8.18

So proud to have the Future President of the United States back in San Francisco where it all started.

Leaked government memo confirms whistleblowers were targeted by Border Agency after exposing federal DNA Collection law was not followed for immigration violations. Homeland Security whistleblowers claim American deaths “were preventable.”

The Chips Act, enacted two years ago Friday, is the nation’s most audacious foray into industrial policy since World War II. It’s essentially a bet that four companies — Intel Corp., Micron Technology Inc., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics Co. — can bring sophisticated chip production back to the US. In a sign of the ambition, one explicit goal is making a fifth of the world’s most advanced processors by 2030, up from roughly zero today.

Judge orders CDC to stop deleting emails of departing staff, calling it ‘likely unlawful’

OpenStreetMap has grown exponentially or quadratically over the last twenty years depending on the metric you’re interested in. My involvement has waxed and waned like soul mates oscillating between rapture and, inevitably, wanting the best for each other in our post-relationship new lives.

Soros’s Open Society Foundations is a sprawling grantmaking network that disburses over $1 billion to left-wing causes as its founder bankrolls the Democratic Party. Democratic lawmakers are often later forced to distance themselves from their policy wish list items. But this comes only after pressure boils over into the public eye. Even liberal cities dealing with skyrocketing crime eventually want civil society restored.

“I have wondered if some in management roles today that were here when we lost Challenger and Columbia remember that in both of those tragedies, there were those that were not comfortable proceeding,” Milt Heflin, a retired NASA flight director who spent 47 years at the agency, wrote in an email to Ars. “Today, those memories are still around.”

Dreyer said his “brain was mush” and he was having hallucinations about freighters and a steel wall. He figured he would need a few more days to reach Milwaukee, but there was a forecast of 9-foot (2.7-meter) waves.

AT&T has been told to stop running ads that claim the carrier is already offering cellular coverage from space. AT&T intends to offer Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) and has a deal with AST SpaceMobile, a Starlink competitor that plans a smartphone service from low-Earth-orbit satellites. But AST SpaceMobile’s first batch of five satellites isn’t scheduled to launch until September.

You can get started with Proton Docs using a free Proton account, which gives you 5GB of cloud storage space for all your files. An upgrade to one of the paid plans, which start at $4.99 a month, give you more space and benefits across other Proton products (including extra email addresses and email filters).

Former President Donald Trump is known for his off-script moments. But his signature freewheeling banter also masks important consistency. He is, actually, predictable. Listening to his recent on-the-campaign-trail speeches reveals some patterns:

Worse yet for the Dems, many of the minority voters they expected would produce their “new Democratic majority” — a term coined by Teixeira in the 1990s before reality set in — are not only unmoved, but are positively repelled, by woke issues like trans rights, abortion, defunding the police and more.

Susan Wild, the Democratic Pennsylvania congresswoman in one of the country’s tightest House races, has privately and repeatedly trashed working-class conservative voters in her district as bigots who “drank the Trump Kool-Aid.” But in public, the Pennsylvania Democrat has drastically moderated her positions on hot-button issues as she seeks reelection in her battleground district.

The Harris campaign has been editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads that make it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News and other major publishers are on her side, Axios has found.

The worry is about the state of our country and the DNC’s all-out, anti-democratic lawfare campaign.

Which is why the magnetic poetry version of the life of Luckey that does the story justice goes more like this: Before the recent preference cascade enabling high-profile tech moguls to violate the taboo against supporting Donald Trump, there was first the lonely figure of Palmer Luckey, the homeschooled, Jules Verne-obsessed, amateur scientist with no money, whose faith in the power of technology was so strong that he worked jobs sweeping ship yards, scrubbing decks, fixing engines, repairing phones, and training to sing as a gondolier for tourists, all in order to spend his nights in a gutted 19-foot camper trailer trying to manufacture dream worlds out of breadboards and lens equipment and accelerometers and magnetometers and a soldering iron—which he did, bringing virtual reality to the masses, burning a hole in his retina with a laser, and losing it all to Zuckerberg over a meme, only to reemerge from his defrocking by Big Tech as a vengeance-seeking icon of counterelite Americana, the aspiring rebuilder of the arsenal of democracy, the black mullet-, chin beard-, Hawaiian shirt-, cargo short-, sandal-clad possible savior of America.

NEW: The New York Times has suddenly discovered that Hunter Biden never registered under FARA, despite taking millions from Russia, China, Ukraine, and Romania to lobby the U.S. government.

This is the best example of how we have all been manipulated by MSM and the Dems. I also finally saw the whole video a fee months ago and that was actually my hoky fuck moment. Trump condemned the Nazi’s. He was referring to something ttly different with ‘good people on both sides’. I believe it was taking down the statues.

That explains why no one including secret service was able to “find” the bomb. It was planted later, to be conveniently found, along with the RNC bomb, within a 15 minute time frame that perfectly coincided with unfolding Ray Epps orchestrated breach of Capitol

When asked in 2020, she was unequivocal: “there’s no question, I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Seems an unlikely change!

Study co-led by Mass General Brigham found that one in four patients with severe brain injury who appeared unresponsive responded to instructions covertly. Understanding this phenomenon can help guide decisions about life-sustaining treatment, goals of care, and clinical management, according to the authors.

Police have been scouring the narrow streets for unauthorised units poking out over the terraces of the village’s homes. There were reports of 22 illegally installed units spotted on various rooftops and terraces between January and May, and a further 15 since June as temperatures soared.

A vast majority of the instructions sent to banks do not move through the modern day REST APIs that we are used to, they move through file.

A new version of the London Underground map designed by a University of Essex lecturer has gone viral.

“The best and most secure way to conduct elections? Paper ballots.”

In 1948, Taruffi devised a twin-torpedo four-wheeler, the Tarf I Bisiluro, with a 492-cc Gilera four-cylinder as one of its possible powerplants. Running in the 500-cc class, Taruffi and the Tarf I set six world speed records for various distances and standing-start or flying conditions. A swap to 1500-cc power garnered two more speed/distance records in that class.

We have received further demands for censorship and for the personal account information of our users, impacting not just Brazilians but residents of the United States and Argentina.  We share those here in the interests of essential transparency.

Just look at it. The implications are so … well … shocking that they don’t seem to quite sink in. This report was funded in 2019 and delivered in 2024, 150% of the time it took for the USA to defeat Imperial Japan in the Pacific.

The Democratic Party of RFK and JFK was the party of civil liberties and free speech. VP Harris‘s is the party of censorship, lockdowns, and medical coercion.

We have long maintained that the two smoking guns of the January 6 Fedsurrection are the curious case of Ray Epps, on the one hand, and the RNC/DNC pipe bomb hoax, on the other. Our extensive reporting on the case of Epps enjoyed a natural assist from the fact that the now-iconic video of Epps urging the crowd to go “into the Capitol” and the subsequent chants from the crowd of “Fed, Fed, Fed” were seemingly tailor-made to go viral. While our ground-breaking reporting on January 6 had been no less comprehensive and no less damning, for the longest time it lacked a corresponding video clip to help carry this historic scandal into mainstream attention.

tour inside @blueorigin’s New Glenn Production Facility at Cape Canaveral,

When Your Customers Disappear

In addition to Luckey, Cramer invited defense giant Lockheed Martin to participate in the Summit. Lockheed has purchased a large booth and will feature a Ground Control Station and model of its RQ 170 Sentinel. Lockheed will also provide breakout speakers.

In this work, we computationally mined the global microbiome (63,410 metagenomes and 87,920 microbial genomes) and discovered nearly 1 million new antibiotic molecules in microbial dark matter, several of which were effective in preclinical mouse models. This is the largest antibiotic discovery exploration ever described. We believe our approach marks a significant advancement in uncovering these essential molecules from the vast biodiversity of the global microbiome.

“It’s a shame because Massachusetts is forcing us to do that,” Rose said. “They’re going to lose their revenue, you know, money every year they’re going to get for excise tax, [and] sales tax when somebody tries to register it.”

But the vacancy rate for downtown Chicago has reached 30 percent, not due to Covid, but to the Black Lives Matter riots and subsequent smash and grab sprees of theft. This puts increased strain on taxpayers.

Trump critics say his full-on embrace of crypto is overshadowed by critical comments of it in the past, and that his admin can’t be trusted to prioritize crypto. These same critics (pro-Harris camp) say nevermind the aggressive anti-crypto actions of the current administration that Harris is vice president of, when she’s in office, things could be different!

Mr. Chairman, many questions remain, yet several theories have been examined, and several questions have already been answered. I am prayerful that our Task Force can move forward effectively and professionally, guided by our shared love for America and our determination to seek full truth. Please know, as we continue our investigation into the attempted assassination of our former President, you can rely upon me as a solemn investigator of fact. It is with that spirit that I submit this confidential preliminary investigative report.

For the 9/10 drugs they announced here’s when generics go on sale due to patents. Not shown are the company’s own newer alternatives (like pens).

Widowed wife of slain Trump supporter Corey Comperatore has retained an attorney to get answers and accountability for major security failures at Butler, PA rally:

The Flywheel effect is a concept developed in the book Good to Great. No matter how dramatic the end result, good-to-great transformations never happen in one fell swoop. In building a great company or social sector enterprise, there is no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.

We looked at data from three of the largest audiobook platforms—Audible, Apple Books, and Spotify—and found a total of 847,685 audiobooks currently available on these platforms.

Eckerman is an ecologist with an interest in biodiversity, as well as in species’ natural histories, behaviors, life cycles, and places in the food chain. Moths are so diverse, he says, that it’s not uncommon to find one that hasn’t been named or described in the scientific literature. No entomologist studies “moths”; out of necessity, they specialize. Travis County has about 1,400 recorded species, the state of Texas more than 4,000. And those are just the ones we know about. Insects are the most diverse group of animals on the planet, and there are likely more undiscovered insect species than known ones—as many as 10 to 20 million species worldwide still left to discover, Rice University biologist Scott Egan told Texas Monthlyearlier this year.

