Roberts said “a lot of stuff” involving Hunter Biden was missing from her iCloud when she got a new phone the next day.

Many editors of the loftier titles won’t admit it, but they all have an eye on the success of the British tabloid Daily Mail Online which, after establishing a large newsroom in New York, has grown to be the world’s largest English-language news website reaching over 225 million unique monthly visitors globally — 75 million of those coming from the United States. Dougherty, now at The Daily Beast, was formerly an editor at the New York Post and Daily Mail.

Krugman’s op-ed about why he, as Nobel-winning macroeconomist, isn’t worried about the debt includes these arguments:

“The older I get, the more my writing is driven by curiosity and the desire to learn, rather than by conviction and the desire to persuade.”

Some time ago, I built a Bürgeramt appointment finder. It helps people get an appointment to register their address at the Bürgeramt. The tool is exceptional in two ways: it’s available to everyone for free, and it follows the rules. I worked with the city for many months to get it sanctioned.

Chris Arnade is not a political extremist. If he reports that the US asylum system is broken, then there’s a real problem.

Printable Popup Horizontal Sundials – How to Make a Sundial.

There is nothing in Wisconsin state law which authorizes municipalities to charge a road use fee. Instead, roads are meant to be financed primarily through property taxes which have strict levy limits and uniformity requirements.  

The Town of Buchanan was one of the Wisconsin municipalities using a TUF to illegally get around their property tax limitations.  

In its letter, Elliott wrote, “While Southwest has a proud history, that history is not an argument for supporting poor leadership and sticking with a strategy that no longer succeeds in the modern airline industry.” Elliott included with its letter a 51-slide presentation laying out its case for overhauling Southwest. One slide features a 2014 quote from founder and former CEO Herb Kelleher: “If things change faster outside your company than they change inside your company, you’ve got something to worry about.”

Car insurance companies secretly collecting driver data with the help of phone apps.

It turns out the 6th floor houses Kitamura Camera’s “Vintage Salon,” dedicated to truly rare and valuable collector’s items. I was blown away when I saw an early Leica built for the German Army bearing a price tag of 40,000,000 Yen, or more than $250,000 USD at the then-current all-time high exchange rate. It turned out that wasn’t even the most valuable model on offer. I asked Mizutani-san if he’d be willing to be interviewed about his experience and the world of ultra-high-end camera collectors, and he agreed.

That is from New History of South Africa, by Hermann Giliomee, Bernard Mbenga, and Bill Nasson, a very excellent book.  I found it to be one of the best single-volume histories of any country I have read.  The other South Africa book I found especially helpful was Understanding South Africa, by Carien du Plessis and Martin Plaut.  One of the best things about travel is you understand a country — through books — much better than before you went there.  Everything is more vivid, and you retain much more of it.

In recent months, NASA officials like Koerner have been grappling with the reality that not all of this hardware is likely to be ready for the planned September 2026 launch date for the Artemis III mission. In particular, the agency is concerned about Starship’s readiness as a “Human Landing System.” While SpaceX is pressing forward rapidly with a test campaign, there is still a lot of work to be done to get the vehicle down to the lunar surface and safely back into lunar orbit.

Will the people connected to this policy be held accountable for any terrorist attacks it makes possible?

The fact that the US allows its own citizens to be put on an enemies list of a Country we are funding is really pathetic and should never be allowed.

But of course that still leaves the basic question of what batteries will be used for. I’m going to go through a bunch of use cases, from the obvious (cars and energy storage) to the not-so-obvious. But first, I should talk a bit about why batteries are such a general-purpose technology.

About one in four people stopped at border had some data copied from their devices by Australian Border Force

Battery-swap stations work well for VPP programs because they offer so much more flexibility than charging at home, where an electric-bike owner usually has just one or two batteries and thus must charge immediately after one runs out. With dozens of batteries in a single station as a demand buffer, Gogoro can choose when it charges them—for instance, doing so at night when there’s less power demand and it’s cheaper. In the meantime, the batteries can give power back to the grid when it is stressed—hence the comparison to power plants.

Is Apple paying OpenAI, or vice versa?

At secret meeting, right-wing radio host Dan Proft dangled $20 million to Darren Bailey’s governor run

Real estate developer Ori Feibush announced the immediate closure of his three OCF Coffee House locations on Monday, a week after OCF workers informed him of their intent to unionize.

She has a lot of company. The past year has been tough for the Bay Area, as thousands of layoffs skittered across the region. Even workers at Silicon Valley’s tech titans — including Meta, Apple and Google — have faced job cuts. Since 2022, tech companies in the region have slashed roughly 40,000 jobs. And with each layoff, workers are entering a market that is less friendly to job seekers than it used to be.

The regime gave $10B to Iran, but tried to take $56B from Elon. Why? It’s simple: they’re fine with Iran getting $10B to kill US troops, but they didn’t want Elon getting $56B to give you free speech. These came just one week apart

The vast majority of Tesla shareholders approved Elon’s comp package in 2018 and have re-approved it now. An activist judge voided it for nothing. The trial lawyers who are asking for billions in fees should get nothing.

United Airlines has launched a new ad serving platform that will exploit the personal travel information of its customers gathered from bookings, and the use of its app to allow a wide array of companies to peddle their wares to flyers.

In the backdrop of heightened data privacy concerns, governments and firms have introduced various privacy regulations. Assembling novel datasets on online advertiser spending, performance, and revenue, we quantify the economic effects of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy on e-commerce firms. Our paper extends prior literature by uncovering the effect of ATT on not only advertising effectiveness but also changes in firm-side strategy to mitigate the effects of ATT and the resulting net impact on overall firm revenue. We show that the performance of conversion-optimized Meta advertisements, which critically depend on third-party data for targeting and measurement, significantly worsened after ATT with a 37% reduction in click-through rates compared to click-optimized campaigns. Although advertisers substitute away from Meta for the Google ecosystem, those with a higher baseline dependence on Meta nevertheless experience a 37% reduction in firm-wide revenue. We find that this is driven primarily by steeper declines at smaller firms in the acquisition of new customers vis-a-vis retaining existing customers.

For example, while the FBI’s number of reported violent crimes fell by 2% in 2021 and 2.1% in 2022, the NCVS’s measure showed increases of 13.6% and 29.3%, respectively. 

Update on the Suez Canal crisis:

• transits thru the Canal are down -50%
• shipping lines punctuality is at 54.6%
• shipping rates prices +44%
• ships transit times +90%

Latest news is Houthis arming Somalis to extend reach

Creating a dozen different SKUs for all those things is complicated. Getting regulatory approval for every variation is expensive. So most manufacturers sell only a few variations of their models.

It’s good that the justices are speaking out. But conservatives need to understand that there is nothing to all the media stories concocting ethics complaints about the justices —they are simply being targeted by coordinated “oppo research” campaigns.

Criminal referral requests against Anthony Fauci and other public health officials have been submitted to District Attorneys in Louisiana.

