Jeffrey Paul:

Please take the time to go to Berlin, and visit the Stasi museum, if you think my warnings about the potential for abuse by the FBI when they are not constrained by the need for probable cause or search warrants are overblown.

This is the same FBI that wrote Martin Luther King Jr. anonymous letters telling him to kill himself.

Presently, the US government is accessing the full content of around seventy thousand(!) Apple accounts per year (as of 2022) without a search warrant, per Apple’s own transparency report. The numbers are much higher when you include warrants issued with probable cause.

Francesca Block:

One sentence in a blog post almost ruined Thomas Smith’s career.

“If you believe that the coronavirus did not escape from the lab in Wuhan, you have to at least consider that you are an idiot who is swallowing whole a lot of Chinese cock swaddle,” commented Smith, 65, a law professor at the University of San Diego.

He wrote it back in 2021, in a piece questioning the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic on his personal legal blog, which usually received only a few hundred visitors per day. 

But the backlash was swift. Smith estimates 60 students submitted a formal complaint to the administration and accused him of being racist, using derogatory language, and promoting conspiracy theories with “detrimental consequences.” Smith later updated his post to clarify that his ire was directed at the Chinese government, not its people.

A week later, Robert Schapiro, the dean of San Diego’s law school, announced an investigation into Smith in an email to the student body, stressing that “University policies specifically prohibit harassment, including the use of epithets, derogatory comments, or slurs based on race or national origin.”

Newsweek has also reviewed secret FBI and Department of Homeland Security data that track incidents, threats, investigations and cases to try to build a better picture. While experts agree that the current partisan environment is charged and uniquely dangerous (with the threat not only of violence but, in the most extreme scenarios, possibly civil war), many also question whether “terrorism” is the most effective way to describe the problem, or that the methods of counterterrorism developed over the past decade in response to Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups constitute the most fruitful way to craft domestic solutions. “The current political environment is not something that the FBI is necessarily responsible for, nor should it be,” says Brian Michael Jenkins, one of the world’s leading terrorism experts and senior adviser to the president of the RAND Corporation.

I am not envious of the team designing Apple’s Camera app. It has to be one app that does everything, and with every new iPhone that adds even more capabilities, that camera app runs the risk of getting heavier and more complex. However, this year they managed to integrate the new 28mm and 35mm quite well.

According to the report, when adjusting for inflation, tech salaries plunged to their lowest point in the past five years, decreasing 9% from $141,000 to $129,000 from 2022 to mid-2023. Additionally, salaries experienced their most significant year-over-year decline, dropping by 3% from $161,000 to $156,000. However, despite economic volatility, job seekers in the U.S. maintained their salary expectations at around $146,000.

Insurance companies acknowledged challenges in maintaining their directories, saying they struggle to get providers’ help in updating listings. Some support creating a national directory to ease the burden and give insurers and providers a single place where they can update and verify information.

In this paper, we study the relationship between stock fund managers’ facial attractiveness and fund outcomes. Utilizing the state-of-art deep learning technique to quantify facial attractiveness, we find that funds with facial unattractive managers outperform funds with attractive managers by over 2% per annum. We next show that good-looking managers attract significant higher fund flow especially if the funds are available on Fintech platforms where their photos are accessible to investors. Good-looking managers also have greater chance of promotion and tend to move to small firms. The potential explanations for their underperformance include inadequate ability, insufficient effort, overconfidence and inefficient site visits.

Now is the opportunity to be creative and explore divergent UIs.

Herzog lives with his wife Lena, a photographer, in Los Angeles, but at a remove from Hollywood—both conceptually and literally. When he is not traveling for his films, he teaches a kind of guerrilla filmmaking at his roving Rogue Film School, launched in 2009. He says that it is easier than ever to work on the cheap—“you can make a 90-minute cinema-quality documentary for $20,000”—and argues against taking office jobs. “Work in a slaughterhouse, work as a guard in a lunatic asylum, work where real life is happening, at its densest,” he says. “The only thing I teach is how to open a safety lock with a set of surgical tools, or how to forge documents like shooting permits, without which many of my films would not have happened.”