Harris’ and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s social media accounts also directly contradict the VP’s claims by showing that the pair filled out women’s basketball brackets in 2021.

The federal government announces a program to issue block grants for states to purchase and operate shuttered grocery stores. The USDA also seizes closed-down production facilities.

This is a brilliant explanation by physicist @hsu_steve of the enormous mistake the US made with its semiconductor sanctions on China, basically sanctioning its own firms and creating a huge market opportunity for Chinese companies.

Noise complaints are just the latest challenge for Amazon’s drone program that’s been struggling to get off the ground since the company started testing deliveries in 2022. A mix of regulatory hurdles, missed deadlines and layoffs last year, coinciding with widespread cost-cutting efforts by CEO Andy Jassy, has halted progress of the ambitious service, which was conceived of by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos more than a decade ago.

findings support the democratic favor channel and challenge the idea that the institutional qualities of democracy per se lead to desirable outcomes.

According to the International Crisis Group, a think-tank, the Clan del Golfo, a gang that controls the entrance to the jungle on the Colombian side, nets over $4bn a year. Much of it is thought to come from human trafficking.

8.11

So why is software so terrible? Why do high-end gaming PCs struggle to browse the web at 60 frames per second? Why does a simple calculator need a splash screen? Why does your phone’s battery still die so quickly? And why does each update make the problem worse?And why do we all use huge frameworks that no one understands? Why do our projects take minutes to compile? Why do we have to restart our language servers every twenty minutes? And why does everyone think this is fine? We made it terrible.

Desperately looking for the country of origin I see ‘Netherlands’. The tomatoes look as desperate as I do. They traveled a long way, from the Netherlands to a Croatian island and I am sure the producers spent a lot of effort to grow them, but they look pale and boring, worn out like I do after travelling all day. The smell is horrible.

There is no “company success” unless civilization itself continues to progress.

The five-minute video shows a conversation between a person identified as Dr. Stacy De-Lin, Planned Parenthood New York City Medical Director for Abortion Services, and an undercover reporter with the Center for Medical Progress (CMP). During their conversation, De-Lin seems to acknowledge that Planned Parenthood would sell the livers of aborted babies.

Higher prices today can mean greater efforts at price discrimination, including over time.  That too can mean lower prices (compared to the counterfactual) at later points in time, or sometimes today as well.

Why does this matter? On one level, it’s an indicator of the unsustainability of many generative AI applications. Even with $150m in funding — which is a decent amount of capital — Character.ai likely couldn’t keep the lights on for very long, thus necessitating its absorption by a larger company. 

some wild stats in judge’s ruling: Google’s internal numbers showed that they’d lose up to 80% of searches on Apple devices, a revenue hit of $30B, if they surrendered default search position

The analysis sheds light on a legal and common way deep-pocketed groups lobby lawmakers in the state of California that is home to Hollywood, musical powerhouses, renowned theme parks and high-grossing sports teams. While many lawmakers accept invites to such events as a way to build relationships with important constituents or highlight major players in their districts, the gifts also raise ethics questions about the privileges enjoyed by public servants.

Hamtramck’s first woman mayor told our journalist she is “absolutely positive” she was ballot harvested out of office. Karen Majewski lost her election bid in 2021 after serving the city of Hamtramck for 18 years, first as a city council president, and then 16 years as mayor. A true Hamtramck insider, Majewski shepherded her city through major ethnic, racial, and religious shifts only to see the town’s progressive open door policy result in her ouster.

A Message to X Users

This Is How Much It Costs to Bring the Michelin Guide to Houston

These are the main building blocks of how I built a scraping pipeline forpricewatcher in order to keep track of how supermarkets change their prices.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is one of my favorite datasets because it has anything and everything. If it could conceivably exist on a map, it probably exists in OpenStreetMap. Whether it’s military bases, lakes, hedges, or power lines, it can all be mapped in OSM. But the scope of this data can be daunting. The entire planet file takes up a whopping 1,931 GB uncompressed.1 As such, using this data can require a lot of RAM and a lot of time. Luckily, there are many open source tools freely available to help make sense of this large dataset. In my experience creating projects with OSM, I’ve used many of these tools to create interesting visualizations and to answer questions about the world we live in.

Often, the issue was not with the copier but with unintentionally destructive behavior by the users.  That, too, was considered fixable.  Orr declares that the technicians’

Now let’s normalize this by comparing $RIVN and $LCID to $TSLA when they had similar Revenue back in the day*:

They will use those drones to create pop-up blockades (air/land/sea) for commercial traffic stretching hundreds—thousands of miles.

During a fireside chat yesterday, SpaceX President & COO Gwynne Shotwell confirmed that Starlink can provide everybody in rural and semi-rural U.S. with high-speed broadband internet connectivity for a very small fraction of the price of laying down a fiber optic cable.

Signs of the approaching storm were already visible the day after the murders, when Britain’s new Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visited Southport to lay the obligatory wreath and was met by vocal hostility from locals. This time the public wasn’t willing to go along with the British state’s choreographed rites of candlelit vigils and the hollow “anti-hate” messaging from state-sponsored community leaders mechanically deployed in the aftermath of now-increasingly frequent atrocities.

Given that the problems are, on some level, built into the structure of the NPS, “I think it needs a complete radical reform,” says Jarvis, the former director. The National Park Service Centennial Act from 2015 lays some groundwork to level the playing field with concessionaires, he says: It gives the agency broad authority to award new contracts without specifying how they should be structured, unlike earlier laws. Almost a decade later, the park service is still working on regulations to implement the law. But in theory, it could take greater control of its own assets and shift the balance of power back to the land it’s bound to protect. For change like that to happen, there needs to be pressure from political leadership, Jarvis says—and therefore, ultimately, from the American people. After all, the parks are supposed to be for them, and Jarvis says, “They should be pissed off.”

NASA is planning to significantly delay the launch of the Crew 9 mission to the International Space Station due to ongoing concerns about the Starliner spacecraft currently attached to the station.

Pilot labor leaders from around the world have sent Airbus CEO @GuillaumeFaury a letter that makes clear: technology alone can never replace the indispensable role of two pilots on the flight deck.

I would argue that ultimately, the same will be true for Google. What will eventually end the reign of Google Search isn’t the rise of Bing or some other would-be competitor in internet search, it’s going to be something tangential that makes internet search just matter less. Maybe it has something to do with AI (though I’d be skeptical that something like SearchGPT is the, um, answer). Or perhaps it’s something no one is really thinking about right now. I don’t know. I’m just pretty certain that this case will have little to do with that end.

The third bomb’s plutonium core went on to have a history of its own. After the surrender it was sent to Los Alamos for use in experiments to determine how much material was needed to produce a critical mass under different circumstances. On August 21, 1945, less than a week after Japan notified the US that it would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, physicist Harry Daghlian was performing an experiment when he accidentally dropped a piece of “tamper” material, used to reflect neutrons back into the core, and triggered a critical mass. Daghlian used his bare hands to pull the mass apart to stop the chain reaction, and absorbed a fatal dose of radiation. He died three weeks later. A military security guard in the room with him, Private Robert Hemmerly, was also irradiated but survived, only to die of cancer 33 years later.

Confused? That’s because these filings from Harris are irregular. If Kamala Harris had used her own candidate ID number, like every other candidate in modern history, this wouldn’t have been so complicated, but then it would have been difficult to make the case that she’s entitled to Biden’s war chest. Undoubtedly, these filings are trying to circumvent those pesky campaign finance laws.

Another example of how US competitiveness, security, and resilience is becoming completely reliant on out of the box thinking and “moonshots” (SpaceX, Anduril, OpenAI, MCCPDC, etc.) by rogue billionaires.

Ortberg’s long list of things to do reflects a failure of leadership by Calhoun.

“According to Safety and Mission Assurance officials at NASA and DCMA officials at Michoud, Boeing’s quality control issues are largely caused by its workforce having insufficient aerospace production experience.”

…Weiss just made the case against the Justice Department and himself in protecting Hunter Biden from the most damaging charges of being an unregistered foreign agent. The latest filing includes another presumptive FARA violation involving Romanians and influencing U.S. policy.

Additional footage was just released of abortion leaders at Planned Parenthood giggling about MUTILATING fetal bodies to cover up criminal LATE-TERM abortions.

and to this very moment we have heard no explanation from Biden as to why he withdrew, and not a single “journalist” has had the cajones to ask Biden, Harris, Obama, Pelosi, Schumer or Jeffries a SINGLE QUESTION about all of this. This is the biggest political story of any of our lifetimes, and the major media is wholly and utterly incurious about it.

The evidence I can find does show that Frankfurt has the highest crime rate in Germany, although perhaps much of that standing comes from the presence of the financial district and the city being such a transport and convention hub, rather than from the immigrants per se. In any case, if you wish to understand the popularity of AfD — which now seems to be Germany’s #2 political party — I suggest you take a walk around Frankfurt.  I didn’t even go near the train station.

Notes on voting machines.

The U.S. Army has a 25% recruitment deficit. Ask yourself why.

“According to a 2023 University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) report, beef production can be climate-neutral or even better if management practices are optimized to minimize emissions and maximize abilities to store carbon.

Harris’s campaign Web site, meanwhile, does not even have a policy section, or an articulation of beliefs. There’s just a button to donate, some merch and yard signs, and a biography that describes her as “the daughter of parents who brought her to civil rights marches in a stroller.”