But Quayle has some 737s and a pilot base in Guam, where business is weaker than before the pandemic, and he has traffic rights in Tokyo. And he is a problem-solver. So rather than returning some Guam-based airplanes to the mainland to fly them between El Paso and Houston (see what I am doing there?), Quayle wants to see if he can make money from unique assets that were controlled by United and Continental before the two airlines merged.

The general approach that Apple is taking is highlighted in this great 6-minute video from the WWDC keynote. In summary, Apple foundation models focus on personalization (alignment strategies), performance (core models), and size (on-device strategies). Only the last one is orthogonal from other developers out there, but it surely added substantial constraints that inspired the other two.

At the Tribeca Festival premiere of her intimate new docuseries, “In the Arena: Serena Williams,” the former tennis champ talks about becoming the subject of so much media attentiont at an early age, as WNBA rookie Caitlin Clark is now experiencing. 

The problem appears to mainly affect those riding mountain bikes in all weathers, particularly in Wales and the UK’s other wettest areas, because they are not sealed properly against water ingress. This week, one of the UK’s leading independent ebike motor specialists, the eBike Motor Centre based in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, told Guardian Money it was being sent about 250 motors a month – of all types – from owners desperate to find a cost-effective fix to problems including failed bearings, failed torque sensors and water damage to circuit boards.

“To 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and to every member of both chambers of Congress: We are 1,800 miles away from the southern border here in Harford County and the American citizens are not safe because of failed immigration policy,” the sheriff said.

I think most everybody thinks their travels are more interesting than they really are and that they are more well-traveled than they really are. I fall into both of these categories, and here are some musings on why.

New York, New Jersey, and California are all losing residents, often to these same states. Last year, New York, California and Illinois lost more people to out-migration than any other states. Demographer Wendell Cox notes that the largest percentage loss of residents occurred in big core cities such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco. In contrast, populations grew in sprawling areas such as Phoenix, Dallas, and Orlando. But although New York City had the biggest losses, an outstanding eight out of every 10 New York towns have also witnessed population declines since 2020. Overall, 90% of US growth last year was outside of big cities, the electoral base of the Democrats.

The sentencing was passed by Judge Kollar-Kotelly. After Harlow’s husband begged for mercy, expressing his fear that his wife would die alone in prison, the judge taunted that maybe Harlow would “make an effort to remain alive” because that is a “tenet of [Harlow’s] religion.”

Remember: you will need a special high level ID to fly from Phoenix to Fort Worth but you don’t need anything to vote for the president.

One week after receiving emails from top epidemiologists arguing the virus was likely a lab leak, Fauci caused a virtual ban on questioning COVID’s origin.

I’d argue the worst sign for WaPo is that they’ve lost *half* their audience since 2020 and *$77 million* last year…. and the fact that they have someone trying to get them out of that rut who isn’t overly sensitive to their anxieties (or to P.R.-approved diction) is a net win

Sadly, this very clear and easy way of doing things somehow got lost in the transition to the web.

Managing a team of any size — from a handful of people to a whole company — is a continual balance between trying to empower people to achieve what they want (interesting projects, plentiful opportunities, a plethora of pay increases and promotions) whilst navigating a conflicting reality that doesn’t always want to give it to them

Brain drain from Canada

The editors of Farm Equipment, with the support of dealership software provider VitalEdge Technologies, have updated the 2024 version of an online resource of the farm equipment industry’s largest dealers. Known as the Farm Equipment Dealer 100™, the content is an interactive digital representation of the 100 largest dealers by locations and compiled annually by Ag Equipment Intelligence and Machinery Advisors Consortium

In 2021, Oakland A’s reliever Michael Kelly made a few baseball bets totaling less than $100. It’s going to cost him more than 7,500 times that amount. On Tuesday, MLB announced it was suspending five players, including Kelly, for betting on baseball. While Kelly was one of four players suspended for a year, San Diego Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano received a lifetime ban for his gambling activity. 

So when did the Deere layoffs start this year and which Iowa towns have to fill the workforce hole? Here’s a timeline of the John Deere layoffs of 2024.

They’ll make simple software fast and at high frequency. They’ll have small teams (or no team) and engage directly with their users. Like content creators, there’ll be many kinds of software creators in many mediums. There will be short-form software creators and long-form software creators. There will be educational software creators, entertainment software creators, and lifestyle software creators.

US Embassy in Kyiv sent a notice out overnight for dual US-UA citizens warning that as of June 1, Ukraine eliminated a “residence abroad” exception that allowed some men aged 18-60 to leave. Now dual US-UA citizens, including those who live in the US, may no longer be able to depart Ukraine. This is the latest measure taken by Ukraine amid its push to mobilize more men for its war effort.

Thus, if a Danish borrower takes out a 500k mortgage at 3% interest and then rates rise to 6%, the value of that mortgage falls to $358k and the borrower could go to the market, buy their own mortgage, deliver it to the bank, and, in this way, extinguish the loan. Since the value of homes also falls as interest rates rise this is also a neat bit of insurance. Remarkable!

Weird, I was told by NPR just yesterday that the economy was stronger than ever and if you believed otherwise it meant you had been “deceived” by misinformation

Elon Musk is planning to build what could be the most advanced supercomputer in the United States at the former Electrolux Memphis facility, multiple sources have told MBJ. The supercomputer project was being confirmed in a June 5 press conference held by the Greater Memphis Chamber. Sources told MBJ that the Chamber has been working to recruit the Musk operation to Memphis for months.

Breaking: Germany plans to send criminal asylum seekers back to Afghanistan. “Who abuses the protection we provide, loses the right to this protection.” The German chancellor announces plans to change German law and create new charges.

Not so in eastern Germany. It’s hard to explain this to people who haven’t grown up in a place so uniquely devoid of religion, but believing in God would have taken a very conscious op-in for the vast majority of us.

“This investigation has shown a blatant disregard for the safety of human beings,” Schmidt said. “As the sheriff, I am angered at how these men were treated and how they died.”

Costco plans to sell its customer data to advertisers, building a retail media network.

Wallace and Gromit’s will face their arch-enemy, evil penguin Feathers McGraw, when they return in a new full-length feature film this Christmas, the BBC has confirmed.

The carrier on Friday said it launched a media platform to serve travelers personalized advertisements on seat-back screens and in its app, among other platforms, as it seeks to leverage customer data.

“Yes, we need more affordable ‘missing middle’ housing in Madison. Certainly, add more density where it makes sense. The proposed apartments are neither affordable nor do they add anything to the ‘missing middle,’” Worel wrote to city planners. “What they will add is congestion, noise, and parking issues to a section of Old Sauk Road that is already dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists, and school children alike.”

Listen to @RepThomasMassie explain how obsessed the US Congress is with one foreign country.

A partially reusable Starship would be a rocket with almost twice the payload of a Saturn V (as it would not have to carry tonnes of reuse equipment) but with the economics of a Falcon 9. Being able to launch a vehicle in this class perhaps 100 times a year would be revolutionary in itself. It would give us the kind of presence in space that people imagined would follow Apollo – Moon bases, Mars expeditions, large space stations. No million person cities at that level, but certainly a very exciting future.

