1.8

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Charlie Munger, the blunt and brilliant vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., isn’t big on small talk. My first encounter with him was in 2004 at the Sunday brunch Warren Buffett used to hold at Berkshire’s annual meeting. I was getting something at a buffet table, and Mr. Munger walked up and began ladling food onto his plate. I introduced myself and held out my hand: “I’m the guy who just revised the Graham book.”

Now that I work at a satellite imagery company, I’ve become acutely aware of the long sequence of hurdles every satellite image must navigate to arrive safely before your eyes. The more I’ve learned about these hurdles, the greater my sense of wonder has grown that people figured this stuff out in the 50s… Launch is hard. Manufacturing is hard. Getting stuff built and tested on Earth to work in a zero G, frigid, irradiated vacuum is hard. Summarily: space is hard.² Because of the challenge of space, there’s another key part of every mission that is criminally overlooked. It’s the very foundation of the modern space technology stack, the bedrock of the two-way communication between humans on Earth and assets in space known as the “ground segment” (“ground” for short).³ You could say…ground is hard ?.

ONE of the world’s most-loved hymns was first heard on this day 250 years ago. Amazing Grace was written by John Newton for a sermon he gave on New Year’s Day 1773 at the parish church of St Peter and St Paul in Buckinghamshire, where he was a curate.

But never have I seen the chaotic meltdown of an airline like that seen during the Christmas period of Southwest Airlines. On Boxing Day, the Luv airline canceled two-thirds of its flights. Its hubs in places like Baltimore and Chicago Midway were a sea of humanity and baggage. Southwest’s meltdown was simply unbelievable.

A decade ago, only a handful of launch companies existed in the US; United Launch Alliance was the big dog, with SpaceX starting to nip at its heels. Since then, however, a multiplicity of new launch startups have arrived in the United States, many of which developed their own rocket engines. As a result, we are now in the golden age of rocketry, with many different startups and approaches to pushing payloads into space.

Liu is repurposing the top electronics contract manufacturer into an electric vehicle powerhouse. Foxconn, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, is gearing up to supply cars, and the chips and batteries that go into them, to global marques. It sees automakers entrusting the company with production in Indonesia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, the United States and beyond. By 2025, Liu wants to take 5% of the global electric-vehicle market and generate annual revenue of T$1 trillion ($32.6 billion) – roughly 15% of Foxconn’s forecast 2022 top line, per analyst estimates from Refinitiv.

What does that mean in practice? For starters, a lot more oil trade will be done in renminbi. Xi announced that, over the next three to five years, China would not only dramatically increase imports from GCC countries, but work towards “all-dimensional energy co-operation”. This could potentially involve joint exploration and production in places such as the South China Sea, as well as investments in refineries, chemicals and plastics. Beijing’s hope is that all of it will be paid for in renminbi, on the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange, as early as 2025.

Unlike Chouinard, however, Green said that his decision was because he “chose God.” He explained that his faith was the “true source” of his success, and giving away his company came down to his own struggle between considering himself an owner of his company, or a steward.

Back when I was consulting for a non-Japanese camera company early this century, one of the constant discussions we had was “how do we fix the user problem?” Not the engineering problem, but the user problem.

China is pausing massive investments aimed at buildinga chip industry to compete with the US, as a nationwide Covid resurgence strains the world’s No. 2 economy and Beijing’s finances. Top officials are discussing ways to move away from costly subsidies that have so far borne little fruit and encouraged both graft and American sanctions, people familiar with the matter said. While some continue to push for incentives of as much as 1 trillion yuan ($145 billion), other policymakers have lost their taste for an investment-led approach that’s not yielded the results anticipated, the people said.

With HSS’s new guidance, it’s critical to have BAAs signed for destinations that will handle PHI. Remember that some platforms like Facebook, Google, and Hubspot won’t even sign a BAA. Other tools charge extra for a signed BAA. To prevent inadvertently sharing PHI where you don’t have a BAA, you’ll need to invest in putting workflows in place.

In its pre-Covid prime, the total value of Chinese worldwide travel was roughly the size of Portugal’s gross domestic product, or just over a quarter of a trillion dollars. The number of Chinese who made trips outside the mainland in 2019 — some 155mn people — represented a population slightly larger than Russia’s. In that same year, Chinese overseas spending on luxury goods was larger than the current $90bn market capitalisation of General Electric.

Following a yearly habit: this is the eighth edition of the list of visualizations, charts, graphics, maps, data and satellite journalism and science photography lists, version 2022.

Stunning and adventurous, Roland’s 50th Anniversary Concept Piano combines sound, design, and connectivity into an instrument of the future.

Google had a confidential plan to turn the collection of slides into an immense archive that — with the help of the company’s burgeoning, and potentially profitable, AI business — could help create tools to aid the diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other diseases. And it would seek first, exclusive dibs to do so. “The chief concern,” Google’s liaison in the military warned the leaders of the repository, “is keeping this out of the press.”

As a startup, what are your must-have sections for a landing page?

