Author: Jim Zellmer

1.28

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“I cannot see how Boeing can continue like this,” said longtime industry expert Adam Pilarksi, of aviation consulting firm Avitas. “They are getting killed.”

Meanwhile, Acts 29 itself has struggled with pastors in the network breaking off in a variety of different cultural and theological directions with some going more progressive while others have taken a reactionary conservative turn.

The marketing departments of the camera companies long ago lost the thread on all this. Japanese continuous iteration engineering will always extract a little more with each generation of product. They’ve been doing that most of my life now in tech, and I don’t see them stopping. However, the first few generation gains are the most dramatic, and once we’re in the tenth or later iteration, the gains are so minimal that the marketing teams can’t even see them, let alone describe them.

Why did this happen again? There is no doubt that as the suppliers of flawed technology, Fujitsu have a case to answer. During my time in government, it was made clear to me that they and the Post Office would be following the same playbook they always had, regardless of how often that had been shown up as inadequate. They had no interest in embracing the new ways of working GDS was advocating for. -and- no more “big IT failures”.

The “stuff” that is CES are all the products and technologies that influence everything that gets built. Stuff that looks silly today might very well vanish, but even if it does it will influence the stuff that shows up and transforms the world. There was an incredible timeline of CES on the wall from LVCC to the Westgate hotel illustrating “stuff” from every year of CES (it was too difficult to photograph). Likewise, the IEEE (yes that one) had an exhibit of long but forgotten gadgets from decades past, even voting on which one should be erased from our memories. In reality as silly as some of these look today, such as the laser disc player or cable TV tuners, each were just part of “gadgets and stuff” that came in past years. If you ever want to wind me up, then say there was nothing transformative at CES.

Altogether, this illustrates the fact that it’s not common for our sweet receptors to get activated by small calorieless molecules, and chemists must have eaten a lot of weird things to find the synthetic sweeteners we currently use. This is when things get out of control.

…and so on! The remaining bytes yourself are for you to practice on. You can stop when you’ve read the number of characters indicated by the length field previously.

It’s the second time Boeing turned to an admiral in connection with 737 MAX crises.

This middle class, however, is feeling less sure these days, as the economy keeps getting whacked. The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things. Are housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving many of them to default and triggering a collapse in the confidence of homebuyers hasn’t improved matters. Does big tech have too much power? Fine, but taking the scalps of entrepreneurs and stomping out their businesses isn’t boosting confidence. Does the government need to rein in official corruption? Definitely, but terrorizing the bureaucracy has also made the policymaking apparatus more paralyzed and risk averse. It’s starting to feel like the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.

Other times, you might want to ask more complex questions about what you see. Let’s say you’re browsing social media and come across an image of a delicious corn dog with some unique toppings. You’ve been seeing a lot of these online and are curious to learn more.

The Boeing inspector recorded in CMES that the repair was not done properly, that the Spirit team “just painted over the defects.” As a result, the repair job was reopened. Looking at it anew, the Spirit mechanics then discovered that, in addition to the problematic rivets, the pressure seal sandwiched between the plug and the airframe was damaged and needed replaced. “The big deal with this seal,” the whistleblower wrote, was that the replacement part was not on hand in Renton and needed to be ordered, which could threaten to delay the jet’s delivery schedule.

To think about Apple’s commercial, one really has think about the context of the start of the year 1984. The Orwellian dialog was omnipresent. Of course as freshman in college we had just finished our obligatory compare/contrast the dystopian messages in Animal Farm, Brave New World, and 1984 not to mention the Cold War as front and center dialog at every turn. The country emerging from recession gave us all a contrasting optimism.

“The U.S. Constitution foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats.”

Jen O’Malley Dillon, the new campaign manager for President Biden’s 2024 reelect, previously worked as a consultant to Bill Gates’s VC arm and Mark Zuckerberg’s personal charity foundation. Here’s her disclosure from her work during 2020.

This sobering letter from former FBI, Homeland Security, and other law enforcement officials describes the chilling reality of why @POTUS’s open border is a clear and present danger to America.

Publishers: Ditch Google search addiction or die
Google’s switch to generative AI-written search results could send many publishers out of business.

10 of 10. The DEM maps disenfranchise between 600,000 and 751,000 citizens. By contrast, the courts in ’92 and ’02 kept disenfranchisement below 260,000. In an earlier case, Justice Dallet said that true neutrality requires that the effect of disenfranchisement is kept minimal.

Last year the US surpassed Qatar and Australia to become the world’s leading supplier of LNG, which is natural gas supercooled and condensed so that it can be economically carried on ships. Its seven operating terminals can produce as much as 87mn tonnes a year — enough to satisfy the combined gas needs of Germany and France.

“This is a worst-case scenario, which is currently trapping thousands of well-healed residents who took out large mortgages,” says one Chicagoland residential real estate investor. “Northside condos appear to be taking the biggest hit,” he observes.

Our aim is to expand the universe of ideas that policymakers can consider to restructure the airline industry. We offer a set of policies that take seriously the problems in the industry and are designed to address them. These policies fall into four categories:

(1) Resilience, Competition, and Geographic Access

(2) Fair and Transparent Pricing

(3) Protecting Passengers and Ensuring Safety

(4) Oversight and Enforcement.

In each of these areas, we offer concrete proposals for how policymakers can improve the flying experience for passengers, workers, communities, and the country.