During the USS Eisenhower carrier strike group’s twice-extended nine-month deployment to the Red Sea, U.S. forces fired over 135 Tomahawk land attack missiles, weapons that cost upwards of $2 million apiece, at Houthi targets in Yemen. The ships also launched 155 standard missiles of various kinds, which cost between $2 million and $4 million per missile, to destroy the drones.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has quietly hired a celebrity photographer — who boasts Mark Zuckerberg, George W. Bush and Barack Obama as previous clients — to burnish his man-about-the-state image. Charles Ommanney, a former photojournalist and war photographer who traveled with Newsom to China last fall as a freelancer, was on hand Thursday to capture Newsom in aviator sunglasses, jeans and work gloves, picking up detritus left over from a recently-cleared homeless encampment in Los Angeles County. Late last month, he photographed the governor surveying the damage of the Borel Fire in Kern County.

On July 22, POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account. Over the course of the past few weeks, the person — who used an AOL email account and identified themselves only as “Robert” — relayed what appeared to be internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official. A research dossier the campaign had apparently done on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, which was dated Feb. 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them and granted anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as a preliminary version of Vance’s vetting file.

Blunt truth telling by Prof. Decosimo. People may avert their gaze, pretend not to know, change the subject, but it does not change the reality.

Forest Service orders Arrowhead bottled water company to shut down California pipeline

AI systems, when trained on historical data, can inherit and amplify human biases, particularly from flawed past hiring practices. This can result in the unfair exclusion of candidates based on irrelevant factors, undermining the potential of otherwise qualified individuals. Combining AI with human oversight can ensure balanced and just decision-making.

The Biden-Harris Admin also launched a novel new IRS crackdown on tips, getting the IRS inside the door at bars & restaurants to directly monitor tips at the cash register, “at point-of-sale.” She also backed the $1.7T spending legislation expecting taxpayers to report their $600 phone app transactions to the IRS without she and the Senate reading the bill (later dropped as untenable). Kamala Harris, who now claims to be against taxing tips, was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which expanded the IRS so it could go after people not paying taxes on tips.

8.4

The strange and total lack of curiosity around:

Is it not abnormal for a person to serve as U.S. Senator for 36 years, then to go on to be Vice President for 8 years, and still have time left to serve as President, and even to run for reelection as President when he is 81, and then to drop the nomination after excluding competitors and winning it in the primaries, handing the nomination to a person who never won any votes in any bid for the presidency? Is it not abnormal for a President to oversee the criminal prosecution of his predecessor, his rival, and then, after dropping out, to seek to rearrange the Supreme Court to enhance the likelihood that his rival will suffer real criminal punishment?

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a collection of personal emails between J.D. Vance and a law school friend of his.  The two were politically far apart, but for many years shared a close and respectful friendship in which they discussed the things that they agreed and disagreed about.  Then the friend, Sofia Nelson, who identifies as a “gender queer radical pragmatist” broke off the friendship over Vance’s support for an Arkansas bill banning gender reassignment for minors.  Here’s what Vance said that was apparently too much for Sofia’s “radical pragmatist’ sensibilities:

“the separation line between being ambitious or being wrong was very thin”

Both OEMs’ views have key flaws.

This kind of Systemic collapse is endemic to human history, to greater or lesser degrees.

according to a senior law enforcement official…

A hacker has stolen a wealth of data from health giant Bausch Health, has attempted to extort the company, and has told associates they think the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) will buy back the data, 404 Media has found. 

As a courtesy to law enforcement, we are not going to post the entire request. This is the first page of that request.

And no, not “every court” has said special counsel office is lawful. DC appellate court upheld Mueller appointment (of course) but it has never been challenged outside of DC. Cannon concluded the appointment of Smith was unconstitutional because it violated the Appointments Clause without a presidential nomination and Senate approval. She also determined the 4 random statutes Garland cited in his appointment order did not apply.

She has a Bible once treasured by a Green Bay couple. She wants their descendants to have it.

This trend of spinning and manufacturing a parallel reality to serve the Dem agenda, solidified by complicit mainstream media, hit home with the Hunter Biden laptop story, the coordinated vilification of President Trump and his followers, and President Biden’s cognitive decline — depriving voters of a voice in a proper primary. These examples displayed the hubris of the current Dem leadership. You must think the American people are fools to believe the spin on these issues. I despise this elite vs. general population ideology viscerally.

“and that she ought to embrace her hazy ideological categorization because “if she keeps people continually guessing then she can adjust the interpretation of your guess every time she sees you.”

We know that Malley’s security clearances were pulled, and he was placed under investigation by the FBI, but repeated Congressional inquiries have shaken almost no information loose from Team Biden. Is Rob Malley the victim of a witch hunt, or the new Alger Hiss, an Iranian mole embedded in the White House in two Democratic administrations?

New data reveal how companies that farm out IT workers exploit flaws in the visa lottery while other US businesses and talented immigrants lose out.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008-10, China has lost faith in the western economic model and is pursuing its own system. In the process it has become far less open to international criticism. “They dealt with the financial crisis much better than anybody else and I would say that’s when we lost them,” he says. China’s market remains deeply challenging for foreign businesses.

In a headline blaring: “Gov. Shapiro’s Failures Enabled Sexual Harassment,” the National Women’s Defense League said in a statement that the Harris vetting team should “consider the handling of past complaints of sexual harassment inside the Pennsylvania Governor’s office.” The group claims to be a nonpartisan organization dedicated to preventing sexual harassment.

In the world of data, CSV is the cockroach of file formats. It’s simple, resilient, and seemingly impossible to kill off. While flashier formats have come and gone, CSV quietly reigns supreme in the data processing kingdom. But how the hell did this happen? Let’s dive into the fascinating history of this accidental standard.

One week ago, the last time NASA officials spoke to the media, the agency’s program manager for commercial crew, Steve Stich, would not be drawn into discussing what would happen should NASA conclude that Starliner’s thrusters were not reliable enough for the return journey to Earth.

“Vice President Harris was the deciding vote for the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act. She owns those, they would not have passed, it was 50-50 and she broke the tie. Those caused the great inflation.

“So many Democrat voting women, often married, think Trump is untrustworthy because they believe he slept with side chicks. So now they are going to demonstrate how much they hate Trump by voting for the actual side chick, Kamala Harris. It’s honestly amazing,” the message shared by Patrick read.

The British businessman Mike Lynch, who this June was acquitted in the US of a multi-billion pound fraud, has said he believes he was only able to clear his name because of his huge wealth.

“I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.” If we accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?”

Indeed, there is evidence that, following U.S. export controls, China has boosted domestic innovation and self-reliance, and increased purchases from non-U.S. firms that produce similar technology to the U.S.-made ones subject to export controls.” In other words, it’s almost a pure loss for US firms who lose customers, revenue and market capitalization whereas the affected Chinese firms find alternative suppliers and China boosts its domestic innovation and self-reliance.

Notably, not all of DJI’s funding came from the Chinese government. Foolishly, in retrospect, the growth of the Chinese drone industry was, in part, fueled by American venture capital. In 2014 and 2015, Sequoia and Accel made major investments in DJI, collectively exceeding any funding for 3DR, Airware, or any other American drone manufacturers. With CCP subsidies and American capital, DJI would continue to dominate the global market. Naturally, a mass-extinction event for U.S. companies followed. In 2016, 3D Robotics shut downits drone manufacturing business line, and Airware, a leading American enterprise drone manufacturer, closed its doors in 2018.

However, we find no evidence of reshoring or friend-shoring. As a result of these disruptions, affected suppliers have negative abnormal stock returns, wiping out $130 billion in market capitalization, and experience a drop in bank lending, profitability, and employment.

7.28

The best photos from the 20th stage of this year’s Tour de France.

Since Barack Obama won election in 2008, health insurance premiums have doubled for single employees. Family plans have skyrocketed to almost $24,000, on average.

“We’re all finding out by tweet,” said one Dem. “None of us understand what’s happening.”

Workers in Washington State are seeking a 40% pay increase in an attempt to claw back concessions previously given to the company by the union. The Local represents over 30,000 members in the region, which includes the plants in Renton and Everett, where the 737 Max and 777 aircraft are assembled.

Second, did you know the US is borrowing more[2] under the “Biden boom” than it did during COVID? Set aside whether a coronavirus should have been treated as a financial crisis.

For the protection of whistleblowers and our investigation, we will not be sharing further information with the congressional task force due to the connective tissue between that entity and FBI, USSS, and other entities.

I know I should not be astonished, but the fact is that I am incredibly astonished that virtually every Democrat voter is insanely happy to have literally no say whatsoever as to who their Presidential candidate is.

Very interesting that TikTok is aggressively laundering and rehabilitating Kamala Harris’s image.

Taylor Swift’s Jet Use In 2023.

The FBI used voice analysis to prove that he was telling the truth. EAD Moore knew that, but hid it from Congress.

But US can still have high QoL and prosperity if it doesn’t start WW3 by listening to dumb strategists and warhawks. Obviously stupid Ukraine tricks and pushing Russia into a deep alliance with PRC will be seen in retrospect as a mistake as big as the Iraq War.

The U.S. healthcare system requires substantial out-of-pocket payments by most consumers, which can prevent some from receiving needed medical services. Recent policy proposals seek to address this problem by increasing government health care spending in order to reduce out-of-pocket costs. The social value of these policies rests in part on the extent to which consumers face credit constraints in financing medical spending. We present a novel analysis of whether elderly households face such credit constraints by estimating the effects of wealth variation from home price changes on out-of-pocket medical expenditures. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study and various measures of home price changes, we find no evidence that housing wealth impacts out-of-pocket medical spending. The estimates are universally small and precise, allowing us to rule out even modest-sized effects. Effects are zero across the expenditure distribution, for specific categories of expenditure, and for different types of consumers split by health insurance status and SES. Our results suggest that further subsidizing health care for elderly homeowners, the majority of older Americans, would increase moral hazard costs without increasing access to needed care.