The hotel would be built at the site where the American League was founded, an event memorialized by a plaque on a stone barrier on the southeast side of the property, according to members of the Society of American Baseball Research.

Duplicate registrations aren’t always some sinister voter fraud plot. They can happen when a person is registered under variations of their name. For example, John Smith is registered to vote under the name John Smith at the DMV and John J. Smith when they fill out a voter registration form at a fair. Another common example is a woman who is registered to vote under her maiden name and her married name.

After reading a Popular Science article on the concept in 2011, Caltech Board of Trustees lifetime member Donald Bren approached the school in hopes of making the science fiction idea a reality. The resultant Space Solar Power Project, co-funded by defense manufacturer Northrop Grumman alongside the Bren family’s $100 million endowment, saw its first major milestone completion yesterday via the SSPD arrival above Earth.

Goodwillfinds.com is an e-commerce site, which sells previously owned merchandise, which has been donated to Goodwill. We cover many of the tactical challenges (onboarding SKUs, product content, fulfillment, and curation), as well as the opportunities of this new “CircularCommerce” space. We also get some of Matt’s predictions about what’s coming next in digital commerce.

Let no one make this out to be a joke or idle talk; I am in dead earnest, since by the grace of God I have learned to know a great deal about Satan. If he can twist and pervert the Word of God and the Scriptures, what will he not be able to do with my or someone else’s words?

The panel, which was required by Congress under a 2020 law to reform how the FAA certifies new airplanes, includes MIT lecturer and aerospace engineer Javier de Luis whose sister was killed in a MAX crash, as well as experts from NASA, the FAA, labor unions, Airbus (AIR.PA), Southwest Airlines (LUV.N), American Airlines (AAL.O), United Airlines (UAL.O), GE Aviation (GE.N), FedEx Express (FDX.N) and Pratt & Whitney.

Then . . . nothing happened. No other media outlets pursued the story. Not the six local TV stations or WNYC, or Politico, New York, the Times, the Daily News. Not even Newsday, the formerly-august news source for Long Island. Grant Lally, the publisher and owner of the North Shore Leader, told me he didn’t get a single call from another publication inquiring about it. “If this had run 25 years ago, it would have been gobbled up,” he said. “There’d have been 20 follow ups from Newsday and other publications and the weeklies.”

Apollo believed in Carvana’s plan to sell cars online and thought that the 10.25 per cent annual coupon on offer in the overall $3bn bond issuance offered plenty of protection. The firm was also reassured by a study into Carvana’s business model it, along with other investors, had commissioned from Bain & Co in early 2022. Apollo, considered by many to be the canniest credit investor in the world, had been a longtime investor in the online car retailer’s debt.

The next blue bird might be a surprise peace in Ukraine, which instantly lowers energy and food costs. A thaw in the US-China cold war, which boosts global trade. A new digital technology that revives productivity, helping to contain inflation. None of this may seem likely, but then surprise is the essential nature of blue birds.

It was the Global East and South that were harmed the most by this fraud. And I will argue that the reason these countries let the fox in the hen house yet again was misplaced trust due to centuries of social conditioning, which has historically resulted in little “white” soy-boys like SBF being given an automatic seat at the proverbial table, no questions asked.

An unexpected ancient manufacturing strategy may hold the key to designing concrete that lasts for millennia.

1.1

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Happy New Year!

General guidance when working as a cloud engineer

This is not the case for the logic used by many of the authors and I think their advice regarding the issue is not particularly worth paying attention to for this reason.

In some cases, filling a tank with gas has become cheaper than charging an electric vehicle

It was only one of the many agencies from the government to “help” Twitter.

BCN Ranking collects real sales data from approximately 40% of the Japanese retailers – this is not a worldwide market share report.

When it comes to assigning dates to military campaigns described in the Bible, the parameters of the debate take on almost biblical proportions. Exactly when did the Amalekites wage war against the Hebrews in the wilderness? Did Joshua fight the Battle of Jericho in 1500 B.C. or in 1400 B.C. — or at all?

The NTSB’s critique noted that the final report failed to include its comments and misstated other documents and findings in assessing the blame to Boeing. The NTSB also concluded Boeing was partly culpable.

And the world that we are currently living in, John Cleese now says, is so “woke” that it no longer allows for creativity. This is the same environment that just four years ago said that Monty Python’s Flying Circus would never get made today because the group wasn’t “diverse” enough. In an interview with Nick Gillespie for Reason magazine, Cleese talks about his career in a wide-ranging interview and talks about being creative and making people laugh.

For more than two years, members of the House of Representatives have enjoyed a privilege unavailable to any of their predecessors: the ability to vote on legislation without being in the Capitol.

Banks have become absentee landlords. When banks were mostly making their money from interest and from small loans, the CEO and the bank employees lived within the community. There was not an insurmountable wage and savings gap between the top of the bank and the lower rungs of its workers and of the community it served. There wasn’t a huge income inequality between people in the finance sector and everybody else. The check cashers employees are next door neighbors, they are not being driven in to work everyday and then driven out after hours to escape the people they served just hours ago.