Claire Bryan:

Next to an atrium filled with historic airplanes at the Museum of Flight, Boeing celebrated hiring more than a thousand Washington high school graduates from the Core Plus Aerospace program on Tuesday morning.

The thousandth graduate milestone comes at a time when demand for Boeing’s jetliners is highafter the pandemic, said Scott Stocker, vice president of manufacturing and safety for Boeing commercial airplanes, who spoke at the event. 

And across the state, Boeing and other companies are hungry for new employees as the baby-boom generation leaves the workforce, said state Superintendent Chris Reykdal. 

The two-year program teaches high schoolers how to build airplanes. For eight years, it’s been training students on their high school campus or at a nearby skills center how to drill, counter sink, install rivets, read blueprints, do precision measurements and more.

These jobs pay a good wage — the first thousand students are collectively making about $100 million in salary and benefits annually, said Reykdal. That works out to an average of $100,000 per graduate.

“It turns out we still have to build stuff,” said Reykdal, who came up from Olympia for the event. “We still have to create, we still have to fabricate and connect. We’re still living in a physical world. … It doesn’t fly without assembly, it doesn’t roll without assembly.”

The program gets state support. The Washington Legislature passed a law in 2015 that budgets funds annually for schools to launch and expand Core Plus programs. School districts can apply for money for equipment for the classes and to train teachers on the Core Plus Aerospace curriculum.

The U.S. has sent more than $70 billion worth of aid to Ukraine since Russian troops crossed its border last year. But now a battle is brewing in Washington over the Biden administration’s request for over $20 billion more.

This “relocate or resign” policy bears an uncanny resemblance to AT&T’s June ultimatum to its employees, which has raised several eyebrows and suspicions of a covert layoff strategy. It’s not uncommon for corporations to use intricate and complex language to obscure their actions and intentions. In this case, the seemingly straightforward phrase “relocate or resign” could be a smoke screen concealing an attempt to shrink workforce numbers without the accompanying negative press that mass layoffs invariably attract.

Obviously, text editing on mobile is possible as millions do it every day. My point isn’t that “it’s impossible” but a much more subtle “it’s much harder than we think”. Many of you will just say “get a grip grandpa, it’s not that bad” and dismiss my concerns. But keep in mind that most text created on mobile is short and low effort, usually messages and social media comments. Editing is rarely needed so this friction doesn’t matter so much. I’ve also had many people tell me of students writing entire papers on their phone. That’s right, it’s possible! Lots of people run marathons too, that doesn’t mean everyone is able to.

It’s too bad, because I’d like mobile to grow and be even more productive than desktops are today. But the way we’re going, we’ll be editing text this way for the next 20 years at least. Do we really want this? Too bad text editing is an invisible problem no one appreciates.

But not everyone is as bullish about AlphaFold revolutionizing drug discovery — at least, not yet. In a paper published in eLife the day before Recursion’s announcement¹, a team of scientists at Stanford University in California showed that AlphaFold’s prowess at predicting protein structures doesn’t yet translate into solid leads for ligand binding.

Finally, on the flip side, when in doubt about the legality of an image posted online, it never hurts to ask the creator before lashing out or making unsubstantiated claims in a public forum. In real life, calmly ask rather than accuse someone of operating illegally in front of a ‘No Drone Zone’ sign. A little civility goes a long way. Hopefully, all this information clears up the misconception of the ‘No Drone Zone’ sign for both sides.

Upon my return to the United States from a trip to Japan, I was directed to a secondary inspection room where I was presented with a Grand Jury subpoena by officers from the IRS-CI and DHS. The subpoena required me to appear in New York to provide testimony for wire fraud. ?

While they’ve seen some beautiful places, it’s the people they met that they said they would remember the most. “Some of the towns we stopped in weren’t that interesting, but the people we met are what is most important to us,” Michael said. “A handful said we must be crazy for going on a trip like this,” Martina said. But then others asked if they could come along with them, she added.