“but that’s because they’ve pulled in men from those groups who respect strength and are repelled by victimology”

Their business model seems pretty focused also. Flying to lots of smaller regional airports with quick turnaround times – so high utilisation rates, flights from 0600-0100, loads of auxiliary revenue, lots of advertising paid for by the destination and the airport operator owns the risk of flight delays – so if a flight gets delayed due to an airports ground handling turnaround time being missed, Ryanair will get a rebate which it doesn’t have to pass on to passengers?
I really don’t see U2 being so focused as FR.

The wealthiest American cities in 1949.

It was the inspiration for Emeryville-based Pixar’s hit movie “Toy Story.” “After 75 years of gratefully serving the San Francisco community, the store will be closing next month. The store has been struggling for a number of years, due to the perils and violence of the downtown environment, inflation, the decrease in consumer spending and the demise of retail across the world. The family is saddened it has come to this and we’ve explored all other options to try and keep the business going. The leadership of the City of San Francisco and the Downtown Association have their work cut out for them on how to revitalize what was once a vibrant and fun downtown experience,” said Ken Sterling of Sterling Venture Law, attorney for the family. “We are working through this complex situation with the landlords and creditors and at this time, I’ve advised my clients to not be interviewed by the press.”

Complexity, Quality and “out of the crisis”

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I recently recommended Deming’s book: “out of the crisis” to a friend.

The Boeing mess offers a front row seat:

The Boeing inspector recorded in CMES that the repair was not done properly, that the Spirit team “just painted over the defects.” As a result, the repair job was reopened. Looking at it anew, the Spirit mechanics then discovered that, in addition to the problematic rivets, the pressure seal sandwiched between the plug and the airframe was damaged and needed replaced. “The big deal with this seal,” the whistleblower wrote, was that the replacement part was not on hand in Renton and needed to be ordered, which could threaten to delay the jet’s delivery schedule.

Well worth reading!

Bonus: Deceased Boeing Engineer Joe Sutter’s book is worth a deep dive as well.

And:

For years, Boeing management was accused of focusing on money rather than products, performance or people. Between 2014 and 2018, it gave away $53 billion in dividends and buybacks. But that shareholder focus no longer works. Boeingis the only large-cap aerospace company in the world with a flat share price throughout the remarkable demand surge the industry has seen over the last three years.

1.21

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By analyzing data on tens of thousands of people across four continents compiled between 15 existing studies, a team of researchers has landed on a more comfortable figure: the optimal number is probably closer to 6,000 steps per day, depending on your age.

The foulest thing about the weekend wasn’t the miserable weather, but rather Bears fans’ collective mood after watching Love go from promising first-year starter to budding superstar in a 48-32 dismantling of the Cowboys.

The anti-inflammatory effect of exercise was much greater than most people had expected. That raised another question: whether inflammation might also play a dominant role in other lifestyle illnesses that have been linked to cardiovascular disease, such as diabetes and dementia.

Boeing’s Legacy Vanished Into Thin Air. Saving It Will Take Years

Chrome Users Now Worth 30% Less Money Thanks to Google’s Cookie Killing, Ad Firm Says

Scott’s dad had a couple of rules when collecting hats. They had to have a patch on them or an advertisement, they couldn’t be plain, and they couldn’t have any dirty sayings, Legried says.

With McCarthy, it was essentially the same. Running back Ryan Grant compared the dynamic on those Packers offenses to mankind’s relationship with artificial intelligence in my ‘19 B/R story: “When you put a quarterback in a position and you talk about how cerebral he is and you give him flexibility to make some changes, guess what? … You develop A.I., because it has the capacity to run without you. And then when it runs without you, it’s like, ‘Wait a minute!’ But in the same breath, if you’re not actually able to stay ahead of it, it’s going to outthink you and it’s going to say, ‘Me making the decision is the better decision.’”

In fact, back in August 2016, the Texanist, apparently weary of the unwavering heat, went off on the perpetrators of what he considered to be an exceptionally infernal utilization of the heat index. “Hey, meteorologists!” he wrote. “Enough with the damn heat index! ‘And we’re looking at a high of 101 degrees, but with the heat index it will feel more like 118.’ That’s like saying, ‘It’s going to be hotter than two rats making whoopee in a wool sock, but it will feel hotter than the devil’s nether regions.’ Or the other way around. Either way, it’s completely unnecessary. It’s hot. Can we just leave it at that?”

How to eliminate a political opponent. Here are 20 classic tricks. 1. Arrest & prosecute them.

It’s bad enough when people fail to consider events that obviously could happen but haven’t. But it’s even worse when people fail to consider events that have happened hundreds of times, treating each new instance as if it demands a massive update.

A self-styled glaciologist, Rabot undertook four expeditions to the Arctic in his lifetime; when he wasn’t voyaging to polar climes, he was writing about them in his capacity as editor of the journal La géographie or advising the likes of the prince of Monaco on their own itineraries. His written accounts theatrically capture the difficulty of life in these harsh climates, as in a description of the struggles of providing medical care in rural Scandinavia:

“Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.” That creates a problem as the software slows down despite the hardware’s improved processing power.

In Madison, other workers currently waiting for contracts include game testers at Middleton video game studio Raven Software, who voted in a union in May 2022; seamstresses and screenprinters at custom clothing company Crushin’ It Apparel, whose votes were tallied in November 2022, and bakers and bread sellers at Madison Sourdough Company, who voted in a union last April. Hundreds of office workers at Madison-based financial services company TruStage, who went on strike in May for the first time since unionizing in the 1940s, finally ratified a new contract in December after close to two years of negotiations – likely the longest lag in the company’s history.