ActBlue money laundering scheme: reports indicate that $20 million from Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss was broken down into over 1.6 million donations across 400,000 donors.

Drone based contested trade with just one minor actor contesting it (Houthis).

The world’s only AI superpowers are engaged in an arms race for swarming drones that is reminiscent of the Cold War, except drone technology will be far more difficult to contain than nuclear weapons. Because software drives the drones’ swarming abilities, it could be relatively easy and cheap for rogue nations and militants to acquire their own fleets of killer robots.

We study how the widespread legalization of sports gambling over the past five years has impacted consumer financial health.

China’s electric vehicle exports declined 13.2% from the previous month in June to 86,000 vehicles, new data showed on Wednesday, signaling growing resistance to the cars as Europe raises trade barriers.

Note that overturning Euclid v. Ambler would not make zoning in the interests of health and safety unconstitutional. Indeed, it wouldn’t make any zoning unconstitutional it would just mean that zoning above and beyond that required for health and safety would require compensation to property owners.

With that in mind, Capitol Weekly recently did a very subjective, very unscientific email poll of our fellow journalists who cover the Capitol or other parts of California government to see who they think are the best press reps to deal with. And yes, we also asked who they think…. hmmm, how to put this nicely? … could be better at their job. We granted everyone anonymity so they could speak freely. Replies came from reporters whose beats span the gamut of government, from city council meetings to chronicling the day-to-day activities of Gov. Gavin Newsom. As one might expect their answers were similarly broad in scope.

It’s the petty, ugly, banalities of an entire subculture of tiresome neurotics who cannot dredge one single beautiful, interesting, or true thing out of their souls that would make you voluntarily pay attention.

A few weeks ago in Paris we got last minute tickets to Palais Garnier, one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world. The show ended up being horrific

If you drive a car made by General Motors and it has an internet connection, your car’s movements and exact location are being collected and shared anonymously with a data broker.

Phones are supported well beyond their average ownership lifetime. In stark contrast, automakers are struggling to work out how long their “smartphones on wheels” can be kept on the road.

An inconspicuous suburb close to Geneva became the first Swiss municipality to banish commercial advertising from its streets, in a policy that creates a blueprint for similar bans in larger cities across the country.

Now sprinkle on long build times and difficulty of testing and it’s no wonder a lot of mobile native devs switch to something else more sane, like the web. Sure, the web has its own issues but it’s minuscule in comparison to that of mobile native dev on average. All this to say – Google and Apple keep making it more and more difficult for developers to ship and maintain quality mobile apps, but they market their releases as the next greatest thing. All the while no real innovation in mobile has happened in close to 10 plus years.

Why would such a fate befall the would-be Polish Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (as he’s dubbed in today’s Poland)? Why on earth would any country deprive itself of potentially becoming the leader in a vital and cutting-edge field of technology? This article looks into these very questions and looks a bit closer at the man behind the machine: Jacek Karpi??ki. 

The problem is that Democrats are so used to having total cloud supremacy — total information control — that they’ve never actually had to make an argument. It is completely demoralizing for them to see high production value videos with Democrats as the butt of the joke. Like a bully getting punched in the nose, these vicious wokes are finally facing committed, capable resistance in the information war. It is their first fair fight.

An African-American two-spirit Hindu Palestinian MtF transgender fat-liberated NEA union kindergarten teacher wearing a rainbow tutu and a Che Guevara halter top told me, “You know, I really don’t think Kamala is qualified to run this country, I’m voting for Trump.”

7.21

In my old business of providing Diplomatic Security in two active war zones we were expected to execute the basics or we would be fired. Clearly USSS failed at the basics of a secure perimeter and once shots were fired their extraction was clumsy and left DJT highly exposed to follow on attacks. It looked like they had never drilled together because those responses should be effectively autonomic. Will there be accountability? That’s not the Washington way.

In an email Saturday at 7:34 pm that appeared to be addressed to sympathetic journalists, and which was also sent to Semafor, Mehlhorn wrote that one “possibility — which feels horrific and alien and absurd in America, but is quite common globally — is that this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash. This is a classic Russian tactic, such as when Putin killed 300 civilians in 1999 and blamed it on terrorists to ride the backlash to winning power. Others who have embraced this tactic of committing raw evil and then benefitting from the backlash include Hamas on October 7. If any Trump officials encouraged or knew of this attack, that is morally horrific, and Republicans of decency must demand that Trump step down as unfit.” More.

This event feels like a bookend moment to the George Floyd killing. That opened wide the era of ACAB and insane public safety decisions made to appease the loud, leftmost fringe. There will be less appetite for things like the SAFE-T Act, police no-chase policy, and hands-off treatment of teen riots.

stunning new report from our friends at Paragon Health Institute, quantifies the stunning scale of Obamacare fraud under the Biden administration, with millions of enrollees now receiving subsidies for which they are supposed to be ineligible based on income. The problem started when Biden made Obamacare “free” (fully taxpayer-funded) for incomes between 100 and 150 percent of the federal poverty level:

This is how you do good reporting. No speculation, no theories, no leading questions, just plain facts. Excellent work by @BBCBlindGazza with one of the best interviews of eye witness account on Trump assassination attempt. As an aside Gary is visually impaired but brings out the most visual account. Kudos as well to whoever is producing him.

A 501c3 called National Youth Advocate Project has been awarded $292 million by the Dept of Health and Human Services for assistance to unaccompanied illegal alien children in Ohio since 2021. The organization’s 2022 IRS form 990 says that the CEO, Marvena Twigg (social worker), earned $1.27 million that year. Wowie.

Well, I’ve thought the Secret Service were rubbish not just since we learned of the Cartagena hookers but for at least another decade before that. And increasingly, when it comes to American officialdom – from Kabul to Uvalde – to modify Henry Ford, you can get it in any colour as long as it’s bloated, lavishly over-funded and entirely dysfunctional. And yet and yet… it’s hard to believe even these guys (plus their bevy of five-foot-two-eyes-of-blue Keystone chorus girls) could be this crap. Assuming for the purposes of argument that the body on the roof is actually that of the perp, a goofball barely out of high school hatched a plan to have Donald Trump’s head explode in close-up on live TV – and, wittingly or otherwise, the world’s most flush money-no-object security state did their best to help him pull it off.

WithSecure assesses with HIGH confidence that due to geopolitical turbulence and low international relations with Russia, the Paris Olympic games will face an increased risk of malign cyber activity compared to previous Olympics.

In our interview last summer and on an accompanying Check 6 podcast, he doubled down on the likelihood that Boeing might not roll out a new passenger jet before 2035—nearly 25 years after the company’s last clean-sheet aircraft, the 787, entered service. “The notion that we should be looking at niche opportunities or competitive dynamics—when you’re going to invest tens of billions of dollars in a program for 50 years—is just silly,” he maintained. His claim in March that development of a new airplane would cost $50 billion was met with widespread derision.

Short story: an accelerating amount of income is leaving MN vs coming to MN. Net migration of income has risen from $215 million in 2017, to over $2.19 billion in 2022.

The Thiel-Hoffman Face-off in Sun Valley

This isn’t then, but the old have difficulty noticing. Add a Congress incontinently ignorant of anything but the politics of Washington and of their home states There is nobody on the House China committee who reads, speaks, or writes Chinese. Yet Congress inveighs fiercely against Beijing like a swarm of feral hamsters. What if, for example, the Russian fleet shows up in support of China? If North Korea seized the chance and invades South Korea, giving Washington two major wars at once? If China sinks tankers going to Japan and Taiwan, neither of which has oil? If Washington insouciantly bombs the Chinese mainland, which it will, and China or Russia hits the Pentagon and Capitol with sub-launched missiles? What does the sole superpower then do?

13. Higher education has been a traditional Democratic stronghold, and it remains one.  Yet its clout and credibility have fallen significantly in the last few years. 14. The Democrats made a big mistake going after “Big Tech.”  It didn’t cost them many votes, rather money and social capital.  Big Tech (most of all Facebook) was the Girardian sacrifice for the Trump victory in 2016, and all the Democrats achieved from that was a hollowing out of their own elite base.

Why? Because all will be held in the Seine River in the centre of Paris. The swimmers – including four Australians – will pass famous landmarks such as the Musee d’Orsay as they swim through the historic heart of the city. This will have enormous scenic appeal for spectators.

There truly is no general policy. One of my chief mandates for our two wine directors is ‘no Excel spreadsheet wine list,’ meaning: no taking a wine and multiplying it by 3x or 4x no matter what the wine is. We buy wines with the knowledge that they will fit into the program economically, not the other way around. We look at all markets (auction, retail, wholesale year-over-year) and attempt to find value in wine purchases. Then we compare those same markets to competitive wine lists in our micromarket. Whenever we can, we seek to offer the best price possible.

Within gender-marriage cohorts – single women are the most anti-Trump; and – divorced men are the most pro-Trump.

“Do not tell the prospect that they are not permitted or unqualified to purchase or sell property because of information you obtained from Forewarn,” a company executive said at a recent training webinar with Illinois real estate agents. She emphasized that potential buyers “do not get notified” when they are screened with the app, a question she said many real estate agents ask.

Houston-based tech company Lancium and Denver-based Crusoe Energy Systems announced on Thursday morning a multibillion-dollar deal to build a 200-megawatt data center just outside Abilene, Texas, that is designed to “meet the unique needs of AI companies.”

In the talk, Steve Jobs predicts that by 1986 sales of the PC would exceed sales of cars, and that in the following ten years, people would be spending more time with a PC than in a car. These were absurd claims for the early 1980s. Describing what he sees as the inevitability that this would be a pervasive new category, he asks the designers in the audience for help. He asks that they start to think about the design of these products, because designed well or designed poorly, they still would be made.