The Weekend Australian unearthed a paper Fauci wrote for the American Society for Microbiology in October 2012 in which he argued in support of gain-of-function research. Such research involves making viruses more infectious and/or deadly. Experts have raised the possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic could have originated from a potential lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, where gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses have been conducted.

The Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index enables business leaders, government policymakers, and taxpayers to gauge how their states’ tax systems compare. While there are many ways to show how muchis collected in taxes by state governments, the Index is designed to show how well states structure their tax systems and provides a road map for improvement.

Bankman-Fried’s collaboration with Lewis is said to have been ongoing for around six months, long before financial irregularities were spotted, but it was first reported after FTX’s collapse in November, when entertainment newsletter The Ankler leaked a note from Lewis’ publishing agency pitching the book to potential movie rights buyers.

3. Boeing engineers. Martha, a former Boeing engineer, points out, “How depressing to work for a company that just said they’re not going to do a new commercial jet for a decade.” Well said. CEO Dave Calhoun’s demotivational management style might not be working.

So, we are midway through this order when we learn that it’s going to get much more difficult for us. Meanwhile we can see in the distributor’s system that payments for the first orders have been approved for payment but there is a hold on the checks. We reach out to the distributor and are informed that we are indeed on payment hold and that the food broker was incorrect when he told us that this order was unique because it was for a specific retailer and supposedly had a place to go. We were now in too deep to stop and we knew our only way to get paid would be to finish the order so it could leave the distributor and go to the retailer.

Kivirist and the other plaintiffs argued that the categories are arbitrary and lead to situations in which, for example, Kivirist could serve her homemade muffins to one of her B&B guests but couldn’t sell a box of them for guests to take home. In the case of the Radls, when a friend who sells honey and maple syrup suggested that they sell the coffee beans they had roasted as a hobby for years, they enthusiastically bought a professional coffee bean roaster, only to learn from a local health inspector that honey and maple syrup were OK, but selling coffee beans was illegal.

I have always loved Texas, as much as any Texan is given to love Texas. The beauty of its peerless landscapes blazes in my memories even now, brighter than the day before me. I think of calamitous slate thunderheads hulking over a green afternoon parking lot hissing with summer rain; fields of cobalt bluebonnets ridged with paintbrushes the color of umber and fire; the crisp, clear, neon perfection of a single Sonic Drive-In square in the center of some interminable grassy plain on a shadowless, starry night. But I have also been transfixed by Texas’ brutal counterpoints. I remember a heifer I saw lying at the bottom of a creek with an eye as milky pale as an opal; a garter snake my mother hacked in half with a hoe in our garden at sundown; every steer skull and cowhide a reminder that death is nearby in pitiless, harsh places, which can also be beautiful, even sublime. My constitution has been shaped by the home I loved, so maybe I had neglected to accept that I had walked away.

Del Prado’s motto is “Food and service over systems,” trying to eschew corporate trappings. “Once you are corporate you are done.” But therein lies the paradox.

12.25

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Merry Christmas

Israel’s decades-long peace with Jordan is unraveling, a development that threatens to upset a fragile regional stability that is being challenged by countries like Iran, Russia, and China, a think tank report warns.

Offenders committed at least 420 acts of hostility against 397 separate churches in the United States between January 2018 and September 2022. These cases include everything from arson and gun-related violence to vandalism and bomb threats, the copiously documented, 84-page report specifies.

The picture is widely viewed as a work of art. More importantly to its creator, however, it was also a feat of electrical engineering. The longtime Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor used it to illustrate a lecture, famously titled “How to make applesauce,” in which he explained the pioneering flash technology that helped him take the shot.

“People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority,” Mr. Toyoda said to reporters during a visit to Thailand. “That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.”

The Ukrainian army has released an instructional video explaining how Russian soldiers should surrender to a drone:

Port Authority Inspector General John Gay said: “This sophisticated, internationally coordinated conspiracy allegedly targeted hard-working taxi drivers trying to earn an honest living. The Port Authority has zero tolerance for bad actors violating the law at our facilities. We thank Damian Williams and the Southern District for their partnership as we continue our relentless commitment to detecting and disrupting illegal behavior at our facilities across the region.”

Many of those newly liberated works were forgotten, partly due to their great age, but also because no one knew who they belonged to (Congress abolished the requirement to register copyrights in 1976), so no one could revive or reissue them while they were still in the popular imagination, depriving them of new leases on life.

Tired of the tactics, a pair of energy industry groups have filed a lawsuit, alleging the Biden administration has failed to comply with federal mandates regarding how often auctions of land for oil and gas drilling are held.

“Foreign government-controlled laboratories should not be eligible to receive U.S. taxpayer dollars while they disregard our policies, dodge congressional oversight, or act against our national interest,” seven watchdog organizations led by the White Coat Waste Project wrote in a letter sent Friday to lawmakers on the House and Senate appropriations committees.

One of the problems with perverting the federal bureaucracy, as the Democrats have done, is that pretty much everyone loses faith in the integrity of government. At this point, there is no reason to assume that government numbers are accurate and unfudged. We have been lied to, too many times.