A new report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office warns that loss of state fuel tax revenues could have dire consequences for the upkeep of roadways. Taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel now total about $14.2 billion a year. More than $4 billion annually could disappear by 2035, when the state’s ban on the sale of new fossil fuel cars takes full effect.

Red Ventures has been quietly approaching strategic buyers, mostly other large media holding firms, for several months to gauge their interest in CNET, but talks began to ramp up before the holidays, sources told Axios.

Google search really has been taken over by low-quality SEO spam, according to a new, year-long study by German researchers.

The researchers, from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, set out to answer the question “Is Google Getting Worse?” by studying search results for 7,392 product-review terms across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo over the course of a year.

They found that, overall, “higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality … we find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do.”

Chip and Joanna’s New Hotel Is Just One Reason to Visit Waco. The latest Gaines project, Hotel 1928, beckons Magnolia fans with its on-brand decor, thoughtful touches, and excellent location.

The Eagle Ford still produces more than a million barrels of oil (mmb/d) and 5 billion cubic feet of gas per day so that’s the first thing to expect about the future Permian. Plays don’t crash and burn but follow an undulating path downward over years or decades.

One should never underestimate the Houthis. They don’t fear disrespect.

I paged through, stopped and smiled when I saw it. There it was, the innocuous phrase that hid an $800 million secret: “expediting production.”

“Courtesy cards,” are cards given out by the NYC police union (and presumably elsewhere) to friends and family who use them to get easy treatment if they are pulled over by a cop. I was stunned when I first wrote about these cards in 2018. I thought this was common only in tinpot dictatorships and flailing states. The cards even come in levels, gold, silver and bronze!

“You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not jokin’.”

These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn’t been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself. Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafes had all drifted toward the same end point. The sheer expanse of sameness was too shocking and new to be boring.

The state’s current approach to valuing farmland amounts to a sort of double discount: the first is well understood and the second is unknown even to some experts. This approach is notable, especially in the context of the current housing affordability challenges facing many Wisconsin communities, since it puts more of the cost of government services onto residential and commercial property owners. The current approach may also distort to some extent both market values for agricultural land and state aid to school districts.

As Molly White said, “there are never purely technological solutions to societal problems”. To fight surveillance capitalism, we need E2EE, regulation, justice, and education.

One of my dreams is to someday convince the State Legislature to teach the curriculum they teach us prisoners, in elementary school, that people like me can learn it better without having to go to prison to learn it, I’m try my to convince some people to pitch it to legislators—if any one would like to help with that please let me know. It will help with more than just avoiding prison—it will help with all relationship conflicts, and who does not have those…? The prison parenting class should be taught in High School too…[page 23 follows]

Steep drop in electric sales in Germany was main factor in sending EU sales down for the first time in 16 months

The emergence of the New America is not just a move to red states but includes population shifts within blue states. In California, San Francisco and Los Angeles may be experiencing declines, but outlying areas such as the San Joaquin Valley and the Inland Empire continue to grow, a trend expected to continue for the next several decades.

Some of the world’s most important breakthroughs have come out of Bell Labs, including the first transistor, the laser, radio astronomy, the dawn of cellular and satellite communications and the beginnings of artificial intelligence. Bell Labs was also the birthplace of the UNIX computer operating system, C++ and numerous programming languages.

The perverse fisheries consequences of mosquito net malaria prophylaxis in East Africa

“Brilliant young female Czech player fatigue”.

If the proposal passes, which would still need to be approved by both chambers of the Legislature in the upcoming budget session, it gives legislative direction to the State Board of Land Commissioners to dispose of the Kelly Parcel directly to the federal Department of the Interior.

Same campaign stop 3 years later. That’s a 28% increase.

From new AI combating self-checkout shrink to digital shelf systems, vendors unveiled grocery innovations and new retailer tie-ups at the annual conference in New York. Here are some of the top ones.

“The fact that the Beltline is totally dry and surrounding jurisdictions have clear main streets is evidence that Madison could also have clearer main streets.”



University of Florida Pushes Back on Offer of Academic Credit for Pronoun Listing

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Jonathan Turley:

There is an interesting controversy brewing at the University of Florida after Professor Autumn McLellan offered academic credit for those who list their pronouns in class. The University has pushed back that “pronoun policing” is not a valid basis for academic credit.

The controversy arose after conservative groupsand sites reported on the offer.

Professor McLellan sent out a notice to class that:

“Guessing or assuming a person’s pronouns can lead to uncomfortable and unwelcoming environments. Displaying your pronouns helps others know how to address you respectfully, even if you feel like your pronouns should be ‘obvious’ to other people.”

McLellan teaches sociology and criminology with stated interests “Collective Action/Social Movements” and “Stratification/Inequality.”

Many faculty and students object to requirements or pressure to use alternative pronouns on political, religious, or biological grounds.

The University itself was quick to push back.

1.14

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The hero of Walt Disney’s ‘Steamboat Willie’ has entered the public domain but others deserve their freedom, too

In late 2011 a fresh-faced Elon Musk could not contain a chuckle at the idea that Tesla could ever be challenged by Chinese carmaker BYD: “Have you seen their car?” “I don’t think it is particularly attractive,” he explained on television then. “The technology is not very strong. And BYD, as a company, has pretty severe problems on their home turf.” A decade on, the Shenzhen-based company led by Wang Chuanfu has claimed Tesla’s crown as the biggest producer of battery-powered cars. In the fourth quarter of 2023, BYD, which was founded in 1995 and counts Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway as a shareholder, sold a record 526,000 battery-only EVs to Tesla’s 484,000.