That Biden will likely remain as president until January 20, 2025, should remind the country the Left is more worried about its own next four-year continuance in power than the fate of the country that now admittedly will be guided in the next sixth months by a president judged unfit by his own supporters to run for the very office that he will still keep holding.

Further irony arises when those who, as supposedly guardians of democratic norms, pontificated to the country the last nine years about the Trump-Hitlerian threat to democracy. Yet now they so cavalierly work overtime on how: a) to pull off the removal of their candidate from the November ballot on grounds of senility, b) but not the removal of the same president from office (their own fate is more precious than our collective fate as a nation), c) while trying to select, rather than elect, a replace candidate, d) without every offering any explanation, much less an apology, how a Democrat president from January 20, 2021, was daily declared vibrant, dynamic, and engaged but suddenly one day after June 27, 2024, was remanufactured as not?

That the Director of the Secret Service actually claimed in public that they couldn’t put agents on that roof because its slope created “safety concerns” — something so stupid it’s hard to believe someone said it — yet still has her job, shows how accountability-free DC is.

Apparently, leaked memos show that J.D. Vance is so hardcore against wokeness that he froze dozens of ambassador nominations over their views on gender transition and DEI. Incredible.

Why undertake anything so obviously cockamamie? The reasons are several. Start with the insular complacency of a city long-accustomed to immense international power and unable to see that it no longer has it. Many who hold the reins in the city are old men who remember the world of decades ago when an aircraft carrier could intimidate almost any country, including China. This isn’t then, but the old have difficulty noticing. Add a Congress incontinently ignorant of anything but the politics of Washington and of their home states. There is nobody on the House China committee who reads, speaks, or writes Chinese. Yet Congress inveighs fiercely against Beijing like a swarm of feral hamsters.

Arlines already use mobile devices for gate checkin, lounges, and kiosks. Hotels are the same. Even TSA. Hospitals already use connected systems via browser and/or Citrix. From now, the only strategy that is not negligence is to move critical infrastructure to mobile devices.

The best photos from the 19th stage of this year’s Tour de France. #TDF2024  

7.14

A new show about the Cold War, “Not All Propaganda Is Art,” reveals the dark, sometimes comic ironies of trying to control the world through culture.

This is known as the Steel Man Technique. Put simply, it’s building the best form of the other side’s argument and then engaging with it. It’s being charitable and patching up the weaknesses in the other side’s proposition so that he can bring the best counter-argument to your point of view.

This tileset would be both the beginning and the end of the story, if not for one catch: it’s a commercial tileset, hosted by Stadia Maps and offered on a subscription plan. (I’m not affiliated with Stadia Maps and I’m not getting any incentive to write about them.)

Figure out what side-impacts the automation may have on your results. I could write a dissertation on all the “automation” that is undocumented or even mostly unknown that comes into play with both our cameras and our post processing workflows. The “average” user, on the other hand, wants to use automation as much as possible because there are too many variables that should be controlled to make you a perfect craftsperson (or deviant artist).  

David Axelrod is hammering Biden nonstop. Speaking for himself, or channeling Obama?

Milwaukee radio station says it agreed to cut out parts of their interview Joe Biden that made him look bad after the Biden campaign called and demanded it.

Nearly 250 years after the publication of Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ and the West has lost the economic plot.

The drone ascended ~3,500 meters from the base camp to the summit of the highest mountain in the world.

Now here’s the kicker: In response to questions about the reliability of their study, Newstead and Hill reanalyzed their data and published a follow-up report (2022) which found no significant change in population abundance of piping plovers at Boca Chica over time. A decreasing trend in abundance over the first three years of the study was balanced by an increase in the final year of the study (once data from additional survey visits was added to the analysis).

For our part, we have conducted nine years of monitoring using a protocol developed with US Fish and Wildlife Services, and for the past two years we have ensured consistent sampling throughout the year by surveying monthly. The findings show little to no strong evidence of trends, either increasing or decreasing, for any of the target species, including piping plovers.

The American System.

In one of the most significant data breaches in recent history, hackers stole AT&T customers’ call and text metadata spanning several months.

The financial record also needs to be complete. More specifically, both the sub-ledger and the general ledger are a complete representation of all business activities that occurred at a specific time. If there is an event that occurred but is not in the financial record, than the system is not complete. Note, that this doesn’t imply eventual consistency not acceptable. You just need to know when your data will become complete, to notify stakeholders that data has settled.

(Do we remember the rodeo clown who merely wore an Obama mask during a bull riding contest and was punished by being permanently banned by the Missouri State Fair authorities?)

The effort was turbocharged by disclosures that several senators made very profitable trades in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when members of Congress were getting classified briefings that warned of how disastrous the virus could be for the U.S. economy. The FBI launched insider trading investigations into three senators, but eventually ended the probe without making any charges.

Often the best solutions are relatively simple. Greece, for example, has been forced to introduce new laws to protect its beaches from over-commercialisation. Regulations introduced earlier this year mandate that umbrellas and deckchairs must be at least 4m from the sea and that they can’t be rented out on smaller beaches. Beaches are being monitored by drones; so far fines of almost £300,000 have been issued.

7.7

The true story — as best I can remember — of the origin of Mosaic and Netscape.

We’ve released a new dataset, Newswire https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09490 2.7M unique newswires reproduced 32M+ times over a century (1878-1977). Articles have location and topic tags and person ids (from Wikipedia). Fun fact: see the prohibition related crime spike in the 1920s

Foreigners make up 8% of the French population but account for 24% of prison inmates. They committed 77% of rapes in Paris54% of street crimes in Niceand 40% of vehicle thefts, and 38% of burglaries and 31% of muggings across France. And in recent months, the stark reality of mass immigration, the glaring lack of social integration, and, to be blunt, what happens when Western nations import people who hate who we are has been further highlighted by a series of shocking atrocities.

Probability of losing per passenger

If you take a walk around Washington or a Western European capital today, there is no feeling of looming catastrophe. The threats are too complex, with many moving pieces and overlapping layers of risk adding up to a larger danger that is less obvious. People can be forgiven for not seeing the cloud hanging over them, for feeling that all is well — even as in Eastern Europe they are digging in for war. But this complacency is itself part of the problem, making the threat more difficult to foresee, to manage, or, potentially, to avert.

A gallery of U.S. state welcome signs

The terms of the deal show that Volkswagen is paying $1 billion by the end of the year to acquire Rivian stock. Half of this sum is locked at a Rivian stock price of $10.84 per share, which was likely the price when the deal was inked. The rest will reflect the share price closer to the deal completion date but not earlier than December 1, 2024. Even if the stock skyrockets by then, Volkswagen is projected to become Rivian’s second-largest shareholder, behind Amazon.

Still, Mickey entering the public domain brings up the question: what cartoon characters enter the public domain next? Below is a list of 10 major cartoon characters entering the public domain over the next decade, with the year they enter the public domain in parentheses. Note these are the earliest versions of the characters entering public domain; like “Steamboat Willie” Mickey, they likely won’t have most of their familiar modern aspects. (So while you can use 1938 Superman when he enters public domain, you’ll have to wait another two decades before you can show or mention his cousin, Supergirl.)

But recently they’ve deteriorated further, mostly due to Jill Biden.

It also contains a project named Protego ( wikileaks.org/vault7/#Protego ) which is not a malware but a missile control system, that can, if used in a specific way, can cause a missile launch to fail.”

Every time you transact in property, you will notice a variety of ticky-tack transactional frictions added to a (hopefully) itemized list. The largest, by a substantial margin, are agent commissions, which have come under substantialscrutiny for their set-by-a-disciplined-cartel character.

Common knowledge is why coronations and executions are held in public – not so a crowd can see the new king or the hanged man, but so a crowd can see a crowd seeing the new king or the hanged man. Common knowledge is why sitcoms have laugh tracks, why American Idol has a live studio audience, and why professional sports teams pipe in crowd noise. Common knowledge is why the Egyptian government fell in 2011 after a televised protest in Tahrir Square, why the Romanian government fell in 1989 after a televised protest in Palace Square, and why the Chinese government will arrest you today if you distribute pictures of a 35-year-old protest in Tiananmen Square. Common knowledge is why inflation has been non-transitory and persistent, why the US withdrawal from Afghanistan collapsed into a fiasco, and why the US response to Covid was so heavy-handed and ineffectiveCommon knowledge is why the 2024 Biden/Harris campaign has collapsed.

The historical left is in full meltdown…. They don’t understand that the MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than President Trump. They will look back fondly at Donald Trump. They’ll ask: Where’s Trump when we need him?

Conceptually the Portable Data Transmitter is essentially a 5G Xperia phone that can only send and receive data, rather than making phone calls. In practice it’s a little more complex than that: adding direct HDMI and LAN inputs and dual USB-C sockets so that it can stream data and video directly from cameras to the internet using its 5G cellular connection.

Japan’s well-known population collapse issues foretell severe labor squeezes in the coming years, and one specific issue this project aims to curtail is the continuing rise in online shopping, with a forecast decline in the numbers of delivery drivers that can move goods around. The country is expecting some 30% of parcels simply won’t make it from A to B by 2030, because there’ll be nobody to move them.

“So what I’m saying is enlarge the pie,” he said. “We have the smallest U.S. active duty military that we’ve had since the eve of World War II. …We are in a major crisis, a 1930s-style crisis, and we’re making decisions that we don’t need to be making about a small amount of resources when we can increase that amount of resources.”

Japan’s kei cars are a common sight on the country’s streets. Today kei trucks, the hard-working cargo versions of the kei car, are increasingly seen offroad and in camping areas as users find ways to customize them for adventurous outdoor use.