Gus Gran says it took them five hours to get only three miles back home.

After that Saturday night trip, I started asking my passengers how much they’d paid and comparing it to what I’d earned. The results were all over the map. I had two trips where I got more than 80 percent of the total fare, including tips. I had a couple of others where I earned less than 30 percent.

Not long ago, CIA veterans tell me, the information above the “tearline” of a U.S. government intelligence cable would include the station of origin and any other CIA offices copied on the report. I spent much of today looking at exactly similar documents, seemingly written by the same people, except the “offices” copied at the top of their reports weren’t other agency stations, but Twitter’s Silicon Valley colleagues: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, even Wikipedia. It turns out these are the new principal intelligence outposts of the American empire. A subplot is these companies seem not to have had much choice in being made key parts of a global surveillance and information control apparatus, although evidence suggests their Quislingian executives were mostly all thrilled to be absorbed. Details on those “Other Government Agencies” soon, probably tomorrow.

The Essay: 2022 gave us many reasons to be encouraged about our future 5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … Rule of the Robotsauthor Martin Ford on the impact of artificial intelligence

“Always be positive”; Rejoice!

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My father has always emphasized positivity. I have learned much from both parents in this respect.



And, so it was while chatting over lunch recently that a long time friend mentioned that my posts have become cynical.

Maybe?

Perhaps my news flow needs a re-think.



Philippians 4:4-7:

Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice.

5 Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand.

6 Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.

7 And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.



While traveling a few months ago, the proprietor of a superb and affordable restaurant asked where we were from? I replied “United States”



We then spoke of his farm, family, the long time “tavern” where a seemingly endless mezze was on offer for €20.00 per person and the joys of friendship over a terrific meal. Ah, the delight of fresh food and a bit of wine, finished off with a delicious date cake.







Later, he turned to me and asked if I had heard of the World Economic Forum? I replied yes.

“You know they are screwing us”, he said while continuing to mention currency and debt manipulation combined with globalist policies – “sticking it to the little guy”.

I thought a bit and replied there are always challenges and opportunities.

Yet, we live in a time of incredible opportunity. It is easier than ever to create something, work with people anywhere and learn, constantly. Admittedly, there are plenty of challenges, but we must balance that with the new new thing.

As ever, while zooming through Advent and just days from Christmas, this is a terrific time to count our endless blessings. We pray for wisdom, smart and well intentioned elected officials, great neighbors and health for all.



So, I pray for a vigorous, healthy and successful 2023 for everyone.



Merry Christmas!





P.S.

What is Advent?

While chatting in a cafe recently, one of the employees inquired about Advent? Another jumped in: “my neighbors gave us an advent calendar, which is fun”.

I replied that it is a time of preparation to celebrate the birth of Christ, our savior on 25 December.

One of the great things about this time of year is the opportunity to “slow down” and observe this preparation. For some, it’s outdoor lights. For others, a very elaborate outdoor pageant. Still others, a time to visit with friends and enjoy parties, social and spiritual events.

The long nights offer those of us in the Northern Hemisphere an opportunity to observe preparation and celebration throughout our neighborhoods.

Ecclesiastes 2: 24 – 26

“A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?”

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12.18

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software mistakenly restricted the size of shims to a maximum thickness of 0.061 in.

But very few startups do this, because their investors won’t let them. That brings me to the other dirty not-so-secret of the startup world: when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company’s assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy.

The classification process is determined inside the Intelligence Branch, all by themselves. The Intelligence Branch has full control over what is considered classified information and what is not. The Intelligence Branch defines what is a “national security interest” and what is not. A great technique for hiding fingerprints of corrupt and illegal activity. The Intelligence Branch does all redactions.

Dow is just one of a fast-growing number of companies, nonprofit groups and countries transforming publicly available data into intelligence for strategic and economic advantage. China has the largest, most focused effort, while U.S. spy agencies, with deeply ingrained habits of operating in the shadows, have been slow to adapt to a world in which much of what is important isn’t secret, according to dozens of officials and many studies.

“Companies moving to inland states are doing a much better job of getting new talent, keeping people, and not having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep someone happy,” Kesteven said. While states previously focused on luring companies to help build a tech hub, they now recognize it’s a multi-pronged strategy that includes attracting human capital, according to the Milken report.

So how have Page and Brin used their newfound freedom? A look inside their worlds reveals two strikingly different empires, each stamped by the interests and inclinations of the man who oversees it. Brin is an inquisitive philanthropist pursuing intellectual curiosities and humanitarian-minded projects; Page has leveraged his vast wealth to retreat from the public eye, ceding day-to-day oversight of his ventures to a small circle of trusted lieutenants. But at their core, the former partners — who still retain control of Alphabet, the $1.2 trillion parent company of Google — share a single overriding similarity: Both rely on a tangled web of corporate entities and family offices that serve to minimize their tax obligations, protect them from liability, and shield their wealth from public view. Their business ventures and personal styles may differ, but their ultimate goal is the same: the freedom to pursue their interests without oversight or restraint. 