In 2004, grayscale cars made up 60.3% of the new car market, which is an understandable number. Grayscale colors are simple, widely liked, and look good on most cars. However, in 2023, that number jumped to a staggering 80%. And, according to iSeeCars, automakers offer the same number of different colors now as they did in 2004, with an average of 6.7 non-grayscale colors. So it isn’t that automakers are afraid of interesting colors. Customers just don’t seem to want them.

The current upper class will fall. Connections. Degrees. Prestige. Perception. Narrative control. The news. Their systems are failing.

Ron Paul said while speaking at the Libertarian National Convention that it is “very clear that there was a coup in 1963, and we’re suffering from it ever since.” “There’s been coups around, and the United States are the champions. We’ve committed more coups in the last 30 or 40 years than probably anybody in history… there’s a lot of people that think that 1963-in matter of fact, I think that it’s very clear that there was a coup in 1963, and we’re suffering from it ever since.”

What are your

websites that display a lot of data / tables?

Animated filmmaker John Musker — who directed such Disney films as “The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin” and “Hercules” — called out the Walt Disney Company for prioritizing political messaging over story in its recent films. “I think they need to do a course correction a bit in terms of putting the message secondary, behind entertainment and compelling story and engaging characters,” Musker told Spanish outlet El País at this year’s Animayo International Summit in Gran Canaria, Spain.

“And my observation about Kubota is that they’ve made a conscious decision that ‘We want our dealers to get deeper into the area that they have,’ and a limitation on size kind of signals that — their focus and as they add product lines. So that looks like a natural reflection — that is, selling a more broad product line that Kubota has in the geography you have, rather than getting broader.”

John Eastman 1 of 9. This is a 9-part thread about Attorney John Eastman speaking on his findings and informing us about the stolen 2020 election. His presentation on Lawfare in America, hosted by Michigan Fair Elections, was given on May 14th.

During the early rise of consumer PCs in the 1980s, no Western-designed CPU, printer, monitor, operating system, or programming language was capable of handling Chinese character input or output—not “out of the box,” at least. For the better part of the history of computing, computing technology has been biased in favor of certain alphabetic scripts—none more so than the Latin alphabet. In the 1960s, the development team behind ASCII (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange) determined that a 7-bit coding architecture and its 128 addresses offered sufficient space for all of the letters of the Latin alphabet, along with numerals and key analphabetic symbols and functions. Chinese characters, by comparison, would have demanded no less than 16-bit architecture to handle its more than 60,000 characters. And of course, long ago Western engineers piggy-backed on the preexisting typewriter keyboard, using the two-dimensional Shift key to toggle between lower and uppercase letters (Chinese has no alphabet, of course, nor uppercase or lowercase).  

A defining characteristic of the contest is that voters overall have little confidence in either candidate across a range of key traits, including fitness for office, personal ethics and respect for democratic values.

Behind closed doors, even Realtors recognize that their dominance feels tenuous. A report commissioned by NAR in 2015 identified one of the biggest and most likely threats as “entry by a new player” into the real estate market. “A large company like Google could fall in love with real estate, along with its many resources. With a market cap of $356 billion and an insatiable appetite for acquiring companies, buying a large real estate portal and becoming a dominant player in the MLS or portal world is not too big of a stretch,” the report warned.

The system is self-perpetuating. Realtors pay dues to NAR and its more than 1,000 state and local affiliates for access to the MLS, and the dues feed a sprawling political apparatus that keeps the money flowing.

Public records, internal documents and NAR’s own statements show that a central part of this strategy is political spending. NAR spent more than $67 million during the 2022 midterms alone through a dizzying network of PACs, money handed out to state and local real estate associations and a network of anonymous-sounding groups with names like “Alliance for a Better Pennsylvania” and the “American Property Owners Alliance.” The $67 million figure is, in reality, a sizable undercount of what Realtors spent swaying elections: State and local real estate associations pour tens of millions more of their own into races each cycle, and people who list themselves as working in the real estate sector are the second-biggest group of professionals contributing to federal elections after investors, according to the nonprofit OpenSecrets.

This quiet, seemingly innocent change to how Meta reports growth is significant insofar as it will no longer have to report its Daily Active or Monthly active users, meaning that the only source of truth in Meta’s growth story is a vague growth metric that could be manipulated to mean just about anything. Three billion “daily active people” across Meta’s “family” combines WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger (which I’m confident it counts separately), Oculus, and Threads.  

So the couple the Alitos got into a spat with were a pro-BLM mid-30s unmarried white couple with a “pandemic puppy” living at their parents’ house. Let’s just acknowledge the amazing typecasting here. It’s also hilarious btw that a pro-BLM couple’s first reaction to a verbal altercation was to call …. the police.

Thanks to our federal partners, @POTUS, @SenatorBaldwin, and @USTreasury, we’re using $50 million from the State Small Business Credit Initiative to launch this fund, but that’s only the beginning! We expect the fund to grow exponentially, creating at least a $500 million impact.

“I think she cannot complain, because I played Court 8 and 9 and you can hear everything. Like, I can hear Suzanne Lenglen, Philippe Chatrier, Court 6, 7 during the points. I think she’s very lucky she can play all the time on Philippe Chatrier and she’s okay with that.

Increased construction and labor costs in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the price of the first five townhouses from about $350,000 to over $500,000 apiece, Middleton developer Terrence Wall said in a letter to the city’s Plan Commission in November. Climbing interest rates have also put a damper on homebuying.

The hit film The Sting in 1973 made Scott Joplin a sensation in his hometown of Sedalia Missouri. This is the fiftieth year of the annual Scott Joplin festival.

Back in 2016 I had drunk the media Kool-Aid and was scared out of my mind about Trump. As such I donated to Hilary Clinton’s campaign and voted for her. By 2020 I was disillusioned and didn’t vote – I didn’t like either option. Now, in 2024, I believe this is one of the most important elections of my lifetime, and I’m supporting Trump.

That this case—involving alleged misdemeanor business records violations from nearly a decade ago—was even brought is a testament to the political debasement of the justice system in places like New York City. This is especially true considering this same district attorney routinely excuses criminal conduct in a way that has endangered law-abiding citizens in his jurisdiction.

You can certainly argue that the 235-year-old “gentleman’s agreement” that presidents are not convicted of crimes had to go, but to throw it out for such insultingly ridiculous charges is just a slap in the face to all reason and good judgment.

Most of you know that I have always said that I am a Christian first and a Republican second —because no political party died for me. Today, a verdict was rendered.

An eBay account called Bullseye Deals has been live since 2013, boasting 137,000 followers and over 2.6 million items sold. All of its products seem to be from Target. An identical account on Poshmark was launched in 2022 and has already amassed over 20,000 followers. Bullseye Deals’ branding, while not a perfect replica of the big-box retailer’s logo, is a red dot with the silhouette of a bull inside, which looks an awful lot like Target’s bullseye.