The ruling sets a precedent for future cases involving Indigenous land rights and resource extraction.

Understanding how many people are involved in the creation of a robust Production System and its surveillance program, we finally get to ask the pointy questions.

Why it matters: Their differing approaches to the first contest of the 2024 primary season — the intensity of their campaigning, their number of public events and the communities they’ve targeted — shed light on how each candidate views Iowa, and their strategies for moving forward.

So how does Boeing build back its credibility with both the airlines and the flying public? “I think that will take showing integrity,” Robison said. “Part of the reason that Boeing struggled so much with the MAX crisis was that there were multiple moments when it was found to be saying things that weren’t true. There was a moment I described in the book where Boeing was claiming after the first crash that it was maintenance errors. But pilots in America knew that was not the case. Boeing, both in public and behind closed doors, needs to show absolute integrity.”

In 2008, a Dutchman played a crucial role in the United States and Israeli-led operation to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. The then 36-year-old Erik van Sabben infiltrated an Iranian nuclear complex and released the infamous Stuxnet virus, paralyzing the country’s nuclear program. The AIVD recruited the man, but Dutch politicians knew nothing about the operation, the Volkskrant reports after investigating the sabotage for two years.

But here is the main point: those © symbols on UK museum websites and catalogues are now redundant if the original artwork is itself out of copyright. There is no reason not to use these images for free (and nobody would argue against paying for new images, if needed). The National Gallery marks images “© National Gallery”, and in its terms and conditions forbids reproduction unless “expressly permitted under copyright law”. But since there is no copyright, reproduction is indeed permitted (expressly or otherwise, there is no distinction). No major UK museum has taken anyone to court over copyright of such images, and no sensible trustee will let them now.

Third, the high-density deployment of the Starlink project poses a serious threat to the security of space assets of various countries and affects the normal operation of satellites from other nations. In addition, the Starshield satellites can undertake suicide missions against space vehicles and carry weapon payloads for space strike missions, which poses a threat to space security.

Scale versus scope in the diffusion of new technology: evidence from the farm tractor.

Love how this just omits the entire Obama presidency.

To summarize, Michelle Mbekeani, who is the head of the Cook County state’s attorney’s office Conviction Review Unit, also appears to run a for-profit company, known as Period, that links inmates with wrongful conviction claims with private attorneys.

Our boat was permanently moored there on account of its being about to sink: it leaned heavily to the starboard, and I had to rig up a plastic chute around the bed to catch the unnervingly treacle-coloured leaks. In winter it was a little less well insulated than a cardboard box and the electric wiring around the hull was worryingly exposed. We were eventually evicted because the boat was rightfully condemned.

“The performance of the prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers,” Hart-Smith wrote. “These costs do not vanish merely because the work itself is out-of-sight.” 

1.7

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After two decades of paying as little as $200 an acre for farms across the plains of Kansas and Colorado, he now wants to rent all his farmland back to local farmers. If all goes as planned he will stop farming on roughly 130,000 acres in eastern Colorado and western Kansas, and let other farmers grow grain to store in his Weskan Grain elevator at Sheridan Lake near the Kansas border. “Because I can see that the farmer is affected by me making money off the land,” he says, noting how the price of acres has appreciated exponentially since he first began buying farms “and that’s money farmers could have made.”

Instead, implementing a knowledge graph as the background structure for a documentation site, with clear guidance about how to connect the nodes of the graph, has the potential to improve search results for readers and allow flexible categorization for writers.

Some of you may have been following our advent-style countdown calendar which revealed day-by-day through December our highlights for these new public domain entrants. The last window was opened yesterday, and while such a format was fun for the slow reveal, for the sake of a good gorgeable list we’ve exploded the calendar out into a digestible array below. Enjoy!

ASML Holding NV canceled shipments of some of its machines to China at the request of US President Joe Biden’s administration, weeks before export bans on the high-end chipmaking equipment came into effect, people familiar with the matter said. More.

The achievements of Tesla are even more incredible when contrasted with the continued struggle of legacy automotive manufacturers to ship a compelling electric car, or even stay out of bankruptcy. At the very end of 2023, it is telling that no other company has yet managed to ship a profitable car with better performance than the very first 2012 Tesla Model S. There are now several non-Tesla electric cars of comparable performance that are sold at a steep loss and/or at achingly low volumes.

The Harvard story covers the total systemic rot in every corner of the Left. It wasn’t “journalists” at big-ticket Gatekeeper of Truth media orgs that exposed the malfeasance, it was outsiders. Big media journalists fought to bury the story and are STILL trying to spin it.

The logistics of digital nomads can be challenging.

Hazards of mouth pipetting.

Our new analysis examines trends driving politics & policy: 10 takeaways from 2023, and 10 look-aheads for 2024. Bottom line: The biggest challenge today is lack of trust… in leaders, in institutions, in America. 2024 may test us in ways even 2020 did not.

Each consultant will be paid an hourly rate of $450, up to $100,000 total, but the state director of courts has the authority to exceed the maximum amount if she determines it is necessary, according to the contracts.

The suspect who left pipe bombs in Capitol Hill the night before Jan. 6 has still not been caught. Three years later, the Justice Department isn’t even taking questions about the investigation. What happened?