Former Twitter employee Ahmad Abouammo was found guilty of spying for the government of Saudi Arabia, according to a report from Bloomberg. The jury handed down its judgment in a San Francisco federal court on Tuesday, where Abouammo was also convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering, and falsifying records.

EatStreet has also been looking for buyers or new investors, but the search has proven unsuccessful.  “Throughout August, September, and October of 2022, EatStreet continued to engage in discussions with a national entity that expressed interest in purchasing or funding EatStreet,” the company wrote, explaining that fulfilling the settlement agreement would be part of any such deal. 

The Overture Maps Foundation, as the new effort is called, is officially hosted by the Linux Foundation, but the program is driven by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Facebook’s parent company Meta, Microsoft and Dutch mapping company TomTom.

But the original Queen of the Skies was the creation of a very different Boeing, a very different Seattle. The company was headquartered here, and it was by far the most important employer in Jet City and the entire region. Not only that, but the 747 entered service amid the Boeing Bust, as the company was cutting jobs after years of rapid growth slammed into low gear. More than 60% of the workforce was laid off, and the company was close to seeking bankruptcy protection.

According to Mudge, Twitter’s information security was essentially nil. In his report, he alleges that many employees installed spyware on work computers at the behest of external organizations. And because Twitter didn’t actively monitor employee devices, it mostly discovered such spyware by accident. This spyware—essentially a malicious program that logs user activity and steals data—could have been used by rival social media firms or foreign governments to access sensitive information on users, including their addresses, phone numbers, physical location of their last login, and financial information. And the spyware’s access to Twitter’s systems, Mudge says, could have been exacerbated by the fact that many employees had disabled security updates, firewalls, and settings that would have prevented unauthorized users from remotely controlling their computers.

The Great Barrington Plan: Would Focused Protection Have Worked?

And there you have it, Ms. Sosa: twenty of the Texanist’s favorite Christmas songs by Texans. He knows it’s more than what you requested, but, like so many Christmas-minded Texas musicians, the Texanist is a generous sort. Happy holidays! 

12.11

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During a three-month period at the beginning of this year, Northwestern charged for fewer than 1% of messages on its MyChart portal. Northwestern charges $35 per encounter, said spokesman Christopher King. Similarly, Lurie has charged for about 300 MyChart encounters in the last year, a sliver of the nearly 300,000 messages it’s received, said Dr. Ravi Patel, vice president of digital health for Lurie.

If the 20th century was the industrial century, the 21st is the computing century. Microchips are becoming much smaller, much faster, and much cheaper. Software is replacing hardware as the main focus of innovation. Real-life problems (like how to detect cancer, fold proteins, or regulate traffic in cities) are starting to be solved by algorithms (artificial intelligence.) And finally, all of these individual bits of technology are being networked so they can talk to each other.

“The real barrier” to setting up manufacturing in the U.S. “is comparative cost to build and operate,” it said.

The entire shooting process was live-streamed on TikTok, allowing fans and followers to watch as Lampert worked to construct, compose and capture his shot. The resulting photograph is a convincing composition, with the LEGO Eiffel Tower appearing so real it’s hard to believe he wasn’t in Paris at a quick glance.

The woke agenda has caused millions of Americans to leave” their deep blue states “for greener pastures,” and particularly for Florida—the anti-woke promised land, the main destination of the new exodus of Americans voting with their feet for lower taxes, schools open for in-person instruction but closed to woke indoctrination, businesses unhampered by extreme anti-COVID rules, and citizens enjoying law and order. This pro-freedom, anti-woke agenda, roughly the opposite of California’s and New York’s, is what Florida has gotten emphatically right.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Boeing has in effect permanently shuttered its Moscow Design Center, formerly the company’s preeminent overseas engineering facility that at one time housed about 1,500 engineers. “Right now, it’s gone,” said Lynne Hopper, Boeing vice president of engineering strategy and operations. Since the summer, Boeing has been facilitating travel for about 100 Russian engineers and their families who wanted out — a process now complete — and is arranging jobs for them at its facilities in other countries.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Jeff Bezos-owned publication has lost 500,000 subscribers since Trump left office in January 2021, which amounts to a decline of roughly 20 percent. The Post is on track to lose money in 2022 after years of profitability. The New York Times reported in August that the Post‘s business has “stalled” since President Joe Biden was sworn in, and layoffs are being discussed amid management’s frustration with “numerous low performers in the newsroom.” Trump called it as early as December 2017, when he predicted that “newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes.” The Post is hardly the only media outlet suffering in the post-Trump era. BuzzFeed, Gannett, and CNN announced significant layoffs this month in an effort to cut costs.

And Boom promises radical transformation: The company’s founder, Blake Scholl, has said repeatedly that its goal is delivering passengers “anywhere in the world in four hours for $100.”

12.4

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The US network — linked to individuals associated with the US military — operated across many internet services and focused on Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Somalia, Syria, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

But Darwin was wrong and that’s why Gómez-Silva is here.

