American critics accuse him of is pretty much a fact of life in contemporary America, under liberalism. It can sometimes be worse. In Orban’s Hungary, you are perfectly free to criticize the government’s stance on gender ideology, and you will not have to worry about being cancelled at your job or in any other way. Is that true in the US? Of course not, not for many millions of us.

REUTERS: “The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.”

Free Software NOT as in `free speech,` NOR as in `free beer

End of Social Media

Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps, research finds

Poorly resourced state governments are no match for the lobbying firepower of Apple, the most valuable company in the world.

Five minutes! Such were the demands on the news agenda of the looming coronavirus pandemic in the early spring of 2020. Coverage of all other developments was eclipsed by COVID. The networks had long since given up covering the war as a war. The pandemic meant that they barely paid attention to the prospect of peace.

8.15

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With “2020 hindsight,” the 2000s housing cycle is not a boom-bust but rather a boom- bust- rebound at both the national level and across cities. We argue this pattern reflects a larger role for fundamentally-rooted explanations than previously thought. We construct a city-level long-run fundamental using a spatial equilibrium regression framework in which house prices are determined by local income, amenities, and supply. The fundamental predicts not only 1997-2019 price and rent growth but also the amplitude of the boom-bust-rebound and foreclosures. This evidence motivates our neo-Kindlebergerian model, in which an improvement in fundamentals triggers a boom-bust-rebound. Agents learn about the fundamentals by observing “dividends” but become over-optimistic due to diagnostic expectations. A bust ensues when over-optimistic beliefs start to correct, exacerbated by a price-foreclosure spiral that drives prices below their long-run level. The rebound follows as prices converge to a path commensurate with higher fundamental growth. The estimated model explains the boom-bust-rebound with a single
fundamental shock and accounts quantitatively and foreclosures.

How Software Is Eating the Car

Chinese state media floats idea of creating a new highly isolated ‘Covid city’ to handle all inbound foreign flights to guard against Covid-19

As the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals recently observed, “it appears that prosecutors worked hand-in-hand with Epstein’s lawyers – or at the very least acceded to their requests – to keep the NPA’s existence and terms hidden from victims.” I lay out this evidence – of prosecutors and federal officials fast-tracking the Epstein NPA, of reaching the NPA before victims were interviewed, of high level DOJ participation in the Epstein deal – because there’s one important question that remains unanswered: Why did the federal government go to these lengths to protect Epstein and his co-conspirators?

Smartphone vendors are struggling to differentiate their products. Apple does this with its hardware/software combination, but none of the other vendors control the Operating System they use. Instead, they are dependent on Google who is seemingly ambivalent about Android. This leaves the AP as one of the few ways these other vendors can differentiate. This point has been hammered home lately as Apple seems to have picked up much (maybe most) of the share opened up by Huawei’s exit. At the same time, pricing for Android phones has come under pressure, see above about the rapid proliferation of 5G phones.

The most recent version has been fancified and crippled. First of all, when you open the app, it doesn’t take you to where you were last reading. It insists on starting with “news of the day” (there are lots of other sites for that stuff) and you have to press “week” to get back into the actual publication. When you do that, even though it knows which articles you’ve read (marking them with a check-mark in the table of contents) it maddeningly doesn’t take you to where you were last. So you have to hunt through the table of contents to get yourself restarted.

Ancestry.com Just Gave Itself the Rights to Your Beloved Family Photos

From Ancient Egypt to the Persian Empire, an ingenious method of catching the breeze kept people cool for millennia. In the search for emissions-free cooling, the “wind catcher” could once again come to our aid.

People are fleeing California for Texas and Idaho; Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are the three states with the most outbound moves.

We rented a California vacation home and got spied on by a surveillance camera

Hacker Says He Found a ‘Tractorload of Vulnerabilities’ at John Deere

In early 2020, the world missed its chance to stop Covid-19. Insight exposes how Beijing’s ten-year takeover of the global health watchdog sowed the seeds of disaster.