Carville advised donors who want Biden out of the race to cut off money to politicians who won’t take their side.

For folks not interested in dropping thousands on an Apple headset, the IR cameras could offer other perks, including bringing “in-air” gestures to AirPods, per Kuo. The IR module could be similar to the receiver that powers Apple’s facial recognition feature, FaceID. The analyst’s report follows a from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, which noted that Apple was looking into the idea of camera-powered AirPods.

Between 1945 and 1960, RAND operated as the world’s most productive research organization. Initially envisioned as a research arm of the Air Force, RAND made century-defining breakthroughs both in basic science and applied strategic analysis. Its members helped define U.S. nuclear strategyconceptualized satellites, pioneered systems analysis, and developed the earliest reports on defense economics. They also revolutionized much of STEM: RAND scholars developed the basics of game theory, linear programming, and Monte Carlo methods. They helped conceptualize generalized artificial intelligence, developed the basics for packet switching (which enables data transmission across networks), and built one of the world’s first computers.

I’m thinking about what *I* want, as a capable, curious adult. I want to use its ideas to invent enabling environments for myself—to help me better think, learn, and create.

Immersion

My most cherished learning experiences have involved diving into a topic, trying things, getting my hands dirty, living and breathing it. In the real world, this kind of learning is somewhat rare. Many topics just seem too abstract. Or, when I try to “just dive in”, I’ll struggle to find an effective way to engage. But this is mostly how we see Nell learn: through immersive, hands-on action.

You can now short the Party with cryptocurrency.

VP Kamala Harris career timeline. Market action.

This website wants to document the technical tools used by the Spanish government to censor official informative websites about the referendum in Catalonia to be held on October 1, 2017. 

Were algorithmic “gotcha” questions still asked? Were the questions easier? Was the bar just higher?

So, the ID. Buzz GTX is facing some stiff competition – and early impressions suggest Volkswagen isn’t competing in the same league. It might be faster than the E-Transit in a straight line, but it doesn’t stop, corner or ride anywhere near as well, which I think rather defeats the point. And that’s before I address the practicality limitations.

Are Democrats even capable of running a presidential campaign without massive hoaxes, disinformation campaigns and election interference involving corruption of government officials and complicity of the mainstream media? This should be offensive to every voter.

The Democratic Party crushed all opposition during the primary with behind-the-scenes arm twisting and threats to discourage potential candidates from running, legal challenges to prevent NoLabels, @deanbphillips, @RobertKennedyJr and others from getting on the ballot in many states, and unprecedented limitations on the recent debate (which enabled the exclusion of @RobertKennedyJr) to limit the possibility of a third-party candidate successfully running for president.

A small group of local reporters (including me) were set to travel with President Biden to a handful of other stops today. We’ve now been told we don’t have transportation and won’t be doing so.

The solution to the software crisis will not be a reversion to more constrained platforms, but a constraint on the number of layers of abstraction we are allowed to apply, as well as the requirement of information preservation between these layers. We must narrow the (semantic gap) so that everyone may scale it.

All new vehicles sold in Europe – including Northern Ireland but not Great Britain – will be fitted with a mandatory speed limiter from 2024 to keep cars within the limits and boost road safety.

The funds, announced Tuesday by the U.S. Economic Development Administration, will create a new shared health database, send a fleet of cancer screening vans to underserved neighborhoods, provide lab space for science startups and help biohealth businesses develop apprenticeship programs.

But there is another dimension, too. Like East Germany, Prussia has left a mark on Germany that didn’t vanish when the state did. There are historians today who constitute an ‘otherness’ of the country’s East based on the idea that it had already been ‘different’ when it was Prussia. Traditions of Prussian liberalism are ignored in this picture and the focus is on perceived attributes of militarism, autocracy and general backwardness. A line is still often drawn from Prussia to Nazi Germany, an image of continuity favoured by Hitler himself, who liked to put himself in line with Prussians like Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck and Paul von Hindenburg.

Funding isn’t an issue. Revolut had $22 billion of customer balances (including over $19 billion of deposits) globally at the end of last year but only $680 million of loans, primarily in the personal lending and credit cards space.

Nuno Cunha Barnabé, a tax partner at Lisbon law firm Abreu Advogados, said the inclusion of retirees in the previous regime had made Portugal an anomaly. “It was against demographics. It didn’t make sense,” he said. “We already have an old population. Attracting pensioners puts more burden on our health system. We need to attract young people.”

Civics: The Democratic Party Awaits Its Gorbachev

Niall Ferguson

The most impressive feature of Thursday’s debate between Brezhnev and Andropov—sorry, Trump and Biden—is that anyone watching was in the least surprised by what it revealed.

The president is senile. The former president is a blowhard. Both these truths have been obvious for years. Yet somehow The New York Times editorial board, the hosts of Pod Save America, and numerous other eminent liberal authorities were shocked by what CNN broadcast from Atlanta.

6.30

How Many Hot Dogs Should You Eat This Summer?

Real positive takeaway here: WWIII, Cold War, Containment … these are not answers for today but relics from last century. After decades of enabling its rise, America now lives in a multipolar world but is deeply uncomfortable with that reality, thus we — in our painfully geriatric leadership cohort — reach for inappropriate tools from the past.

“We hear a lot, ‘We moved out to the town because we wanted to be in a more rural area, and here comes the big, bad city of Madison developing it,’” Greger said. “We try to allay some of those concerns. This is a long-term plan, land it takes a long time for this development to occur. Plus, we don’t have any real development interests at the moment out here.”

Bestselling writer Naomi Klein has called Baillie Gifford “thin-skinned” for putting literary festivals in jeopardy, as she defended her decision to support Fossil Free Books’ campaign against the investment manager. Speaking to City A.M. in an interview after winning the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction for her latest book Doppelganger, Klein said she believed people should pull their money from Baillie Gifford and that the investment manager couldn’t expect to gain the clout from association with the arts, without also engaging with the ideas of artists and writers.

This cheaper device, codenamed N107, is now the focus of Apple’s Vision Products Group. The company hopes to bring that product to market as early as the end of 2025 — a plan that’s been in place since before the Vision Pro was first unveiled last year. The problem: Apple is struggling to get the cost down while retaining critical features. It’s dealing with some difficult trade-offs.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, active since 1996, preserves nearly 900 billion pages for public access.

The unbearable sorrow of Apple Weather

As many as 5,000 bridges along Germany’s autobahns are so decrepit that they need to be renovated or rebuilt as quickly as possible. But the state, restrained by a national debt brake, is struggling to find the money.

Dealing with a co-founder not pulling their weight.

If I blast white noise, fan speeds stay at max + no throttle.

Words you can spell with a calculator.

“The only logical conclusion for the secret nature of the proceeding was to give Glanville in conjunction with the State the unfettered ability to harass and intimidate the sworn witness into testifying,” the lawyers argue in the motion. They go on to say defense lawyers have a right to the full transcript of the meeting since Copeland may have said things that could be used to undermine his credibility on cross-examination.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and Attorney Bjorn Johnson have filed a lawsuit against the Village of Sister Bay on behalf of their clients Captains Cottage LLC, a short-term rental in the Village for unlawfully refusing to issue Captains Cottage a permit to rent the property. Due to the Village’s actions, Captains Cottage was forced to cancel all their reservations starting July 1, causing a substantial loss of income. Following WILL’s filed complaint, a judge has granted a temporary restraining order and set a hearing for Wednesday, June 26th.

What we can learn today from the British East India Company. Captain Hawkins was the father of all account managers. His expense account totaled an annual sum of £3,200 (~$0.5M in 2020 USD) paid from the treasury of the Mughal Empire. His knowledge of Turkish allowed him access to Emperor Jehangir’s intimate drinking circle, where, after several years, he succeeded in obtaining for his employers at the British East India Company the concession of a warehouse in Surat. In 1609, when Hawkins undertook his duties as account manager, the East India Company was still largely focused on the spice trade, particularly nutmeg from the Banda Islands in present-day Indonesia. The purpose of the concession was to exchange wool, iron, lead, and tin for cotton goods in India which could be traded for spices with the inhabitants of the ‘Spiceries’.

Welcome to Rent Elderly People.

I’ve mentioned that tables of contents can communicate the structure of the page. However, they do so from the outset, before you’ve started reading. In their “base form”, the reader stops benefiting from tables of contents once they’ve started reading.

I was searching through old presentations and ran into one that I gave to an international military audience in a closed-door event, just after Stuxnet had been found. At the time, these speculations felt pretty wild. They turned out to be true.

Hillary Clinton proposed a drone strike on Julian Assange, back in 2010.

A campaign finance expert tells the Tribune that ex-Ald. Ed Burke can pay the $2 million fine levied today from his political fund w/o penalty.

Anyone following Boeing’s financial performance and weak balance sheet could see this one coming.

The real gatekeepers of the world tend to be governmental in nature, either by law or by regulation. The problem with that is we’re going from a more open global market to a more tightly regulated regional market in ways that are now impacting companies pretty directly. That’s because the laws and regulations are getting tougher to protect perceived regional interests. 

Yet although SpaceX has made its money on satellites orbiting Earth (including its own Starlink communications system), the new focus among space entrepreneurs centers on opportunities outside Earth’s orbit. For the first time, the amount of venture capital money spent on extraterrestrial projects has exceeded the amount devoted to either launch or satellite manufacturing companies. Some are directly making off-Earth enabling devices, such as moon landers. It was a Houston-based private firm, Intuitive Machines, that recently placed the first American lander on the Moon in half a century.

Blue Origin demands to cap the launch and landing of Starship from Cape Canaveral.

Adonis tracks outcomes including net collection rate, denials, and accounts receivable timelines, the latter of which Magoon says Adonis reduces from about 75 days to 25–30 days. Customers include Apollo MD, US Dermatology Partners, Brightside Health, Rippl Care and RubiconMD.