Saleh’s plight is part of a global problem that shows no signs of abating. The United Nations has logged an increasing number of crew members abandoned by shipowners, leaving sailors aboard months and sometimes years without pay. More than 2,000 seafarers on some 150 ships were abandoned last year.

For two years Biden was absolutely adamant that no US weapons could be used to strike Russia. Now he reverses the policy — aka, he lied. So where’s the pushback? Congress, media? What could be of greater consequence than lying the country into war with a nuclear superpower?

The prosecutor is a politician who promised to nail Trump. The judge’s daughter is a Democrat operative who literally raised $$ from the trial while her father presided over it.

While being highly efficient and powerful, the new engines will also revolutionize vehicle packaging by being more compact than existing models. Smaller engines will allow for even lower hoods, improving design possibilities and aerodynamic performance while contributing to better fuel efficiency. The development will also emphasize compliance with increasingly strict emissions regulations.

The Verge and 404 Media are building out new functions that would allow them to distribute posts on their sites and on federated platforms – like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky – at the same time. Replies to those posts on those platforms become comments on their sites. The fediverse allows users from different platforms and services to interact with one another without creating individual accounts for each platform, letting followers from one platform like and comment on a post on another platform. In other words, it lets social media networks that are independent from one another “talk” to each other. But now publishers want in on the interoperability. The Verge, Vox Media’s tech news publication, and start-up tech site 404 Media are eager to federate their sites — they’re just waiting on the tech to support that functionality to become available to them.

This new insight is created by mapping all the various national media distributors — including broadcast and cable networks and streaming services — up to their parent company. Nielsen calculates the total minutes viewed on the TV screen for each network’s services and aggregates those totals based on initial distributor mapping, ultimately arriving at a share of total TV usage for each parent company. The minimum reporting threshold for a parent company in The Media Distributor Gauge is a 1.0% share of TV. Similar to the fluctuation of monthly TV usage tracked in The Gauge, rankings within the media company view will also demonstrate shifts that correlate with the seasonality of TV viewing. 

Appeal to Heaven: On the Religious Origins of the Constitutional Right of Revolution

Preventing sellers from including their offer of pay for the buyer’s agent “also unnecessarily restrains the seller’s choice and absolute right to offer compensation to a brokerage firm representing the buyer,” the statement said.

The billionaire behind the Chobani yogurt brand has acquired Anchor Brewing Co. with plans to modernize and reopen the historic San Francisco brand that closed last year after 127 years in operation.

On Friday, Hamdi Ulukaya, Chobani founder and CEO, announced that his family office had bought all of Anchor’s assets: the iconic steam beer recipes, the 2.1-acre Potrero Hill campus and all the brewing equipment in the De Haro Street warehouses. The price was not disclosed.

The billionaire behind the Chobani yogurt brand has acquired Anchor Brewing Co. with plans to modernize and reopen the historic San Francisco brand that closed last year after 127 years in operation. On Friday, Hamdi Ulukaya, Chobani founder and CEO, announced that his family office had bought all of Anchor’s assets: the iconic steam beer recipes, the 2.1-acre Potrero Hill campus and all the brewing equipment in the De Haro Street warehouses. The price was not disclosed.

I hate to inform the OSINT accounts but, dubious reports of military strikes aside, the Houthis have successfully imposed a blockade against a US Navy who has no capacity to break it. US Navy control over shipping lanes is stone dead

Indeed selling user information.

Today, state highway departments have rebranded as transportation agencies, but building, fixing and expanding highways is still mostly what they do. So it was notable when, in 2022, the head of Colorado’s Department of Transportation called off a long planned widening of Interstate 25. The decision to do nothing was arguably more consequential than the alternative. By not expanding the highway, the agency offered a new vision for the future of transportation planning.

These platforms completely T-boned media companies. As a media company, you were competing for the same attention of users, but with a strictly higher COGS. The more people you had on your payroll that were creating content, the more exposed you were to being flanked by user-generated content platforms. Structurally, investing in media has been a losing value proposition ever since and value creation has shifted entirely to the platforms that control distribution.

As for what I believe? I think the Democratic Party leadership is acting like shortsighted decisions to open the doors to hell don’t matter because many are in their 80s and aren’t going to be around long enough. And they don’t care enough about their own children or their country to care about the world they leave behind after their demises. I have always said that Trump poses an existential threat. Biden joined that club a while back. He should be removing himself at his age and in his condition and Kamala should not be a heartbeat away from being commander in chief of the world’s pre-eminent thermonuclear power.

Exceptions to this include: Fauci, Illegal aliens, every single person on the Epstein client list, your son, you, your brother, the person who left cocaine at the White House, Obama, Bush, the Clinton’s, every elected official insider trading, Big Pharma the WHO and George Soros. “Sovereign individuals”

First attempt at visualizing the mediated Dzhanibekov Rotation as described in @EthicalSkeptic ‘s article.

After being forced into Federal court by us, the White House admits they altered evidence to make Biden appear less incompetent

Simplicity is underrated. Everything about this website is done as simply as I could stand. For example, notice how there’s no database at all. In essence we are using Git itself as our database, specifically that very first repo. That means this site is entirely static, and can be deployed directly to Github Pages without any complications. I don’t think I’ve had to tweak anything about that flow in the last 3 months.

Recently, we released ? FineWeb, a new, large-scale (15-trillion tokens, 44TB disk space) dataset for LLM pretraining. FineWeb is derived from 96 CommonCrawlsnapshots and produces better-performing LLMs than other open pretraining datasets. To bring more clarity in machine learning and advance the open understanding of how to train good quality large language models, we carefully documented and ablated all of the design choices used in FineWeb, including in-depth investigations of deduplication and filtering strategies. The present long form report is a deep dive in how to create a large and high-quality web-scale dataset for LLM pretraining. The dataset itself, ? FineWeb, is available here.

I’ll get to Luxcious in a bit, but it turns out that new sofas, by and large, really do. Why would that be? Well, check out Why Are (Most) Sofas So Bad? in Dwellmagazine which has a weirdly-intermittent paywall, here’s another version.

Under 18 U.S.C. §2071, an individual who “willfully and unlawfully” conceals, removes or destroys a federal record can be fined and imprisoned for up to three years. The statute also applies to attempts to conceal, remove, or destroy a federal record.

The “right to roam” movement in England seeks to reclaim common rights to access, use and enjoy both private and public land, since citizens only have access to 8% of their nation’s land currently.

Coffee houses are one of the earliest examples of ‘Third Places,’ a term popularized by urban sociologist Raymond Oldenberg, who described them as “public places on neutral ground where people can gather and interact. In contrast to first places (home) and second places (work), Third Places allow people to put aside their concerns and simply enjoy the company and conversation around them.” More than that, Third Places are essential to community-building because they bring people together within a shared space who may otherwise remain in more disparate social circles.