Farmer’s bigger problem was that her patients weren’t dying fast enough. Some fished, drove tractors, and babysat grandchildren. Their longevity prompted concern around the office because of a complicated formula that governs the Medicare benefit. The federal government, recognizing that an individual patient might not die within the predicted six months, effectively demands repayment from hospices when the average length of stay of all patients exceeds six months.

Miniature Calendar is an incredible ongoing project by Japanese artist Tatsuya Tanaka, that features beautiful miniature dioramas of everyday life using common household objects such as food, cloth, stationery, electronic devices, and even masks.

Those praying for its awakening (basically, everyone in real estate) need office workers to return. This is why some office landlords are quietly applauding Big Tech’s mass firings, hoping the thousands of now unemployed engineers will portend a buyer’s market for talent, one so strong that employers can insist that the office actually be part of office work. Some landlords might even welcome another dotcom collapse, likening it to a Covid vaccination: nasty side effects at first, but a much better chance of long-term survival.

Sansone and Keyes violated their employment agreements by using SSM Health Dean property and equipment during business hours “to plan a competing business,” and “induced and encouraged” the other surgeons to breach their contracts, the lawsuit says.

From 1979 into 1981, JaM became a major component in a new effort in Geschke’s laboratory. This was a push to develop a printing language that could be commercialized, used with the production version of PARC’s experimental computers called the Xerox Star, and more broadly used across all of Xerox’s lines of printers. A group of six Xerox researchers—Chuck Geschke, Butler Lampson, Jerry Mendelson, Brian Reid, Bob Sproull, and John Warnock—melded the JaM approach with other more established protocol techniques. The result was named Interpress.

The Federal Council of Switzerland has therefore published draft legislation, which outlines four tiers of escalating measures to conserve electricity and avert potential blackouts. The first prescribes a lot of temperature restrictions for things like refrigerators and washing machines. The second includes more unusual rules, such as the demand that heating in clubs and discotheques “be set to the lowest level or switched off completely,” and that “streaming services … limit resolution of their content to standard definition.” The third foresees cutting business hours, banning the use of Blue Ray players and gaming computers, and also limiting the use of electric cars, which should be driven only when absolutely necessary. A fourth and final tier mandates closure of ski facilities, casinos, cinemas, theatre and the opera.

A lot of that comes from how Tacitus represents the structure of Roman rule in Egypt: he describes Augustus as having ‘kept in the [imperial] house’ (retinere domi) the governance of Egypt, assigning it to an equestrian2 prefect.3 Egypt was a relatively late addition to Rome’s growing Empire; the Ptolemaic dynasty had ruled it since the death of Alexander the Great in 323. From the 160s that Ptolemaic kingdom had become effectively a client of Rome, its independence maintained by the threat of Roman arms (demonstrated vividly in 168 when Rome turned back a Seleucid invasion of Egypt with noting more than https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/ a consultum of the Senate), but had remained independent until Cleopatra’s disasterous decision to back Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) in the last phase of Rome’s civil war. After their defeat, Octavian (soon to be Augustus) had in 30 BC after the suicide of Cleopatra, annexed the kingdom, creating the province of Roman Egypt.

After violent camera robberies, a number of photographers plan to stay away from San Francisco

The COVID-19 pandemic drove home an important lesson: that the smallest organisms can be the deadliest. Not only are they highly fatal, they are also incredibly adept at evading the antibiotics and antimicrobials that we have in our relatively pitiful arsenal of drugs. In conjunction with World Antimicrobial Awareness Week (18-24 November), Prof Stephen Baker, molecular microbiologist and Director of Research at the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge, dials in to share his research on antimicrobial resistance, and how we can change the course of this global health threat.

East books read in 2022.

11.27

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He said something like this: “All these leaders are asking me what our blockchain strategy is. They tell me that everyone’s saying it’s the future, the platform that’s going to obsolete everything else. I need to have a good answer for them. I’ll be honest, when they explain why it’s wonderful I just don’t get it. You guys got to go figure it out for us.”

In addition, “we failed to accurately predict how this would all play out and the impact it would have on our business. As a result, we find ourselves here.”

That an anti-“disinformation” group is actually working to spread, not counter, disinformation is troubling enough. More troubling still is that the group was recently given tax-exempt status.

It’s the iron law of internet access: if you don’t like your carrier, you’re probably stuck with them — and when they know you’re stuck, you end up paying more.

The Markup also found the pixel code on a tax preparation site operated by a financial advice and software company called Ramsey Solutions, which uses a version of TaxSlayer’s service. That pixel gathered even more personal data from a tax return summary page, including information on income and refund amounts. This information was not sent immediately upon visiting the page but only when visitors clicked drop-down headings to see more details of their report. 

But there’s another reason it stands out: the key change from G major to G# major that occurs at around 2 minutes and 52 seconds. If you’re not familiar with the concept, the simplest way to think of a musical key is a collection of notes around which a piece of music revolves. The beginning of “Man in the Mirror” is in the key of G major, which is built from the notes below.

“She cooks high volume like she would cook for her family. Everybody loves Michelle’s food,” said Karen Andro, case manager and continuum care specialist for Housing Initiatives and a longtime advocate for people experiencing homelessness.