More and more people in caring professions have to account for everything they do. Is this an improvement?

The great news is that I will be doing this, as Reid mentioned, 24/7, so keep Outlook and Teams open on your phones, tablets, or whatever device you take to bed with you. Building on Reid’s comments, I’m excited to announce that in my first official act I am also making redundant all of the Executive Vice Presidents that report to me and that I will assume their roles as well. We call this technology MultiplePersonalities (only available with $300M+ in Azure commits) and it gives me the ability to be on multiple Teams calls at the same time with each of the personalities of our previous executive team or even as multiple of them in a single call.

In long-awaited evidence, Jenkins, 72, insisted that the bugs and errors in the system were “well controlled and managed”, infuriating sub-postmasters. Appearing at the public inquiry into the scandal, he disputed the findings of Judge Peter Fraser, in the High Court trial led by the campaigner Sir Alan Bates, that Horizon was “not remotely robust”.

Both Poe and the novice printer Calvin F.W. Thomas were just eighteen when the poet handed over his manuscript, presumably at Thomas’s shop at 70 Washington Street in Boston, and paid him to make it into a book. The result was forty pages of unevenly printed verse bound in drab tan wrappers the shade of a faded tea stain. Tamerlane’s front cover features a potpourri of discordant typefaces within an ornamental frame that resembles a geometric queue of conifers—a heavy-handed period design I have grown to adore. It’s clear that Thomas, as a workaday job printer whose usual commissions were show bills, apothecary labels, calling cards, and the like, had his shop stocked with a mishmash of typefaces to fit any taste. On this occasion, he seems to have drawn liberally from his inventory.

Comparative data from Marine Traffic suggests that the Houthi attacks have led to a 79.6 percent drop in drybulk carriers going through the Suez Canal in June 2024 versus June 2023. The recent attacks and sinking of Tutor is expected to lead to an additional rise in insurance costs for companies planning to send ships through the Red Sea. Central Command continues to work with partners to degrade the Houthi abilities, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder told reporters Tuesday.

Recognizing the growing anti-Biden trend among Democrats, Howell issued an “emergency” memo last week warning about a possible move. He noted that since Biden has already passed through the primary process and beyond fall election ballot deadlines, the party is stuck with the president.

The campaign also comes at a time when several Republican-appointed members of the high court, including Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, have been accused by Democratic lawmakers of abrogating ethical responsibilities despite a lack of evidence that either of the justices’ decisions were influenced by outside parties.

The National Legal and Policy Center, led by Paul Kamenar, filed the complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics on Tuesday. The complaint dings Omar for “failing to accurately report the financial assets, transactions, and liabilities of her spouse,” Tim Mynett, citing discrepancies in Omar’s personal financial disclosures. Those discrepancies “deserve to be fully investigated,” Kamenar said. The complaint comes roughly three weeks after a Minnesota Reformer report highlighted Mynett’s shady business ventures in the wine and marijuana industries, which have prompted lawsuits from disgruntled investors.

“To anyone watching closely, it’s been obvious that Obama has been thinking about where he fits in today’s political mêlée and working on his public tone.” // Biden can barely do a minimal job of appearing to be a candidate for reelection. How could he perform this magical task in the last 4 months?

The images by Weimin Chu capture traditional landscapes integrated with modern developments in China. Chu creates a frame within a frame, connecting the carriage interior with the outside landscape, inviting us to journey alongside the photographer through landscapes and time.

That second point is interesting to consider. With PCC, Apple has gone to extraordinary lengths to safeguard user privacy with AI- related tasks. In doing so, Apple has surely also incurred an extraordinary expense. How can Apple justify the cost of providing PCC if it doesn’t directly monetize its Apple Intelligence features? Either through the improved brand perception captured in a broader privacy narrative or by monetizing PCC with other non-AI use cases.

Then-FBI Director James Comey had also met in the Situation Room in early October to discuss the plan. But Comey balked at accusing “Russia’s senior-most officials” of authorizing the “alleged hack” of the Clinton campaign and trying “to interfere in the U.S. election process,” as the two-page document claimed. Conspicuously, the FBI did not sign on to the intelligence.

Many of the things they fought about rhyme with the arguments in 2020. There were – wait for it – alternate or “fake” elector slates. There were arguments about the meaning of the 12th Amendment and how these conflicting slates were to be handled.

Georgia and Atlanta are welcoming, business-friendly environments that provide an ideal backdrop for Cargill’s investment in technology and innovation…

Dairy farmers in Denmark face having to pay an annual tax of 672 krone ($96) per cow for the planet-heating they generate.

These success stories suggest that the formula for Singapore’s effectiveness— active problem-solving and long-term thinking—is alive and well in many U.S. communities. Celebrating and documenting homegrown models of competent city governance is the first step in determining whether we can create an American Singapore.

It only took @TractorSupply losing $2 billion before they decided to stick to selling farm equipment rather than engaging in activism

What is the secret of the LMB’s success? Many researchers and historians have pointed to its origins in the Cavendish Laboratory, the physics department of the University of Cambridge, UK, where researchers brought techniques such as X-ray crystallography to bear in the messy world of biology. Its pool of exceptional talent, coupled with generous and stable funding from the Medical Research Council (MRC), undoubtedly played a part. However, there is much more to it. None of these discoveries was serendipitous: the lab is organized in a way that increases the likelihood of discoveries (see ‘New questions, new technologies’).

The Pennsylvania-based healthcare giant uses Nuance as an IT provider. We’re told that after the Microsoft-owned entity terminated one of its workers, that staffer two days later may have accessed and taken copies of sensitive records on a huge number of Geisinger patients – for reasons as yet unknown.

Lawyers for the Post Office arranged a secret meeting with a judge to prevent disclosure to defence solicitors in a criminal trial, the Post Office Inquiry heard yesterday.  Solicitor Martin Smith and his barrister colleague Simon Clarke met the judge at Birmingham Crown Court in 2013 on the eve of a trial of a sub-postmaster accused of theft.

This is the story of one of the greatest intelligence coups in history. It begins in the lobby of the Hotel Bristol in Oslo, one wintry night in 1939. A middle aged man went to reception and asked, could he borrow a typewriter?

‘I’m good, I promise’: the loneliness of the low-ranking tennis player

Why these things are not happening is not a military matter; this is a political matter. It is clear that the Commander’s Intent and Higher Direction and Guidance from the POLMIL level does not want to do this. So, we’ll do an incomplete job instead. The results speak for themselves.

Technology is about to accelerate.
Because Chevron deference is over.
And regulators can’t just make up laws anymore.
So, countless new startups just became feasible.
This is often spoken about in the abstract, so let’s do three examples and two visuals.

Assange says the email shown in this video is the most significant in his whole collection. Because the email contains sensitive info between Hillary Clinton and John Podesta.

In 1908, at the height of photographic pictorialism, a photography textbook formalized Robinson’s suggestion, in what is likely the first actual account of the (as-yet-unnamed) phenomena:

The Principle Object of Interest?—?There must be a principle object of interest in the picture; and that object must be put in the right place, not only in regard to the spacing of the negative, but also in relationship to the other details of the picture. For this purpose, you will find it an excellent plan to rule your ground-glass in the manner indicated on the accompanying diagram. The crosses indicate positions of strength, the weakest part of the space is the center. The principle object of interest, therefore, should be placed very close to where the lines intersect; that is to say, near but not in, the middle of the picture. [emphasis added]

Surprising decision by @eumetsat to launch with SpaceX Falcon 9 instead of Ariane 6, not waiting for the inaugural flight before making their launch service decision. It’s difficult to understand, especially as Ariane 6 is well on track for its 9 July inaugural flight, with all proceeding nominally. Plans still target one more launch in 2024 and the ramp-up of Ariane 6 has not changed, except now for the loss of MTG-S1. The end of the launcher crisis is within reach. Now is the time for Europe to support autonomous access to space, which is on the horizon.

To conduct this research, Passman and his colleagues applied for and received an exception to FDA rules that allows them to use the watch to alert patients who have already been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation that they are by having an irregular heartbeat.

SpaceX has been deploying Direct-to-Cellphone Starlinks since January 2024. This will enable enabling global texting, calling, and browsing with existing unmodified cellphones. SpaceX is still testing these capabilities. SpaceX should start offering T-mobile customers direct to cellphone service in the next few months.

Two decades ago Oliver Blume did a PhD in Shanghai under the supervision of Wan Gang, who as China’s minister for science and technology later became the driving force behind the country’s electric vehicle revolution. Now Blume, chief executive of both Volkswagen and Porsche, must safeguard two of Germany’s biggest industrial names from the achievements of his former professor, which gave rise to Chinese EV industry champions from carmaker BYD to battery giant CATL.

6.23

A laboratory accident with a laser more than 30 years ago served as the unlikely first step in the development of an entire industry that has helped more than 30 million people overcome vision problems.

DR DOS was a great product. It was superior to other DOS versions in many ways, and it is certainly possible that it could have been more successful were it not for Microsoft Windows having been so wildly successful. Starting with Windows 95, the majority of computer users simply didn’t much care about which DOS loaded Windows so long as it worked. There’s quite a bit of lore regarding legal battles and copyrights surrounding CP/M and DOS involving Microsoft and Digital Research. This has been covered in previous articles to some extent, but I am not really certain how much would have changed had Microsoft and Digital Research got on. Gates and Kildall had been quite friendly at one point, and we know that the two mutually chose not to work together due to differences in business practices and beliefs. Kildall chose to be quite a bit more friendly and less competitive while Gates very much chose to be competitive and at times a bit ruthless. Additionally, Kildall sold DRI rather than continue the fight, and DRI had never really attempted to combine DR DOS with GEM as a cohesive product to fight Windows before Windows became the ultimate ruler of the OS market following Windows 3.1’s release. Still, it was an absolutely brilliant product and part of me will always feel that it ought to have won.