This part 2 of the Secret History of Polaroid and Edwin Land. Read part 1 for context. Kodak and Polaroid, the two most famous camera companies of the 20th century, had a great partnership for 20+ years. Then in an inexplicable turnabout Kodak decided to destroy Polaroid’s business. To this day, every story of why Kodak went to war with Polaroid is wrong. The real reason can be found in the highly classified world of overhead reconnaissance satellites.
Here’s the real story.

All tabular knowledge can be stored in a single long plain text file. The only syntax characters needed are spaces and newlines. This has many advantages over existing binary storage formats. Using the method below, a very long scroll could be made containing all tabular scientific knowledge in a computable form.

So, instead of focusing on the pixels, we think of design decisions as how we intentionally use gestalt principles to communicate meaning. And like Tufte’s data-ink ratio compares the strictly necessary ink to the total ink used to print a chart, we can calculate a gestalt ratio which compares the strictly necessary design decisions to the total decisions used in a design. This is design density.

“The Financial Times reported earlier this year that a McKinsey-led think tank, the Urban China Initiative, produced a report….The report, titled, The Trend and Impact of World Technological Revolution and Industrial Transformation, made scores of recommendations to enhance the military and industrial capabilities of the Chinese government.

In the last few weeks there has been a sea change in crypto regulation:

1. Bitcoin spot…

Worse yet, you’re not actually expected to use any of it directly. Instead you’re also supposed to follow the developments of framework abstractions that are layered on top of the foundation specialities, at least doubling the number of complex fields a web dev has to follow and understand, right out of the gate.
This is immense – an expectation so mind-boggling that we need to acknowledge just how remarkable it is that each of us has managed as well as we have.

Google “doesn’t have a choice right now,” Thomas Monteiro, a Google analyst at Investing.com, said in an interview. “Companies need to move really fast, even if that includes skipping a few steps along the way. The user experience will just have to catch up.”

This brings us to the close of our brief tour through the various energy intensive industries. More or less extreme changes to these processes are indicated by the emergence of extremely cheap solar power. These changes present infinite possibilities for disruption of the large, risk averse, growth averse incumbents. The incipient emergence of solar cheaper than fossil fuels is probably the last opportunity to reshuffle the deck in terms of ownership of these various means of production, and represents a unified, industry wide investment thesis with unlimited capacity for outsize returns in response to technical innovation.

With Minnesota having repealed its anti-municipal broadband laws, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance says that 16 states still restrict the building of municipal networks. The Minnesota change “is a significant win for the people of Minnesota and highlights a positive trend—states are dropping misguided barriers to deploying public broadband as examples of successful community-owned networks proliferate across the country,” said Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB), which represents community-owned broadband networks and co-ops. There are about 650 public broadband networks in the US, Sohn said. “While 16 states still restrict these networks in various ways, we’re confident this number will continue to decrease as more communities demand the freedom to choose the network that best serves their residents,” she said.

Essays on programming I think about a lot
JULY 2020. Every so often I read an essay that I end up thinking about, and citing in conversation, over and over again. Here’s my index of all the ones of those I can remember! I’ll try to keep it up to date as I think of more.

The inaccessible and abandoned islands of New York – in pictures

USDoD is a high-profile player in this field, closely associated with “Pompompurin”, the operator of the first iteration of data leak site BreachForums. USDoD is said to have plans to set up a successor to the second iteration of BreachForums which was recently seized by law enforcement. Releasing this database may be USDoD’s way to round up some interested users. USDoD is also believed to be involved in a breach at TransUnion, the data of which was (partly) dumped in September, 2023.

We investigate whether an LLM can successfully perform financial statement analysis in a way similar to a professional human analyst. We provide standardized and anonymous financial statements to GPT4 and instruct the model to analyze them to determine the direction of future earnings. Even without any narrative or industry-specific information, the LLM outperforms financial analysts in its ability to predict earnings changes. The LLM exhibits a relative advantage over human analysts in situations when the analysts tend to struggle. Furthermore, we find that the prediction accuracy of the LLM is on par with the performance of a narrowly trained state-of-the-art ML model. LLM prediction does not stem from its training memory. Instead, we find that the LLM generates useful narrative insights about a company’s future performance. Lastly, our trading strategies based on GPT’s predictions yield a higher Sharpe ratio and alphas than strategies based on other models. Taken together, our results suggest that LLMs may take a central role in decision-making.

To conduct this part of our analysis, we collected a random sample of just under 1 million webpages from the archives of Common Crawl, an internet archive service that periodically collects snapshots of the internet as it exists at different points in time. We sampled pages collected by Common Crawl each year from 2013 through 2023 (approximately 90,000 pages per year) and checked to see if those pages still exist today.

After decades of strategic drift and costly acquisition failures, the U.S. Navy is sailing straight into a storm it can’t avoid. Despite the Defense Department’s lip service about China being the “pacing challenge,” decades of deindustrialization and policymakers’ failure to prioritize among services and threats have left the Navy ill-equipped to endure a sustained high-intensity conflict in the Pacific. The United States is unable to keep pace with Chinese shipbuilding and will fall even further behind in the coming years. 

Luckily for the government there isn’t an example of a company building a nationwide charging network much faster and cheaper for them to be compared against. More.

Welcome to CPU DB, a complete database of processors for researchers and hobbyists alike.

A study found corporate recruiters have a bias against ex-entrepreneurs. They get stereotyped for not wanting to ‘be a small piece of the puzzle’

Hopefully, at this point, you see where I’m going with this. What I’ve concluded, based on experience, is that positioning your project as an alternative implementation of something is a losing proposition. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how hard you work. The problem is, when you build an alternative implementation, you’ve made yourself subject to the whims of the canonical implementation. They have control over the direction of the project, and all you can do is try to keep up. In the case of JITted implementations of traditionally interpreted languages, there’s a bit of a weird dynamic, because it’s much faster to implement new features in an interpreter. The implementers of the canonical implementation may see you as competition they are trying to outrun. You may be stuck trying to ice skate uphill.

A professional developer does thorough work when it matters, and cuts irrelevant corners that aren’t worth wasting time on. Extremely productive developers don’t have supernatural coding skills; their secret is to write only the code that matters. How can we do a better job cutting corners? I think we can learn a lot from people building tables and dressers

The “employment ice age” that followed the collapse of the 1980s bubble condemned hundreds of thousands to low-paying temporary jobs and a meager pension to match. Who will sustain Japan’s Lost Generation as it enters retirement in the years ahead?

Biden’s $7.5 billion investment in EV charging has only produced 7 stations in two years.

Germany may introduce conscription for all 18-year-olds. Both men and women could be called up to boost numbers in the armed forces.

Incora Health was established in 2022. It plans to start selling its earrings, currently in clinical trials, in a few months. “We’re first-time founders in a small city trying to change women’s health care, and that’s not lost on us,” says Theresa Gevaert, a co-founder. But the audacious young firm is part of a wave of startups that have been launched in America over the past few years. Many will fail. Some will succeed. Together they suggest profound change is afoot.

Tesla FSD vs Mercedes Driver Assist! Is Mercedes really better?