Philadelphia Police Department’s first DEI officer is fired

The Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Law Institute (ELI) created the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) in 2018, establishing a first-of-its-kind resource to provide “reliable, up-to-date information” about climate change litigation, according to the group. The project’s reach has extended to various state and federal courts, including powerful appellate courts, and comes as various cities and states pursue high-profile litigation against the oil industry.

On Christmas Eve, just before the deadline for public input on the proposed MAX 7 exemption, the Foundation for Aviation Safety — a lobbying group set up by former Boeing manager and whistleblower Ed Pierson following the two deadly MAX crashes — filed a submission calling on the FAA not to certify the airplane until Boeing fixes the safety defect.

“The report compared the FBI and Justice Department’s voracious investigation of Trump’s connections with Russia, to its allegedly lackluster approach to its Clinton probes ‘tippy-toeing’ around the former Secretary of State.”

His business in a snapshot:

5 BHPH dealerships
3,600 units sold per year
10,000 customer accounts serviced
$19K average sales price
$500/month avg customer payment
19.9% avg customer financing APR
40% of customers default on loan

What questions do you have?

There is no “Ingravescentem Aetatem” for American politics. The term “gerontocracy” was coined in 1828 by Jean-Jacques Fazy, a Swiss republican, in the title of his book De la gérontocratie. He jeered that, in political terms, “France has been reduced to seven to eight thousand eligible individuals, asthmatic, gouty, paralytic, impaired, and only aspiring to rest.” In the contemporary US, the gerontocracy seems even more exclusive and its membership even older than the one that was swept away in France by the July Revolution of 1830.

Manhattan is also close to the water. Why hasn’t the Sulzberger New York Times Company made plans to move?

She said that Wing deliveries typically take under 30 minutes, and have reached their destination in as fast as three minutes.

CJR admitted Russiagate was fake. Which means Democrats spent four years publishing false stories about a debunked conspiracy theory of 2016 Russian election fraud. The impeachment was fake. The Pulitzers were fake. It was all fake. Agree?

On July 29, a United plane was nearly totaled after a hard landing. Who was flying that aircraft? Was the co-pilot a former flight attendant who was FIRED and then rehired through United’s DEI program despite being on a list to not return to United?

The lawsuit argues that, based on prior incidents involving Lt. Byrd, the Capitol Police, Capitol Police Board, and ultimately Congress, as Lt. Byrd’s employer, “knew or should have known that Lt. Byrd was prone to behave in a dangerous or otherwise incompetent manner:”

ULA had tried to kill the baby. When SpaceX sought a launch site for its Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral in 2007, the parents lobbied the Air Force brass hard to stop the lease of Space Launch Complex-40 to Elon Musk and his rocket company. But the commander of the 45th Space Wing with oversight of Cape Canaveral, Gen. Susan Helms, approved the lease anyway. Since then, ULA and SpaceX have been uneasy bedfellows in Florida, working side by side at nearby launch pads. Some of the rivalry was good-natured. Every week, for a while, engineers from SpaceX and ULA would meet up at Hogan’s Irish Bar in Cape Canaveral for trivia night. They would vie for nerd supremacy, drinking Guinness and blowing off steam.

“No one can match BYD on price. Period,” says Michael Dunne, chief executive of Asia-focused car consultancy Dunne Insights. “Boardrooms in America, Europe, Korea and Japan are in a state of shock.” While the US government has responded with a slew of subsidies to encourage domestic manufacturing, the prospect of millions of low-cost, high-tech cars made by Chinese companies hitting European shores poses a dilemma for lawmakers there.

Just about a week after signing a controversial contract with the UK’s national health service, Palantir Technologies Inc. launched an influencer marketing campaign to counter criticism of the patient data platform it’s building, potentially breaching terms of the deal.

Additional notes on 1302 Midvale

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A few additional comments:

1. I don’t think any construction should happen at 1302 Midvale in the absence of an attractive plan for the Midvale/12-18 intersection. Cart before the horse. I know what that means with respect to a schedule.

However….

This is an opportunity to raise the design bar vis a vis our endless, more of the same rectangles simply designed to expand the tax base. Further, compare 1302’s proposed height and aesthetics to the Sequoya Library building.

2. I find current, nearby property assessments rather curious, placing large values on the buildings (really?) vis a vis the land.

3. Summarize the issues. I appreciate the long narratives that have been shared via email and social. I suggest consolidating them along with a succinct intro on a blog/www site, with a brief, easily shared domain.

4. Get the word out: share a QR code/link via postcards with the surrounding neighborhood.

5. With respect to the developer, entrepreneur Sam Jacobsen (PDQ, Bishops Bay) had a son named Jeff. Perhaps there is a relationship.

Photos and aerial vr scenes, here.

12.31

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Beginning January 1, 2024, T-Mobile is instituting three new fees for non-compliant traffic that result in a Severity-0 violation. A Sev-0, (Severity-0) represents the most harmful violation to consumers and is the highest level of escalation with which a carrier will engage with Bandwidth. This applies across all products (SMS or MMS, Short Code, Toll-Free, and 10DLC) that traverse T-Mobile’s network.

A potential labelling error was the latest in a series of concerns for the American Chestnut Foundation, driving the nonprofit to pull support for a genetically engineered tree meant resurrect an iconic American species.

An independent panel has been investigating Daihatsu after it said in April it had rigged side-collision safety tests carried out for 88,000 small cars, most of which were sold under the Toyota brand.