The Architecture Behind A One-Person Tech Startup

Toyota has since developed a new generation of smaller engines with a unique design using shorter pistons that promises higher fuel efficiency when used alongside batteries in hybrid vehicles. The engines can run on diesel and petrol as well as carbon-neutral fuels such as hydrogen or so-called e-fuel. The world’s largest carmaker by sales is betting that the continued investment in the profitable fuel-based technology will pay off at a time when consumers are choosing hybrids rather than fully electric vehicles due to concerns about cost and driving range. But industry executives and analysts remain divided on whether the Japanese group is underestimating the scale of the electric transition that is increasingly being led by its Chinese rivals and whether its bullish bet on engines could become costly in the long run.

A century after George Mallory’s disappearance on Everest, why do his words, “Because it’s there,” remain an indelible explanation for the human obsession with high places?

Besides this being wrong – it’s not a story of which country is fast tracking aircraft. This isn’t how certifying safe commercial aircraft works or should ever work.

Aggressive refinancings that rearrange collateral packages have become the norm in the syndicated bank loan market used to finance mega leveraged buyouts.

Censorship and the Connecticut bar.

At its European Group Meeting in Bristol, U.K., Epic leaders and customers showcased new AI products and collaboration. In May, two hospitals in the Netherlands became among the first to deploy the AI-enabled Patient Summaries technology, which distills years’ worth of clinical notes into a short summary for clinician review.

The U.S.-led campaign against Iran-backed Houthi rebels has turned into the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II. That’s what its leaders and experts tell The Associated Press, whose journalists visited U.S. ships off Yemen in recent days. 

The retired USN admiral James Stavridis sums it up nicely for Boot: “We are at an absolute pivot point in maritime warfare,” he told me in an email. “Big surface ships are highly at risk to air, surface, and sub-surface drones. The sooner great-power navies like that of the United States understand that, the more likely they are to survive in major combat in this turbulent 21st century. Like the battleship row destroyed at Pearl Harbor, carriers are at the twilight of their days. It is absolutely time to move the rheostat of procurement away from manned warships and toward more numerous and far less expensive unmanned vessels.”

Call center agents who have to deal with angry or perplexed customers all day tend to have through-the-roof stress levels and a high turnover rate as a result. About 53% of U.S. contact center agents who describe their stress level at work as high say they will probably leave their organization within the next six months, according to CMP Research’s 2023-2024 Customer Contact Executive Benchmarking Report. Some think this is a problem artificial intelligence can fix. A well-designed algorithm could detect the signs that a call center rep is losing it and do something about it, such as send the rep a relaxing video montage of photos of their family set to music. 

Nine years ago, sitting in a hotel room in Budapest, my girlfriend of just a couple weeks found out she was pregnant.

“They sued him previously, and I think they are disappointed with the outcome of that settlement and how he has responded to it … They are putting in the extra work to see if they can get a stronger case here.”

Canvassers from all major political parties have been warned about how careful they must be while knocking on doors. One campaign manager went as far as warning staff that they were being recorded at all times, in order to avoid the type of controversy that enveloped a Tory caught removing opposition leaflets from a home in May.

Happy 6 year anniversary to Greta Thunberg saying we’d all be dead in 5 years.

Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin joined us at The Recombobulation Area.  We sat down for a roughly 35-minute interview, discussing a range of topics. In case you missed it, I wrote a little bit about the interview here.

(Ken SilvaHeadline USA) It’s been about nine years since Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records about a CIA asset and FBI informant who helped fund the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as for records about a neo-Nazi bank-robbery gang also involved in the attack.

Sam Loyd published The Patch Quilt Puzzle. A square quilt made of 169 square patches of the same size is to be divided into the smallest number of square pieces by cutting along lattice lines. The answer, which is unique

Boeing Sent Two Astronauts Into Space. Now It Needs to Get Them Home.

In a recent teardown of the Apple iPad Pro 11-inch, TechInsights revealed details of Apple’s latest silicon: the Apple M4 SoC, codenamed TMRV93, built on TSMC’s advanced N3E process. This surprise release demonstrates Apple’s agility in adopting cutting-edge semiconductor technologies ahead of schedule.

Pilot project shows Navy can move terabytes of data daily from the U.S.S Abraham Lincoln to the cloud

A century later, the tribe and Burlington Northern Railroad Company reached an agreement allowing one eastbound and one westbound oil train to roll through the reservation daily. Under that 1990 agreement, Burlington Northern also paid the Swinomish Tribe $125,000 as “payment in full for all rent, damages, and compensation of any sort, due for past occupancy of the right-of-way from date of construction in 1889 until January 1, 1989.”

The Deadly Mining Complex Powering the EV Revolution

Program and optimize a drone to automate a farm and watch it do the work for you. Collect resources to unlock better technology and become the most efficient farmer in the world. Improve your problem solving and coding skills.

What are some iconic comments on HN?

Replacing two 50-car trains with a single 100-car train increases the odds of derailment by 11 percent, according to a new risk analysis

Later in the article, a clue emerges: “Today, about 85% to 95% of customer calls that First Horizon fields are handled in a self-service manner within the interactive voice response,” according to one of the bank’s executives. Aha! This tells us that however many years ago, the management at First Horizon Bank was sold on an another automation technology, interactive voice response (IVR), that is now used to field the vast majority of its incoming calls. So, like most of its peers, First Horizon Bank was able to replace many of its call center workers with an IVR system, or to allows its call volume to balloon without hiring more of them, until most calls were not being answered by people at all, but IVR. The problem is, everybody absolutely hates IVR.

Your news tells you Biden is cognitively fine. We all see he isn’t.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism? The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

WashingtonTimes: Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.

A big part of the problem is the piling on to any government program a host of progressive wish-list items including:

Using a Trump-era authority, the US Commerce Department has banned the sale of Kaspersky’s antivirus tools to new customers in the US, citing alleged threats to national security.

These estimates reflect the combination of five kinds of support: nationally approved buyer rebates, exemption from the 10% sales tax, government funding for infrastructure (primarily charging poles), R&D programs for EV makers, and government procurement of EVs. The buyer’s rebate and sales tax exemption have accounted for the vast majority of support for the industry (see Figure 2). That said, because of the high cost and desire to winnow the field of producers, the central government reduced the buyer’s rebate in 2022 and eliminated it beginning in 2023. 

After his testimony before the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee around Thanksgiving of 1934, the New York Times ran a front-page story with a two-column headline: “Gen. Butler Bares ‘Fascist Plot’ To Seize Government by Force.” But most of the article was full of denials and outright ridicule from some of the bigwigs that he’d implicated, while the meat of Smedley’s charges got buried on an inside page. Time magazine followed up with a piece headlined “Plot without Plotters,” complete with a cartoon of Butler riding a white horse and asking veterans to follow him. “No military officer of the United States since the late tempestuous George Custer has succeeded in publicly floundering in so much hot water as Smedley Darlington Butler,” the article said. Doesn’t seem like the big media have changed their spots much over the last eighty years, does it?

The Post Office has apologised after it published the names and addresses of 555 postmasters it pursued during the Horizon scandal. The company confirmed personal details had been shared in a document on its website and said it had referred itself to data watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Reid Hoffman overlooked several major issues under the Biden administration, including the worst inflation in 40 years, the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the War in the Red Sea, and the entry of 10 million illegal immigrants into the country…

SVG, short for “scalable vector graphics” is a format for, well, scalable vector graphics. In this article I summarize my opinion of the format, what its problems are and suggest what could be done to improve things.

On April 3, 1897, a letter was put forth to the Kunstlerhaus announcing the formation of a new group with Klimt as president and Rudolf von Alt as honorary president. Of a total of 40 members on the list, 23 were members of the Kuntslerhaus, including Klimt, Joseph Olbrich and Koloman Moser. The group had in fact intended to stay in the Kunstlerhaus, but on May 22nd the board of directors put forth a motion of censure against the new group during their assembly forcing Klimt and the group to leave the meeting in silence. Two days later, an official letter of resignation was sent to the Kunstlerhaus announcing the resignation of twelve member artists including Stor, Olbrich, Moser, Carl Moll, and Felician von Myrbach. More resignations followed over the course of the next two years, including Hoffmann, Kurzweil and ending with Otto Wagner on October 11, 1899.

The advantage now enjoyed by small aerial drones on battlefields including in Ukraine is but “a moment in history,” French Army Chief of Staff Gen. Pierre Schill said at the Eurosatory defense show in Paris. While anti-drone systems are lagging and “leave the sky open to things that are cobbled together but which are extremely fragile,” countermeasures are being developed, Schill told reporters during a tour of the French Army stand at the show June 19. Already today, 75% of drones on the battlefield in Ukraine are lost to electronic warfare, the general said.

Chomsky continued, “Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t refer to i all the time as an unprovoked invasion. By now, censorship in the United States has reached such a level beyond anything in my lifetime. Such a level that you are not permitted to read the Russian position.
Literally. Americans are not allowed to know what the Russians are saying. Except, selected things. So, if Putin makes a speech to Russians with all kinds of outlandish claims about Peter the Great and so on, then, you see it on the front pages. If the Russians make an offer for a negotiation, you can’t find it. That’s suppressed. You’re not allowed to know what they are saying. I have never seen a level of censorship like this.”

In this essay, I will talk about my experience riding Waymos, predict the impacts that self-driving vehicles will have on our society, sketch out Waymo’s unit economics and discuss its competitive positioning vis-a-vis Uber and others, and finally argue that Waymos will totally overhaul how we think of public transit — offering a rare technological “leapfrog” opportunity to urban America.