This article is a partial-rebuttal/partial-confirmation to KGOnTech’s Apple Vision Pro’s Optics Blurrier & Lower Contrast than Meta Quest 3, prompted by RoadToVR’s Quest 3 Has Higher Effective Resolution, So Why Does Everyone Think Vision Pro Looks Best? which cites KGOnTech. I suppose it’s a bit late, but it’s taken me a while to really get a good intuition for how visionOS renders frames, because there is a metric shitton of nuance and it’s unfortunately very, very easy to make mistakes when trying to quantify things.

Moreover, meticulously measuring and filling the gaps during assembly of each 787 is as expensive as Hart-Smith warned it would be.  Boeing has projected the cost of inspecting and reworking the gaps on previously built 787s before it delivers the jets to airlines at $6.3 billion. “It’s not a catastrophic safety issue, as Salehpour suggested, but only a major disaster for Boeing in regard to costs and assembly times,” Hart-Smith said. “As everyone now knows, it’s a financial disaster.”

We sent a letter to @WisDOJ after they were asked to define who is a lawful “election official.” There is no need for the AG to provide such an interpretation because the WI Constitution and statute is quite clear.

Associations of Internal Medicine Residency Milestone Ratings and Certification Examination Scores With Patient Outcomes

And when Charles Singleton, incarcerated at the Hamilton Aged and Infirmed prison in north Alabama, died at a hospital in November 2021, his body was returned to family after an autopsy at UAB. It was missing a brain, among other organs.

That makes Sweetgreen — popular for peddling premium salads that can cost as much as $20 — one of the best performing stocks in America this year, having soared more than 185% in 2024.

A study analyzing Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX suggests that return to office (RTO) mandates can lead to a higher rate of employees, especially senior-level ones, leaving the company, often to work at competitors. The study (PDF), published this month by University of Chicago and University of Michigan researchers and reported by The Washington Post on Sunday, says:

Along with the corporate overhaul by Noyes and his associates, husband and wife team Charles and Ray Eames also worked closely with IBM to re-imagine the company for the 20th century. While Elliot Noyes was an industrial designer who focused on corporate design and branding, the Eameses were renowned for their contributions to furniture design, architecture, and multimedia productions.

The Littoral Combat Ship was designed with the current crisis in mind, instead it turned into a boondoggle. Here’s why. …. The Zumwalt program saw massive cost growth which forced Navy leaders to slash the planned fleet size from the originally planned 32 to 7 and finally to the three which were actually built. 

And Chinese EVs are very good. China has struggled to make good internal combustion engines, but the shift to EVs has allowed them to leapfrog ICE vehicles entirely. Since China dominates the battery industry, mastering EVs was easy. Kevin Williams has a long article about the high quality of Chinese electric cars, which you should read despite the fact that it contains a fair share of histrionic hand-wringing “We’re cooked”, etc.). Williams’ conclusion is spot on:

“We really don’t know how the (Chinese) politburo think,” one Western official concedes.

“Doubly tough and truly sad,” Buckley said, because the city’s history was interwoven with Hamilton, and it was for a time one of the area’s largest employers. “Frustrating, too, for a city and workforce that put forth our best efforts to keep Hamilton manufacturing jobs here. But it was not to be.”

 And in Revelation 12:7, we are told, “Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back…” In this passage, we see Michael as a military commander of some angels. This is a reference to John’s apocalypse, where the archangel sees a great war of heaven. The devil’s forces were too weak to remain in heaven, so they were thrown down to heaven.

Monday was day five of a live stream that has connected Ireland’s capital with New York via an interactive sculpture and webcam that allows people to see, but not hear, each other.

One very real election issue that @GovEvers refused to address was the number of indefinitely confined voters. This status allows people to check a box & vote without showing an ID. Today, that list still stands at more than double 2016.

Recently, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe thanked Pritzker for the $827M incentive package it received from the State of Illinois despite the company’s massive net loss of $5.4 billion dollars in 2023.

While other people have had similar devices implanted, Arbaugh has become the most public recipient. Part of this is because of the enormous attention that surrounds everything that Musk does. Arbaugh is sharing his story here for the first time. Obviously he isn’t happy about being paralyzed. But he says that it happened for a reason and that dedicating his body to science in this way is part of God’s plan for him.

The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time, with X’s next to each suspicious event that occurred when they were on shift. Letby was the only nurse with an uninterrupted line of X’s below her name. She was the “one common denominator,” the “constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse,” one of the prosecutors, Nick Johnson, told the jury in his opening statement. “If you look at the table overall the picture is, we suggest, self-evidently obvious. It’s a process of elimination.”

“Whenever you see somebody’s spending way, way more than the current value on real estate, that’s creating an epicenter,” Richards said. “These guys aren’t stupid. Whatever he’s doing, he’s here for the long haul.”

Early in his first term, Gov. Tony Evers tried committing Wisconsin to rejecting all fossil fuels as a source of electricity by 2050, an aim the Legislature rejected, but one that the governor has since pursued with executive orders. As context, Wisconsin still obtains the majority of its electricity from such conventional types of fuel. Which fossil fuels predominate, however, has changed in recent years.

Watch out for mainstream disaffection based on the fact that this movie contains traces of Ayn Rand: (“your education is not complete when you’ve not read Rand” – long chat on a DFW – LAX flight years ago.)

McVey — whose official title, as she keeps pointing out, is minister of state without a portfolio — was immediately and mercilessly mocked over her new role, and made to look very foolish on Question Time when she failed to properly explain what a minister for common sense actually does.

Market intelligence says Airbus Commercial Aircraft CEO Christian Scherer visited with Southwest executives in Dallas and Breeze leadership near Salt Lake City in mid-April. This was well after Breeze’s February order for 10 additional A220s.

Two months ago, we sounded the alarm about independent publishers being demoted on Google to give way to big media sites. This is what happened next.

In just a few months, this Speaker has worked to give the Executive more authority and more money than even Pelosi granted

“The difference between the two company’s cultures, design philosophies, and decision-making structures allowed SpaceX to excel in a fixed-price environment, where Boeing stumbled, even after receiving significantly more funding,” said Lori Garver in an interview. She was deputy administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2013 during the formative years of the commercial crew program and is the author of Escaping Gravity.

China today has enough capacity to manufacture half of the world’s 80 million vehicles. By 2030, China’s capacity could climb to 75% of the world’s volume, according to Global Data.

Some startups that launched buzzy generative AI products are now narrowing their offerings to try to make them more useful to business clients.

Each permit, according to sources who have acquired one, is being sold for up to 50,000 Mexican pesos, roughly $2,000. Without one of these, migrants are stuck at the Mexican southern border for months and end up having to pay sometimes more as a bribe to the same INM officials to let them out of Mexican southern border towns like Tapachula. 