“A medieval university city such as Oxford had a deadly mix of conditions,” says criminologist Manuel Eisner, lead murder map investigator and Director of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology. “Oxford students were all male and typically aged between fourteen and twenty-one, the peak for violence and risk-taking. These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild, and thrust into an environment full of weapons, with ample access to alehouses and sex workers.”

The Skype team concluded that they needed the protection of a bigger partner and sold the company to eBay for $2.6bn in 2005. Zennström made even more money a few years later by participating in an investment consortium that bought Skype back from eBay and flipped it to Microsoft for $8.5bn in 2011, making him a billionaire.

Maximalism can be seen as the inverse of wokeness: a cultural movement in the form of an economic movement. It’s about owning guns, lifting weights, and eating steak as much as it’s about Bitcoin.

The charge was filed in a document known as an information, a type of document that prosecutors usually use if a defendant is expected to plead guilty to the charges. Littlejohn and his lawyer, Lisa Manning, declined to comment.

It’s still far too hard to learn what many hospital procedures cost. Laws can help, but public pressure is also necessary.

Over the past 40 years, betting against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been a fool’s game. But today, China’s development model faces its most formidable test. During Xi Jinping’s ten years in power, he has overseen major economic and political changes that threaten to undermine the key drivers of China’s success during the “reform and opening up” era. Instead of an open, pragmatic, and experimental approach to development, Xi has turned to national security, ideology, and top-down directives to realize his “China Dream” of national rejuvenation.

What are the rules of the rules-based order?

Some key takeaways from Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk:

1. The only unbreakable rules are the laws of physics. Every other rule or restriction was put in place by a person, and people are idiots. Progress means questioning every rule and seemingly arbitrary guideline. If you aren’t re-writing the rulebook, then there’s no hope of ever beating the status quo.

The government passed a law, so they buy your software, (Epic) they get money. It’d make it a lot easier.

All right, two really good stories. You might not even believe them, because they’re so outlandish. Does everyone know who Epic is? It’s hard to know, because they’re not public. It’s a very large private company in Wisconsin that is the largest player in EHR software, medical records. And this is their CEO, Judith Faulkner. Now, in, get the year right, 2009, Obama put her on his Health IT Council. She was the only corporate representative. Should not surprise you that she’s a major donor to Obama.

Now, Obama passed the American Recovery Act, that was his big piece of stimulus, kind of like Biden’s inflation act that happened recently, and tucked underneath that, easy to hide in this big bill, is an act that was, the acronym’s HITECH, it’s this health information technology thing. And then they created an agency called ONC that oversaw it. Now, this is the part you’re not gonna believe. They came up with a brilliant idea. I have to assume she helped encourage this. Doctors would receive $44,000 each if they bought software. $38 billion. This is true, you can look it up. I’m not making it up. $44,000, give it to a doctor, implement some software. For many of you who run companies, that’d be pretty cool, right? The government passed a law, so they buy your software, they get money. It’d make it a lot easier.

Now, you may be thinking, Are doctors needy? But here’s the catch. You remember, this happened because of the mortgage meltdown. Doctors own multiple homes, so they have multiple mortgages, so they probably needed the assistance. Now, there’s two more things about this act that are also unbelievable. First, there’s a flaw. If someone said you’re gonna pay people to buy software, most people would be like, Well, you’re gonna have a problem. They’re gonna buy it and they’re not going to use it, right? Well, they thought of that. So guess what? The second phase, doctors got paid 17,000 more dollars to prove they were using it. It was called Meaningful Use. Plastered all over the website of all the EHR vendors at the time. It gets even better! So the the ONC decided the threshold of features you would need for your software to comply with this mandate. And I’m assuming they kind of took Epic’s feature set and plowed it into this spreadsheet. But they got the Department of Justice to enforce people that didn’t have the feature set that were getting the payments.

And you had three record fines. 155mn, 57mn, 145mn, against the lesser competitors of Epic. Unreal.

If you’ve studied the innovator’s dilemma, the way startups disrupt is they come in with lower feature products, but a feature that really matters to the customer in a simpler product, and they move up.