According to food scientists, it’s probably not in people’s heads. “There do tend to be differences,” says Greg Ziegler, a professor of food science at Pennsylvania State University who specialises in chocolate. But there’s nothing all that surprising about that. Geographically, tastes vary quite a bit, and food companies are in the business of satisfying them. “A lot of what you like depends on what you were exposed to growing up,” says Ziegler. It would be more unexpected if chocolate was the same everywhere. And anyone who has travelled will know this well – the same big-brand chocolate bar you can pick up in the UK might taste different in the US, Australia and Asia, even if the packaging remains the same.

Along with those few photos of a bearded Petrov, the park’s visitor center displays biographical information that gives his full name as Petrov (also Petro or Petroff) Zailenko, a man who was possibly born in 1914, and “is believed to have been a soldier for the Russian Army who was wounded and captured by the Nazis in World War II, (then possibly came to the United States) as a displaced person from a concentration camp.”

Beginning programmers are taught about linked lists — where every element in the list contains not only a value, but also the location for the next and previous elements. Knuth helped popularize a way of moving through those elementswhere “it just seems that these numbers in the computer are following an elegantly-choreographed dance, and so that’s why I call it dancing links.” Knuth discussed them in 2018, and this year’s lecture was described as a kind of sequel.

Private equity acquisition of hospitals, on average, was associated with increased hospital-acquired adverse events despite a likely lower-risk pool of admitted Medicare beneficiaries, suggesting poorer quality of inpatient care.

In 2022 and 2023, the city saw record housing approvals in the core Downtown, which will amount to nearly 3,000 new apartment units located within walking distance of the state Capitol, Stouder said.

We investigate the link between hospital performance and managerial education by collecting a large database of management practices and skills in hospitals across nine countries. We find that hospitals closer to universities offering both medical education and business education have lower mortality rates from acute myocardial infarction (heart attacks), better management practices, and more MBA-trained managers. This is true compared to the distance to universities that offer only business or medical education (or neither). We argue that supplying bundled medical and business education may be a channel through which universities improve management practices in hospitals and raise clinical performance.

Chris Doridas’ terrific Christmas playlist.

Given that I mostly write about ILC, I’m going to use the DCS as my starting point. That starting point in 1991 was 1.3mp, and in today’s dollars would approach US$30,000. The usual product that’s used as the signal of the consumer ILC market is the Nikon D1 (1999), which was 2.74mp and sold for what would be close to US$12,000 in today’s dollars. 

“Greece’s debt crisis and the crises it generated offer a clear warning to European policymakers not to allow public debt to pile up indefinitely,” he told the European Parliament in 2011.

“the homegrown industry is mounting a wide-ranging lobbying offensive against a leading Chinese rival that’s stepping up its own PR game.”

Without clumps, all of the brewing water comes into contact with the ground beans, reducing the amount of coffee that goes effectively unused and giving a more consistent brew.

The discovered vulnerability is a hardware feature, possibly based on the principle of “security through obscurity,” and may have been intended for testing or debugging. Following the initial 0-click iMessage attack and subsequent privilege escalation, the attackers leveraged this hardware feature to bypass hardware-based security protections and manipulate the contents of protected memory regions. This step was crucial for obtaining full control over the device. Apple addressed the issue, identified as CVE-2023-38606.

Having to pay Big Tech to ensure deliverability is unfair, especially since lots of sites self-host their emails for multiple reasons; one of which is cost.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was developed in the 1990s to extract natural gas from previously inaccessible shale deposits.1 Thanks to fracking, shale gas went from 2% of US natural gas production in 1998 to nearly 80% of American natural gas production by 2022.2 Today, next-generation geothermal companies are using advanced drilling and fracking technologies from the oil and gas industry. Perhaps ironically, technology developed for the oil and gas industry could be crucial in our effort to transition to zero-carbon sources of energy.

Flossbach pointed out that Italian luxury sports-car maker Ferrari, which is more than 50 times smaller than Volkswagen by revenues, has a larger market capitalisation than VW. “This just beggars belief,” he said.

ColdFusion, unlike something like Perl or Ruby, was created specifically for building websites. Without the need for tradeoffs that come with a more broadly applicable language, of the choices about how the platform, and its underlying programming language, worked were grounded in how the web worked.

To better understand what’s happening at the microbial level, researchers set up a cheddar-making experiment. They made multiple samples of cheddar using different starter cultures that contained varying combinations of bacteria, including Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactococcus cremoris and Lactococcus lactis. They made some of the starter cultures themselves and obtained others from industrial producers.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was developed in the 1990s to extract natural gas from previously inaccessible shale deposits.1 Thanks to fracking, shale gas went from 2% of US natural gas production in 1998 to nearly 80% of American natural gas production by 2022.2 Today, next-generation geothermal companies are using advanced drilling and fracking technologies from the oil and gas industry. Perhaps ironically, technology developed for the oil and gas industry could be crucial in our effort to transition to zero-carbon sources of energy.

12.24

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Aruna Viswanatha and Nancy A. Youssef:

Navy Capt. David Lausman, once the commanding officer of an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, stood front and center in a trial that capped one of the biggest military corruption cases in U.S. history.

He and his alleged co-conspirators enjoyed “36 hours of straight drinking, prostitutes and hotel rooms,” a prosecutor told the jury. Debauchery was among the rewards Lausman and four senior officers allegedly received for helping Malaysian businessman Leonard Francis carry out a scheme that cost the U.S. tens of millions of dollars.