Elon Musk wants every Twitter employee sending weekly updates about their work via email now. Per an internal memo to employees that I obtained, every Friday all Twitter employees are required to send an email update on their work with the subject line structure: “Weekly Update, name, dept, and date.”

colbert:

EcoHealth Alliance, a long-term partner of Wuhan Institute of Virology, sought funds from a US defence agency in 2018 to insert a ‘furin cleavage site’ into bat coronaviruses. There is no evidence such work obtained Western funding.

Following the agreement, the Biden administration granted Chevron a license that would allow the California-based oil company to return to its Venezuelan oil fields in joint ventures with Venezuela’s national oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA. The new license, granted by the Treasury Department, would permit Chevron to pump Venezuelan oil for the first time in years.

11.20

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Still, the implications of a disrupted microbiome are poorly understood, even on Earth, said David Pearce, a bioscience researcher at Northumbria University and author of a 2022 paperexploring how a trip to Mars might affect microbes in the gut — which makes the range of related illnesses and diseases in space difficult to predict. And direct research is limited because only around 600 people have ever been to space. Those who have taken the trip don’t typically stay long, as the average length of a trip to the International Space Station is about six months. And some researchers aren’t yet convinced there’s enough evidence suggesting the human microbiome will change much in space at all.

From the entrepreneurial perspective, one can also find far larger parallels in history. The dot-com bust of 2000 wiped out almost 80% of the NASDAQ and trillions (with a ‘t’) in market value evaporated in months. Whatever amount of hate crypto is about to get from the commentariat, it will be nothing compared to the non-stop haterade about tech during the first real tech downturn. The eventual Internet boom(s) followed all the same, of course

Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI are being sued for allegedly violating copyright law by reproducing open-source code using AI. But the suit could have a huge impact on the wider world of artificial intelligence.

As much as $400 billion in COVID-19 unemployment relief dollars were likely lost to waste and fraudsters. Lawmakers want answers.

All this came to an end during one of the darkest chapters of California’s history, when Fountaingrove was seized by the government as part of the state’s discriminatory Alien Land Laws, which were instituted in 1913, expanded in the 1920s and forbade Asian nationals from owning land or businesses. The childless Nagasawa, who never married, attempted to keep the estate in the family by willing it to his grand-nephew Kosuke Ijichi, born on the estate and thus an American citizen, and his Japanese-born father Tomoki Ijichi. But upon Nagasawa’s death in 1934, Kosuke was not of age and the trustee took control of the estate and quickly sold off the land.

What rises and falls in status through the FTX story?

Videos from the Stanford academic freedom conference

The past year, rent soared more than 20 percent, and the median home price rose almost as much over the same period (before home prices dropped thanks to interest-rate hikes). The airport has new direct flights to Vail, Colorado, and Texas’s first Soho House opened there last year. Elon Musk has built a $1.1 billion “gigafactory” nearby, turning “Tesla” into shorthand among some to describe the city’s bougification. “There’s nothing weird about Austin,” said one Soho House patron, who recently flew home to California for an abortion. “Lululemon is everywhere.”

Prices for cryptocurrencies have undergone multiple boom-bust cycles, together with ongoing entry by retail investors. To investigate the drivers of crypto adoption, we assemble a novel database (made available with this paper) on retail use of crypto exchange apps at daily frequency for 95 countries over 2015–22. We show that a rising Bitcoin price is followed by the entry of new users. About 40% of these new users are men under 35, commonly identified as the most “risk-seeking” segment of the population. To establish a causal effect of prices on adoption, we exploit two exogenous shocks: the crackdown of Chinese authorities on crypto mining in mid- 2021 and the social unrest in Kazakhstan in early 2022. During both episodes price changes have a significant effect on the entry of new users. Results from a PVAR model corroborate these findings. Overall, back of the envelope calculations suggest that around three-quarters of users have lost money on their Bitcoin investments.

Inspired by Douyin’s success, these Chinese sellers think livestreaming is the future of shopping.

This isn’t just a compelling and humorous corporate drama. We could be watching a revolution within the tech industry unfold in real time before our eyes. 

11.13

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Cemetery records, newspaper articles and ground-penetrating radar now indicate more than 3,700 souls rest at Lebanon – many of them tightly situated, leaving geophysicist Bill Steinhart, who has surveyed most of the cemetery, to say, “If they’re not touching, they’re nearly touching.”

The city of Salem said Monday it would take a full work week at a cost of $4,200 to provide the public records that back up a city statement explaining its silence on the departure of a top police official suspected of misconduct

We have a similar body of evidence laying before us on the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

But outside the Beltway bubble of politicians and journalists, democracy feels like a far more distant, esoteric concept than the daily struggle to feed a family and to be able to afford to commute to work. From Pennsylvania to Arizona, the return to normality after the Covid-19 nightmare that Biden promised remains elusive to many as the economic after effects of the once-in-a century health emergency linger.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday announced that law enforcement seized $3.36 billion of bitcoin from a man who “unlawfully obtained” over 50,000 bitcoin from darkweb market Silk Road over a decade ago.