They put a brick wall there, so you couldn’t come up. It’s just amazing.

Obama, in an interview with Ezra Klein, said this was the most disappointing part of Obamacare. I mean, I think if any of us were in the room when they scratched this thing out, I could have told him it would have failed. I mean, paying people to do stuff is just… it’s not going to work.

Now you may ask, am I am I unhappy with Judith? I’m disgusted with it.

But, but, if I were a judge in the Olympic regulatory capture competition, I’m giving her a 10! This is fantastic. Fantastic!

In another way, though, the Replicator initiative is a radical departure from business as usual in the Department of Defense. It is meant to accelerate the invention of military technology in order to change the way the United States fights wars and practices deterrence. Replicator, Hicks declared, would “field attritable autonomous systems at scale of multiple thousands in multiple domains within the next eighteen to twenty-four months.” As she envisions it, there will be “constellations” of these systems “flung into space, scores at a time”; pods of small, solar-propelled boats outfitted with sensors, trawling the ocean and relaying real-time intelligence; and “flocks” of aerial drones, some conducting surveillance and others carrying weapons. Instead of concentrating Defense Department resources on exorbitantly expensive and complicated equipment, which would have to be operational for decades to justify the cost, Replicator aims to deploy equipment with a much shorter shelf life, allowing for constant reinvention of technologies.

No matter how slick and stylized you make it, and no matter what your experience ultimately is, your resume is just a handy little cheat sheet you’re going to need for different reasons. Applying for a job on an employer’s website amounts to transcribing everything — top to bottom, line by line, everything—from your resume over to their application form. Yep, that’s right: you have to re-type everything on your resume nearly every single time. I don’t know about you, but when you do that once or twice in a row, I’m sure as hell not in a French-accent mood.

This boy, orphaned and mutilated on a savage morning in 1382, would by 1405 become the second most powerful man in the world’s largest and most advanced nation, the commanding Admiral of the Western Seas who strides through the Ming scroll photocopy that sits on my desk as I write. He would become the greatest seafarer in the 5,000-year annals of China.

Frog season in Louisiana runs year-round, with the exception of April and May, when it closes to allow the amphibians to breed undisturbed. While it’s possible to catch frogs all year, Jody says late winter and early fall are best. Late winter is good because the lilies haven’t greened up yet and it’s easy to spot the frogs. Late summer and early fall are good because the water in the Atchafalaya Basin falls, concentrating the frogs. Ideally, you want days that are warm but not too warm, followed by nights that are cool but not too cool. “Frogs feed on the crawfish under the lilies right after dusk,” Jody explains. “When they’re full, they float to the surface and kind of lie there.” Today we had a daytime high in the mid-eighties, which should drop to the mid-sixties after dark. Jody reckons we should have excellent frogging. A friend of his caught more than two hundred the other night and sold them for two dollars apiece.

As companies grow and as they go public, a consolidation of this information happens. Still, engineers still have access to business data for their organization that helps guide their decision making.
At traditional companies, much of this does not exist. Engineers get the spec, and the higher ups will know why something is decided – at least, that’s the idea.

Overall, the results from both empirical strategies suggest that tea was associated with larger declines in mortality rates in areas that had worse water quality to begin with. To provide further support for the mechanism behind these relationships, namely, boiled water, I use cause-specific death data from London to show that higher tea imports curbed deaths from water-borne diseases such as dysentery, but did not significantly affect deaths that were not directly linked to water quality . Thus, the totality of the results point to the importance of tea, and in particular the boiling of water, in reducing mortality rates across England during this important period in economic development.

According to Appelbaum: “Many journalists who have worked on the Snowden archive know significantly more than they have revealed in public. It is in this sense that the Snowden archive has almost completely failed to create change: many of the backdoors and sabotage unknown to us before 2013 is still unknown to us today.”

That’s because the Universal Product Code (UPC) — the barcode used on every product in grocery and retail stores all over the globe — changed everything 50 years ago. Barcodes are scanned billions of times each day, and award-winning engineer Paul McEnroe, who spent more than two decades in leadership roles at IBM, assembled and led the team that transformed the technology from an idea into the reality that endures.