Francis, who carried 350 pounds on a 6-foot-2 frame and was known as “Fat Leonard,” acknowledged paying bribes and overcharging the U.S. to service Navy ships at ports around the Pacific. He struck a deal with federal prosecutors to provide evidence against the high-ranking Navy personnel who helped him.

A federal investigation had swept the ranks of dozens of Navy personnel deemed unfit to serve because of ties to Francis. The probe also sank the careers of officers tainted by unfounded allegations, including those who had been on track to command the Seventh Fleet. The 2022 trial in San Diego marked its unraveling.

U.S. assistant attorney Mark Pletcher told jurors that what set Lausman apart was “the bedazzling array of bribes this guy received from Leonard Francis from 2007 to 2011.”

One of Lausman’s lawyers, Robert Boyce, belittled the bribery allegations, which included free golf balls. Lausman, a 6-foot-6 Michigander known as “Too Tall,” was quiet, boring and not much of a drinker, according to one of Francis’ hired escorts, a woman in the Philippines. Lausman had declined her advances, she had told the defense team.

The news comes from Autocar, which quotes Watola as saying the ID.2All concept and its buttons “showed a new approach for all models.” Like Schäfer, he referenced the public’s feedback. There are still touchscreens, to be sure—the infotainment display is large and in charge, and there’s also a digital gauge cluster. But instead of all the controls being hidden behind menus in these displays, they’re toggled via switches on the center stack.

Prosecutors told the jury that Lausman had slept with an escort hired by Francis, which Lausman denied. The government didn’t disclose to the defense until later that investigators had communicated with the woman after the trial began and she, too, said they didn’t have sex. Prosecutors are obligated to turn over evidence favorable to the defense as they receive it. Defense attorneys asked for a dismissal. The judge declined.

The potential payoff, though, is astronomical: a world with Pixie everywhere means a world where Google makes real money from selling hardware, in addition to services for enterprises and schools, and cloud services that leverage Google’s infrastructure to provide the same capabilities to businesses. Moreover, it’s a world where Google is truly integrated: the company already makes the chips, in both its phones and its data centers, it makes the models, and it does it all with the largest collection of data in the world.

A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers

Across the globe, billions are being invested in the electrification of the car industry. Governments have put future bans on the sale of internal combustion engines, but recently we’ve seen politicians backtracking a little on the issue. Also, there are still huge infrastructure and cost challenges ahead for EVs. So, are reports about the death of the internal combustion engine a little premature?

The “how” is the “craft” in statecraft. Most of what the U.S. government does is distribute money and set rules. Relatively few parts of it mount policy operations, especially diplomatic ones. Doing so requires complex teamwork. Officials must master international choreographies, intricacies of law and practice, and a bewildering variety of instruments, cultures, and institutions spanning societies. The ability to do all that is a fading art in the United States and the rest of the free world. As it fades, handwringing and platitudes take its place. Officials paper over the gaps with meetings and pronouncements. The limited supply of effective U.S. policymaking was demonstrated tragically during the COVID-19 outbreak, when the world failed to create a global alliance to fight a global pandemic. It can be seen today in Ukraine, where the free world is struggling to sustain a country fighting a war of attrition. And it is surfacing in the Gaza Strip, where well-meaning countries try to help with Gaza’s future sustenance and governance. There will doubtless be new demands in the coming months and years, and one can debate which of them Washington and its allies must answer. But no one wants to take on a problem and then fail. Success has to be defined concretely and practically. Governments have to more effectively pool their capabilities and know-how. Only then can they convert blue-sky hopes into blueprints.

bustimes.org is the unofficial home of bus, coach, tram and ferry transport information

I want to share a little provocation about AI language models. You can skip ahead to that, if you like. Before I get to it myself, I’m going to review several items that might be interesting to those of you subscribed to this occasional lab newsletter.

First identified in 1886 by Theodore Lewis during the multi-year Northwestern Archaeological Survey, what is referred to as the Ghost Eagle has a 1,240-foot wingspan and a 700-foot-long body. The imprint of the mound is more than twice the size of the bird mound on the grounds of the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, long considered to be the largest bird mound in the world.

Last week the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) confirmed that they’ve allowed illegal immigrants to use their arrest warrants as a valid proof of ID to board flights in the United States for more than a year. Americans should be appalled by President Biden’s decision to reward criminal behavior but given his promises to provide free healthcare to illegals, tear down the wall, and make our heroic Border Agents his personal enemy, it’s hardly a surprise. Despite record illegal border crossings in 2021, the Biden Administration has yet to take any deliberate action to defend the sovereignty of our republic and secure the southern border.

Thieves took a cash register with $250 and forced the restaurant to close for three days, leading to $10,000 in losses related to food waste and employee compensation. Insurance only covered $750, said Ryan Zin.

Therefore, for many, Milei’s decision to “give the company to its employees” is a polite way to shut down the carrier, as Aerolíneas will face an extremely complicated scenario with almost no maneuvering margin.

“Do they even know what it looks like to miss on a quarterback?” an exec from another team asked. “They have seen other teams go through it, but are they humble enough to say, ‘This could be us’?”

A loophole in FDA processes means older drugs like the ones in oral decongestants weren’t properly tested. Here’s how we learned the most popular one doesn’t work

All of the big pharmacy chains in the US hand over sensitive medical records to law enforcement without a warrant—and some will do so without even running the requests by a legal professional, according to a congressional investigation. The revelation raises grave medical privacy concerns, particularly in a post-Dobbs era in which many states are working to criminalize reproductive health care. Even if people in states with restrictive laws cross state lines for care, pharmacists in massive chains, such as CVS, can access records across borders.