Whereas, on April 18, 2024, the Rules Committee passed H.Res. 1160—the rule providing for consideration of the 95-billion-dollar foreign funding package—by a vote of 9 to 3. Notably, all Democrat members of the Committee voted to advance the measure to the floor while three Republicans opposed it. It is unprecedented for members of the minority party to advance a resolution out of the Rules Committee. Since 1995, there have been a few instances of rules advancing out of Committee with minority support; however, H.Res. 1160 is the only instance where this was done to bypass opposition from members of the majority party.

Despite the fact that the first sentence of his bio still calls him the “Editor-in-Chief of The Athletic’s Bay Area coverage,” Kawakami no longer is in charge of Bay Area coverage, something that he wrote in a February 2021 mailbag was “due to an editorial restructuring.”

WHY DID SEVERAL HUNDRED PEOPLE in Texas pay good money to spend a beautiful Saturday inside, listening to three living members of the Habsburg family and a scattering of Carlists talk about what ails the world? It’s clear what the Habsburgs got out of it: the conference, held in Plano and organized by David Ross, a Dallas-area realtor and right-wing Catholic, was in support of the family’s effort to win a sainthood for Emperor Karl I, perhaps the least successful and most tragic Habsburg monarch, who reigned for the last two years of World War I and then died penniless on the Portuguese island of Madeira. The family hoped to keep their memory alive—and maybe sell a few books. What everyone else might get out of it was unclear, at least at first.

Higher Ground Labs created and published its 2022 report that describes its landscape and connections in the election industry complex.  This document outlines the many initiatives, connections and activities it is involved in and the players it interacts with to ensure radical far-left and increasingly communist anti-American Democrats win elections. This landscape involves “non-profits” and publicly traded companies which prevent the public from requesting information that would be required to be provided by the government in FOIA requests.

Wow, how wonderful of our local Government to threaten anyone found with a Starlink dish the amount of up to £125,000 we might as well live in a few countries I could mention that live under a dicatorship..

Which is why Total SF is introducing the San Francisco Starter Pack: a virtual welcome basket for someone moving to the city for the first time, serving as a primer for city life, a way to blend in and early exposure to some of our deeper cuts. (It also works as a checklist for locals who want to re-engage with San Francisco.)

What’s a “lens relay system?” Think of a telescope. Instead of focusing an image on a plane of film or a sensor, it creates what’s known as an “aerial image” that you capture with another lens system — your eye. If you’ve ever smashed your phone up to a pair of binoculars successfully, you’ve made a lens relay system.

I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked. A trip to the Beijing Auto Show reveals just how advanced China’s EVs are. So what are the so-called “foreign” automakers doing about it?

No more. Thanks to TikTok, I discovered a new (to me, at least) spin on walking: backward walking, also known as “retro-walking.” Though it’s trending onsocial-media platforms right now, physical therapists and fitness trainers have been touting its benefits for years. It’s a low-impact way to burn calories, strengthen your legs, test your coordination, and even improve pain, experts say—all of which lured me onto my quiet, rural street one afternoon to give it a whirl.

To understand why engine development has become a challenging task, we need to understand engine fundamentals and the technologies used for these fundamentals. In the last Corner we started a discussion around Open Rotor engines after looking at geared versus direct-drive Turbofans. We now look deeper at the Open Rotor Propulsive Efficiency.

“I correctly forecast that there would be no near term impact on the industry, but boy, was I wrong on the long-term impact,” he said. “I think I called for possibly a partial impact on certain segments of the industry. Incorrect. But remember the context back in 2015, the largest constellation in existence was Iridium with 66 satellites, and back in 2015, it wasn’t even entirely clear that they were going to make it successfully without a second dip into bankruptcy.” It is clear that SpaceX has been successful on the launch and technical challenges. The company has deployed nearly 6,000 satellites, with more than 5,200 still operational and delivering Internet to 2.7 million customers in 75 different countries. But is the service profitable? That’s the question Quilty and his research team sought to address.

Despite abundant risks to supply chains, demand for container trade increased in Q1 2024. Global container demand is estimated to have grown between 7 to 9% YOY with all import regions contributing positively. Import growth was strongest in North America, Latin America and Oceania. The top three fastest verticals in Q1 were retail, tech and lifestyle. Global container demand growth is expected to remain positive in coming quarters but likely at a slower pace. 

Charcoal Blasting Olmsted Point.

The time has come for Chicago Residents to initiate a petition calling for a binding referendum to authorize and establish an ordinance to recall The Mayor of Chicago from office. In many states throughout the Midwest (including WI, MI, MO and OH), the mechanism is already in place for voters to recall their mayor when warranted. In 201

The working tugboat Mirene, where @Ryanphelan6 and I have lived for 40 years, is properly celebrated in Dwell magazine this month.

To this day, it’s the most backdoor-looking bug I’ve ever seen. Google Translate does a good enough job on the original article, which is still available on Habr, but I’m going to walk you through it along with some context. Telegram is a popular chat app that uses its own… bizarre protocol to encrypt chats, called MTProto. The protocol is used both to encrypt all messages to the Telegram server, and to encrypt opt-in 1:1 end-to-end “Secret Chats”.[1] In text I can’t do justice to the facial expressions of cryptographers when you mention Telegram’s protocol, so just believe me that it’s weird. The current consensus seems to be that the latest version is not broken in known ways that are severe or relevant enough to affect end users, assuming the implementation is correct. That is about as safe as leaving exposed wires around your house because they are either not live or placed high enough that no one should touch them.

General counsel for the secretary of state’s office Charlene McGowan confirmed that Fulton County broke the law in their recount. “Fulton County used improper procedures during the recount of the presidential contest in 2020.”

From the era of insane economic policy

Archive officials immediately claimed they found material with “classified markings” among the boxes’ contents. That prompted for the first time ever the archives sending a criminal referral to the DOJ in February 2022. Smith indicted Trump and Nauta in June 2023; the following month, Smith added De Olivera and additional charges in a superseding indictment.

Howell then signed off on a warrant for Nauta’s location history from his cell phone. Among Howell’s other abuses are signing a warrant sought by Jack Smith to get Trump’s Twitter data AND an NDO preventing Twitter from notifying Trump as well as piercing atty-client privilege to help Smith get all of Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran’s records.

Benjamin Rothove:

Nearly three in four recipients of this year’s prestigious, federally funded Truman Scholarship have clear ties to Democratic politicians or progressive causes, a College Fix analysis found.

Approximately 43 of the 60 students have worked for Democratic politicians, advocated for progressive causes, or identify as left-leaning — continuing an annual trend exposed in past Fix analyses.

In contrast, only five scholars have worked for Republican politicians, advocated for conservative causes, or identify as right-leaning. The College Fix determined this information based on provided biographies, LinkedIn profiles, and email inquiries.

The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.  In my essay “No one will read your book,” I said that publishing houses work more like venture capitalists. They invest small sums in lots of books in hopes that one of them breaks out and becomes a unicorn, making enough money to fund all the rest.