Months after Ángel García Padrón fixed a German journalist’s MacBook Pro in his small Havana repair shop, she sent him an email. García Padrón had mended her waterlogged laptop after her home in Cuba flooded, but when the journalist took it to an official Apple Store in Berlin, the authorized repair person had expressed disbelief, saying there was no trace of any water damage at all. “Then my Cuban repairman must be a magician,” she recounted telling the Apple worker. García Padrón is used to conjuring these sorts of tricks on a daily basis — the skills required to deal with Apple products in Cuba require a special sort of magic.

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

Over the past 40 years of American politics, college-educated white voters have defected from the Republican Party, while the white working class has become a reliable source of Republican support. I study the issue basis of this realignment. To do so, I generate over-time estimates of public opinion on four broad issue domains from 1984 to 2020 and develop a theoretical framework to understand how issue attitudes translate into electoral coalitions. Using this framework, I find that both economic and cultural issues have contributed to the observed realignment. College-educated white voters have become increasingly liberal on economic issues since the mid-2000s; college- educated voters now express more liberal views than working class voters on every issue domain. Over the same time period, cultural issues have become more important for the voting decisions of the working class. The increasing weight placed on non-economic issues means that the conservative cultural attitudes of white working class voters translate to Republican support at a higher rate than in the past. Together, these findings suggest a nuanced role for economic and cultural issues in structuring political coalitions. Educational realignment has deep roots across issue domains, suggesting that the new coalitions are likely to be stable into the foreseeable future

SpaceX launched its 67th rocket of the year on Tuesday night, a staggering total for the company and its workhorse booster, the Falcon 9. At this pace, a clip of one launch every four days, the company is likely to launch 90 or more rockets during this calendar year. This Starlink satellite launch was notable for a couple of other reasons. It marked the first time SpaceX has reused a Falcon 9 first stage 17 times. This booster, serial number 1058, had previously flown 11 previous Starlink missions along with GPS III-3, Turksat 5A, Transporter-2, Intelsat G-33/G-34, and Transporter-6.

Moreover, even if a Republican *could* recapture the presidency, they’d be stuck with the flaming bag of dog poop that is DC’s financial position — $33T+ of debt and counting[1]. And you actually don’t want to be at the helm when this thing crashes.[2]. So, if Republicans were smart, they’d understand what areas they’re strong on, and focus there, rather than putting all their hopes on Hail Mary passes for national control.

In 1940, only five years after Dukas’s death, Walt Disney and Leopold Stokowski collaborated on a short animated film starring Mickey Mouse as the mischievous apprentice who, weary of toting water buckets through his master’s underground workshop, waits until the master has retired for the night, then dons his magical cap and enchants a humble broom to do the job.

Our updated generative AI market map is below. Unlike last year’s map, we have chosen to organize this map by use case rather than by model modality. This reflects two important thrusts in the market: Generative AI’s evolution from technology hammer to actual use cases and value, and the increasingly multimodal nature of generative AI applications.

In such a state of affairs, many years ago and with much that was plainly wrong already present, the “New Coke” fiasco occurred, wherein Coke’s executives came to the brink of destroying the most valuable trademark in the world. The academically correct reaction to this immense and well-publicized fiasco would have been the sort of reaction Boeing would display if three of its new airplanes crashed in a single week. After all, product integrity is involved in each case, and the plain educational failure was immense.

“At that time (1909) the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation.”

In my view, pharmaceuticals are undervalued and underinvested in because, despite high prices, pharmaceutical innovations earn only a fraction of the value that they create (Nordhaus finds that in general that innovations reap only a small share of the gains that they create). In 2014, for example, we got Harvoni a new treatment that offered a complete cure for hepatitis C (HCV) infection. In 2014, Harvoni cost over $1000 a pill and between $60,000 and $100,000 for a full treatment. In 2015 Medicaid spent more on Harvoni than on any other drug and there were calls for regulation and price controls. Studies showed, however, that even at that high price, Harvoni was value/cost-effective. Today, with more competition, there are equivalent versions of Harvoni available from Amazon for $12,869 (and 64 cents) which is still expensive but cheap for a cure for an often debilitating and sometimes life-threatening disease (and the price is less for a private insurance buyer or Medicare/Medicaid). In 2030, Harvoni will go generic and prices will fall much more.