Few people have been more effective advocates of engineering biology than Drew Endy. As an early pioneer in the field of synthetic biology, he helped to launch the undergraduate majors in biological engineering at both MIT—which was the first of its kind in the country—and Stanford. His trainees have founded some of the leading companies in the discipline. Clearly, some of his ideas have taken root. However, the concept of the biologization of industry—which I view as one of the most compelling visions for the future of the Bioeconomy—seems to have remained dormant. Here is the core premise:

As an FBI translator’s report for Rennie explained, Villota was complaining that he’d paid someone $1.5 million to bribe public officials and that he seemed to have nothing to show for it.

That’s mostly because it’s literally on the Mexican border, with its main drag ending in a pedestrian bridge vaulting over the border fence. A bridge that’s constantly busy with Mexicans coming into El Paso to shop for clothes, mabye find a little work, visit relatives, or splurge on a mall day, and Americans going into Juarez, for the same reasons, and also to fix up their bodies at prices that won’t send them into debt.

“Never use a token you created as collateral?.?.?.?Don’t borrow if you run a crypto business. Don’t use capital ‘efficiently’. Have a large reserve,” Zhao tweeted.

Anyway it is still early and confusing but that seems to be the story of FTX. Coindesk reported on Alameda’s FTT exposure, and then Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the founder of Binance Holdings Ltd., the largest crypto exchange, raised eyebrows by tweeting that Binance would sell its FTT holdings “due to recent revelations.” People worried that this would tank the price of FTT and put pressure on FTX, so they started withdrawing money from FTX. FT didn’t have the money, and Bankman-Fried started calling around asking for a loan or a bailout. Eventually he called CZ himself, and they announced a non-binding letter of intent for Binance to acquire F°TX and make customers whole. Bankman-Fried’s fortune basically vanished, as did his ” emperor aura.” Venture capital investors in FTX – which last raised money at a $32 billion valuation – are probably getting zeroed, the price of FTT collapsed, and now regulators are investigating.

None of this changes the fact that Biden will be 81 years old on Election Day in 2024 or that 56% of those who voted Tuesday don’t have a favorable opinion of him or that 74% of those same voters are “dissatisfied” or “angry” about “the way things are going in the United States.” 

Now, former-President Donald Trump is more unpopular than Biden, with 58% of voters saying they have an unfavorable view of him. So Biden still has a decent chance of beating Trump.

According to the USPS, IV3’s use of NCOA data may violate the terms of their license. In a statement, the agency told WIRED that the NCOALink database can only be used for updating mailing lists, adding that “the alleged use of NCOALink services by the entity identified in your article is under review.”

This is now — at least — the fifth journalist raided by Biden’s FBI for reasons that remain unclear. Arnu’s beat may not be typical, but his work appears normal as far as the process of journalism goes. Simply because Arnu isn’t a member of the mainstream press, does not mean he should not be granted freedoms protected by the First Amendment.

FOUR HUNDRED private jets arrived in Egypt during COP27 as climate delegates are accused of ‘hypocrisy’

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, I found myself talking on the phone with a very nice woman who was telling me, as seriously as possible, why New York City is the best city for witches. On every criterion used to judge metropolitan witch friendliness, she pointed out, New York had scored incredibly high. “It’s kind of the melting pot for witchcraft,” Sharon Sullivan told me. Sullivan is the managing editor for Lawn Love, a website that connects people to local landscaping businesses. I was talking to her because I had responded to a press release (“2022’s Best Cities for Witches”) emailed to me by Lawn Love earlier that day. I had to ask: Why was a lawn services company creating quasi-scientific studies about witches?

In fact, as Jeremy Shapiro convincingly argues, we should expect US pressure for Europeans to take care of a much larger share of the costs of supporting Ukraine to grow very soon. And we’re talking here about the best of all worlds for Europeans without a Trump type of president back in the White House any time soon which would mean that all bets on security guarantees for Europe are off.

Assets: Securities Held Outright: U.S. Treasury Securities: All: Wednesday Level

According to the analysis by satellite data monitoring firm SpaceKnow, the two “dark ships,” each measuring around 95 to 130 meters long, passed within several miles of the Nord Stream 2 leak sites. “We have detected some dark ships, meaning vessels that were of a significant size, that were passing through that area of interest,” says Jerry Javornicky, the CEO and cofounder of SpaceKnow. “They had their beacons off, meaning there was no information about their movement, and they were trying to keep their location information and general information hidden from the world,” Javornicky adds.

This is how it worked: FTX would create a synthetic token that tracked the price of Bitcoin but with leverage. So, if Bitcoin went up by 10 percent, the FTX token would go up by 20 percent. Of course, if Bitcoin prices fell, the losses would double. These tokens were not real Bitcoin but a creation of FTX, their own tokens. The company used their gains to raise cash by using their own tokens as collateral for loans. Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Softbank, Lightspeed, Temasek, Blackrock and others invested over a billion in the company which at one time was valued at $32 billion. FTX and Alameda Research’s intermingled ownership should have raised eyebrows, but history shows greed trumps diligence.