For example, training GPT?3 in Microsoft’s state-of-the-art U.S. data centers can directly consume 700,000 liters of clean freshwater (enough to produce 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla electric vehicles), and the water consumption would have been tripled if training were done in Microsoft’s data centers in Asia. These numbers do not include the off-site water footprint associated with electricity generation.

You’ll never guess which one is on the FBI domestic terror watchlist:

In the past two years, the company (TSMC) has relocated hundreds of Taiwanese workers and their families to Arizona. Instead of a gleaming new facility, these workers found an active construction site, and a company struggling to bridge Taiwanese and American professional and cultural norms. 

The donations underscore how ambitious employees in Baldwin’s office have decided against heeding her calls to slow the revolving door. A total of 24 of her employees have reportedly come from or gone into lobbying, including on behalf of companies in Wisconsin. Moreover, the cash is an apparent irony that Republicans are aiming to exploit this election cycle amid the GOP rallying around Eric Hovde, a businessman largely self-funding his Senate campaign.

Global powers are racing to expand their presence. China has expressed interest in building a port complex near the Strait’s Atlantic mouth just across Chile’s border in Argentina. From there, Beijing could grow its presence in the region and also project influence in Antarctica, where geopolitical rivalry is heating up as the sea ice melts. In April 2023, the head of the U.S. military’s Southern Command, General Laura Richardson, visited Argentina and Chile, stopping in Punta Arenas for a security briefing and a tour of the strait. “For Magallanes, this will be like going back in time, when we were a free port and ship traffic was enormous.” —María José Navajas, regional director of Corfo

How bots, mercenaries, and table scalpers have turned the restaurant reservation system inside out.

The Department of Justice on Tuesday announced it has reached a $138.7 million settlement deal with victims of the disgraced former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar to resolve their claims of wrongdoing against the FBI in its failures to investigate allegations of sexual abuse.

A service called ReplyGuy advertises itself as “the AI that plugs your product on Reddit” and which automatically “mentions your product in conversations naturally.” Examples on the site show two different Redditors being controlled by AI posting plugs for a text-to-voice product called “AnySpeech” and a bot writing a long comment about a debt consolidation program called Debt Freedom Now. 

In emails released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, Dischler laid out several contributing factors — search query growth was “significantly behind forecast,” the “timing” of revenue launches was significantly behind, and a vague worry that “several advertiser-specific and sector weaknesses” existed in search.

Upon reading this, I realized it was time to stop procrastinating and tell you all a story I’ve been meaning to set down for a long time now about the time I visited that house (the cheap $33.75 million one, I mean). Strictly on a need-to-know basis. Because you really need to know how deeply twisted some of these plutocrats who run our society truly are.

10+ years ago I created an annual list of websites that FORBADE you from linking to them, DEMANDED you write to ask for permission or LIMITED links to only their home page. Royal Mail even promised to post me a paper licence.

Wizards of the Coast has been in the drivers seat at Hasbro for some time, and the gradual disintegration of the consumer products business has made Wizards an increasingly crucial part of the company’s portfolio.  Magic: The Gathering remains incredibly popular and very lucrative, but the business has had troubles lately. 

Person: Yes, hello, I heard there is a new hospital price transparency law. I’m trying to be a Good Consumer, so I was wondering if you could share the machine readable fi-

That car was burnt in effigy, not by a solitary individual, but by a giant crowd. These crimes are not punished because the Democrats who run the city want them to happen. The message is simple: today it’s your car, but tomorrow it’s you in the car.

It is set to bring to an end more than 120 years of production in the city. The designer, manufacturer and supplier of high-quality ceramic and porcelain tiles has been operational since 1901.

Cash price being cheaper than insurance prices has also been documented for prescription drugs. While counterintuitive, these findings reflect the inherent and inevitable trade-offs between using cash and using insurance to purchase healthcare. Insurance shields us from financial risk exposure but adds administrative complexities. When financial risk exposure is low, it makes little sense to use insurance. That’s why car insurance does not cover oil changes, and home insurance does not cover faucet replacements; otherwise, premiums would skyrocket and such plans would be driven out of business. Why Are Cash Prices Lower Than Health Insurance Negotiated Prices?

Women now author the majority of books published, according to an NBER study.

The change was positioned by the company as a way to more quickly and deeply integrate AI into its products, but make no mistake about it: This is an attempt to mimic Apple’s product development model.

People Are Slowly Realizing Their Auto Insurance Rates Are Skyrocketing Because Their Car Is Covertly Spying On Them.

From 2021 through 2023, venture capital firms reportedly pumped nearly $100 billion into defense tech startup companies — an amount 40 percent higher than the previous seven years combined. This report examines how Silicon Valley startups, big tech, and venture capital who benefit from classified Defense contracts will create costly, high-tech defense products that are ineffective, unpredictable, and unsafe – all on the American taxpayer’s dime.

The $72-per-square-foot pricing for the tower at 995 Market St., which anchors the corner at Sixth and Market streets, represents a 90% drop in value from when the building last sold in 2016, for roughly $62 million.

GM shared our driving data with insurers without consent, lawsuit claims

Ex-Post Office boss sought ‘non-emotive words’ for Horizon bugs, inquiry hears

I previously highlighted the 1910s, 1940s, 1970s, and 2000s as weak decades for both stocks and bonds in real terms. During those decades, energy assets invariably did well. Gold and silver usually did well. Copper and other commodities usually did well. The benefits of diversification in that sense are clear throughout modern financial history, both logically and quantifiably. The higher prices of these base materials are what’s pressuring stocks and bonds during those periods, and so it helps to own the base materials and/or their producers alongside stocks and bonds.

This post covered my experimentation with the technical aspects of Apple’s fisheye projection format (Vision Pro). Along the way, it’s been fun to collaborate with Andrew, Paul, and others to work through the details. And while we were unable to arrive at a 100% solution, we’re most definitely within range.

The Port of Oakland Board of Commissioners unanimously voted this week to change the name of Oakland International Airport to San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport, infuriating San Francisco officials who promised to sue over the decision.

A conference on National Conservatism is proceeding today in Brussels after a Belgian court ruled in the event’s favour against a police shutdown ordered by the local mayor, in what has been hailed as a “victory for free speech”.

Barcelona bus route removed from map apps to tackle tourist overcrowding.

Take, for example, A Chart of Biography, which is considered to be the first modern timeline. This unusual, and unusually beautiful, pedagogical tool, which was published by Priestley in 1765, while he was in his thirties and working as a tutor at an academy in Warrington, England, tends to get lost in the shuffle of Priestley’s more notable achievements—his seminal 1761 textbook on language, The Rudiments of English Grammar, say, or his discovery of nine gases, including oxygen, 13 years later.

I went to Cairo, Illinois, the capital of the fastest-shrinking county in America, and wrote about why in the future, much larger parts of America are likely to lose population.

Report card comparing Biden & Trump’s accomplishments.

How Amazon built an unrivalled EV charging network in just two years.

Hospital prices for the same emergency care vary up to 16X, study finds.

‘Rather Despicable’: John Eastman Speaks Out After Bank Of America, USAA Shut Down His Accounts