States now offer a vast menu of personalized plate options for a dizzying array of organizations, professions, sports teams, causes and other groups.

And it’s beneficial for companies to shift computing requirements from their servers to their customers browsers: a real win for reducing their spend on infrastructure.

We looked at all lawsuits occurring against OpenAI and listed them below. In addition to the relevant detail we had a lawyer provide some commentary. This list will remain updated as an easy-to-reference location for any lawsuits against OpenAI ordered by date (oldest to newest).

For centuries grape growers in different communities passed down lore about where their grapes came from. Some governments, particularly in Europe, designated appellations—strictly circumscribed regions with rules on how and where a varietal such as burgundy, rioja or barolo was legally allowed to grow and be produced. But genetic studies to discover where vines originated thousands of years ago began in earnest only 10 or 15 years ago.

However, the studio said it decided it would be better to put the future of the company in someone else’s hands, with Goro Miyazaki believing it would be too difficult to bear the responsibility on his own, according to the press release.

On a Saturday night, a security engineer at Equifax was updating an SSL certificate on a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). Immediately after, suspicious connections were detected. After a more in-depth investigation, it became evident that the situation was far graver than anticipated. A service had to be promptly shut down to prevent further exploitation, but by that point, the damage was already done. Malicious actors had been exfiltrating data for several months and had already collected personal information from 163 million customers.

Jack Poulson has an insider’s background, an outsider’s perspective, and unique technical expertise, making him an invaluable resource for monitoring the world of national security contracting.

It’s just a matter of time before people start to realize that we need some genuinely new ideas in the field, either new mechanisms (perhaps neurosymbolic 2), or different approaches altogether.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) today announced it is beginning a rulemaking process to remove medical bills from Americans’ credit reports. The CFPB outlined proposals under consideration that would help families financially recover from medical crises, stop debt collectors from coercing people into paying bills they may not even owe, and ensure that creditors are not relying on data that is often plagued with inaccuracies and mistakes.

Despite all his technical achievements, Barroso told WIRED in 2012 that mentoring interns was “probably the thing I’m best at.” Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, who brought Barroso to Google in 2001 with interviews over crème brûlée, tweeted on Monday without naming his onetime research partner, “Sometimes close friends and colleagues leave us altogether too soon.”

Micron Technology is set to break ground on its $2.75 billion semiconductor testing and assembly plant in Gujarat’s Sanand, just three months after announcing the project. This marks the largest investment under the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM), with Micron contributing $825 million, and the rest covered by subsidies. The plant is expected to be operational by late 2024.

I have been walking Austrian footpaths for decades. They form a wonderful network, and the signs are a wonder in themselves. How beautiful can a footpath be? Austria’s are amongst the best. I particularly enjoy the country’s system of footpath signs. Over the past three years here I have photographed many of them. I reproduce a selection here.

Or at least that was the case until May 2019, when the Agriculture Ministry abruptly disqualified all halal certifiers eligible to operate in the United States, except for one newly licensed company: IS EG Halal Certified. Five months later, the ministry awarded the same company exclusive certification rights in South America as well, a major source of Egypt’s imported meat.

From Nero to Sunak, leaders have always put on a show for the public. The scholar explores the notorious Roman emperor’s fondness for acting and how the stage became a metaphor for power itself

If Milley was a real patriot (or our system worked), he would have resigned in disgrace after the catastrophic retreat from Afghanistan.

Modern Buildings in London was authored by the outspoken architectural critic and broadcaster Ian Nairn, a man who’d made headlines nearly a decade earlier after coining the term “subtopia” to describe the degraded state of Britain’s built environment. Its publisher was London Transport, and reflecting something of the flavour of those times, copies were actually sold from automatic vending machines in selected stations.