American taxpayers footed the bill for at least $1.8 trillion in federal and state health care expenditures in 2022 — about 41% of the nearly $4.5 trillion in both public and private health care spending the U.S. recorded last year, according to the annual report released last week by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

South Korea will soon require companies that slim down products to show the old and new sizes on packaging

“It’s impossible to get quality food at a fair price. I have to sell my lobster roll for $29 at the restaurant, but I can sell it for $20 at my new Little Anchor truck because it’s just me and I don’t have all the labour costs.”

Ampex, launched in San Carlos, California in 1944 is the key connecting point between music storage and data storage. That tiny startup, according to Silicon Valley historians Peter Hammar and Bob Wilson, was involved directly or indirectly in the launch of “almost every computer magnetic and optical disc recording system, including hard drives, floppy discs, high-density recorders, and RFID devices.”

The handling of the talks is now raising eyebrows in Washington, particularly among Republicans who suspect the White House did not want Biden to agree to a deal.

The US is pushing for expropriation of frozen Russian central bank foreign exchange reserves to endow these in some form to Ukraine.
Under international customary law central bank reserves have diplomatic immunity from seizure, even in a declared war. If they do this G7 ends FX reserves, innovated in 1922 as an expedient to expand debt, except among themselves and aligned states.

“I am strictly advocating for black people. Call ICE on them. Trump, come in here and clean this mess up. The most corrupt city in the United States is the city of Chicago.”

Parks Canada says 84 deer killed in $834,000 cull using helicopter.

Henceforth, currencies will compete. Who knows which ones will win – USD, BTC? But CBDCs will surely lose.

“When I started, they were tickled to have someone like me. I built a business based on service,” he says. “I even made the top 150 dealers in 1987 and helped celebrate their 150th anniversary. I sat at the same table as Mr. William Hewitt, who was the John Deere president and CEO at the time.” “Somewhere in the mid-90s, you could see this trend [toward consolidation] starting. I knew the single-store dealers’ days were limited, but I lasted longer than I ever dreamed I would.”

Mickey and Minnie will enter the public domain on Jan. 1. From then on, Disney will no longer enjoy an exclusive copyright over the earliest versions of the characters. Underground cartoonists, filmmakers, novelists, songwriters — whoever — will be free to do what they want with them.

Jake Sullivan wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs that went to print before Oct 7. For the online version that came out yesterday, they let him not just add new material but scrub the sections embarrassed by events. Some deleted gems from the original, not available online (1/6):

“It says something about the Biden administration’s priorities,” Kavanagh added. “They are willing to prioritize arming Ukraine over Asia despite their pronouncement that Asia is the priority theater for the United States.”

Bird said in a filing last month that it had net losses of $73.4mn in the nine months to September 30, at which date it had unrestricted cash and equivalents of $10.2mn. Last year, Bird reported revenues of $244.7mn and a net loss of $358.7mn.

“As long as we don’t do something stupid — which is a daily challenge in this industry — we will continue to wipe the floor with every other airline in Europe,” he said.

This report uses survey data from 20 countries and qualitative research from the United Kingdom (UK), United States (US), and Germany to explore who is paying for news content online, which publications they pay for, how much they pay, and what motivations they have for subscribing or donating to news.

12.17

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So you all should be long Twitter. And those who have left are missed far less than they might have wished.

We attracted a lot of criticism for this on social media, but none of us noticed.

This year I worked on fascinating projects in food, media, storytelling, AI and health at Magnetic, and learned many learnings.

Federal and state subsidies and regulatory credits for EVs totaled nearly $22 billion in 2021, or nearly $50,000 per EV, socializing the true cost of these vehicles to taxpayers, utility ratepayers, and owners of gasoline vehicles.

Sometimes, Roberts is flown out to support an artist mid-tour, but more often he liaises with other A-list trainers around the world to look after his regular clients. And he trains those who are passing through London. His first step is to assess the needs of the individual and their goals. “Someone like Beyoncé, for example, has got very energetic dance routines, whereas Liam Gallagher can just stand there.”

That could obviously help make the everyday experience of using the internet nicer. “Web browsing is more limited by the roundtrip time than the capacity of the connection these days for most people. Beyond about six to 10 megabits per second, latency has a bigger role in determining how quickly a web page load feels.”

Every year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. For 2024, ‘AI, and everything else’.

At the start of each year, on January 1st, a new crop of works enter the public domain and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose. Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain — and here we focus on three of the most prominent. Newly entering the public domain in 2024 will be:

About a year ago, I tried thinking which database I should choose for my next project, and came to the realization that I don’t really know the differences of databases enough. I went to different database websites and saw mostly marketing and words I don’t understand.

While a number of folk will once again complain about the transition to subscription, I’ve said my piece on that (basically I’m for it as long as the company is actually putting that constant stream of money into a constant stream of development, which seems to be the case with Luminar). The problem I have with Luminar (Skylum) is that they’ve been all over the board trying to monetize their product(s), while their primary product itself has been what I’d call unreliable. The only other similar software package I’ve had more crashes and bugs from is OnOne. It’s gotten to the point where any benefits I perceive from Luminar now don’t match the cost, so I’ve also stopped updating that product, won’t subscribe, and am uninstalling it from my machines.

The worm turns?

According to Companies Market Cap, an online tool that ranks companies by market capitalization, Ryanair is now the largest airline in the world by market capitalization. The budget carrier has a market capitalization valued at $29.63 billion.