The Accord Hybrid is jumping out of the cake but it’s Tesla’s party now.

He gets a 39% approval rating which is lower than his predecessors at this stage. But in addition, 58% say that they are worse off than they were before Biden became president. 22% say they are better off. A whopping 73% say that Biden should NOT run again, including up to 65% of Democrats. So what does this mean? Let’s pick it apart and make some predictions.

According to two sources familiar with the company’s manifest, however, it does appear that Blue Origin is finally getting ready to fly the New Shepard launch system again. The company’s tentative plans call for an uncrewed test flight to occur in early October. If all goes well, Blue Origin is then planning its first crewed mission since August 4, 2022, to take place in mid-February of next year.

Patrick also experiences a lot of new things outside of his actual activity. Through the close cooperation with the Chinese colleagues, he quickly got an impression and a better understanding of the Chinese culture and way of life. “Hospitality is a central value in Chinese society. Invitations to dinner are very common and they are an expression of appreciation and respect for the guests,” he tells of his experiences. Food is much more than just the satisfaction of hunger. It is a social event where family and friends come together and spend time together. Chinese cuisine is known for its versatility, its variety of tastes and its refined preparation methods. The regional diversity is reflected in a wide range of flavors and specialties. “In the Chinese language, in addition to the words that describe the taste of a dish, there is also an expression of the feeling that a dish or the consistency of a dish evokes in the mouth,” Patrick illustrates the extremely high importance of food culture.

A few days ago, SpaceX launched its 63rd mission of 2023 – and the company has already topped last year’s record of 61 missions while flying at a blistering average of a launch every four days. Beyond the U.S. rocket market, SpaceX leads the world in both launches and spacecraft mass delivered to orbit each quarter. The company alone keeps the U.S. ahead of China, the next closest geopolitical competitor, in satellite and astronaut launches.

In 1952, the Sight and Sound team had the novel idea of asking critics to name the greatest films of all time. The tradition became decennial, increasing in size and prestige as the decades passed.

“If we continue to limit what can be built on most of the land in Madison, we will only continue the creep of high rises into neighborhoods or the exodus of home buyers into neighboring cities,” said resident Josh Olson.

Oracle is working to “drive Cerner profitability to Oracle standards,” she said.

This presents a problem. Because the mainstream press still needs powerful people—quite literally, in the case of the Post, as it’s owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, who is no fonder of difficult stories about his companies than any other billionaire.

Permissionless II opener from @ErikVoorhees that got an entire crypto conference on their feet.

“You smear somebody with falsehoods and all the rest and then you merchandise it and then you write it and they’ll say, see, it’s reported in the press that this, this, this and this, so they have that validation that the press reported the smear and then it’s called a wrap-up smear. Now I am going to merchandise the press’ report on the smear that we made. It’s a tactic”

Pirates are taking over the Oakland Estuary Marinas. Yes, pirates. And local and federal authorities says it’s getting so bad – the U.S. Coast Guard is deploying help to patrol the area. “Boat owners attacked by pirates,” said Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao. “There are no excuses for that.”

Tesla’s current process to build its popular Model Y SUV already involves a unique use of massive, ultra-high pressure presses that can mold both the front and rear parts of the vehicle. Tesla calls this process “gigacasting,” which some experts say is already highly efficient and cost-effective compared to other automakers’ factories. But now Tesla is looking to up the ante.

However, WHOIS records don’t necessarily include geolocation information for allocated networks. Furthermore, organizations that own networks can use those networks in any geographical location they end up choosing. Even worse, those organizations can assign networks to any third-party organization or lease IP blocks to other entities. Therefore, it is inherently tricky to geolocate IP addresses and thus geolocation is often not accurate.

https://x.com/theevuniverse/status/1702589119614902640?s=12

I also made a few small quality of life improvement: using the browser’s language to suggest the user’s country, focusing on the right fields when moving between form stages, and a few other niceties. It’s subtle, but it adds up to a nice user experience.

Matt Barnum:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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