7.17

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They show how ex-EU digital commissioner Neelie Kroes, one of Brussels’ top officials, was in talks to join Uber before her term ended – and then secretly lobbied for the firm, in potential breach of EU ethics rules.

We seem to be in an era where we don’t want to think (or learn) any more. Just let the machines do the work. My car wants to keep itself in lanes, but has a real problem when the lines start to widen at off ramps. It also prioritizes centering in the lane despite a vehicle encroaching on an adjacent lane. Autofocus systems aren’t any different. They see general problems decently, but the marginal problems—of which more exist than you might realize—aren’t the focus AI’s forte, for sure.

Like Turner, Rishi is now worried that identity thieves will just hijack his Experian account once more, and that there is nothing he can do to prevent such a scenario. For now, Rishi has decided to pay Experian $25.99 a month to more closely monitor his account for suspicious activity. Even using the paid Experian service, there were no additional multi-factor authentication options available, although he said Experian did send a one-time code to his phone via SMS recently when he logged on.

We’ve asked BMW for the exact details of this roll-out, but it was unable to say when the subscriptions had been launched in which countries. It’s no surprise that BMW isn’t trumpeting the news, though. Since the company announced in 2020 that its cars’ operating system would allow for microtransactions on features like automatic high beams and adaptive cruise control, customers have decried the move as greedy and exploitative.

Brad Jones, the interim chief executive of ERCOT, who was brought in after the 2021 blackout fiasco, has pointed to mining Bitcoin as a way to harvest that surplus electricity in lieu of forcing power plants to sit idle and lose money. “We can use cryptocurrency to soak up the excess generation when there’s a lot of that and really provide a home for more wind and more solar to come to our state,” he told CNBC on March 18. ERCOT has a vested interest in incentivizing energy generators to continue building in Texas, despite the frequent gluts. Climate change and the state’s booming population make it likely that the grid will continue to experience ever-greater record peaks of demand each summer and winter. For those precarious days, maximizing the available power matters.

I take it you’re not interested in retiring.
No, I think retirement is going to happen to me unwillingly. But I swim a lot and I work out. I’m pretty healthy, though I have started forgetting stuff a little bit. I’m insanely focused on the work, more than on my social life or my family life. That’s the priority.

We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you’re going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb.

7.10

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While we banned plastic straws, Russia drilled and doubled nuclear energy production.

As Ukraine war bogs down, U.S. assessments face scrutiny. The growing conjecture is fueled by U.S. assessments of other wars, notably Afghanistan, where officials habitually sidestepped questions of whether success was sustainable

But how much can Japan really expect in the way of returns from the subsidies?

“Dutch farmers turned out in their thousands to speak out against the World Economic Forum (WEF) climate change policies of their government.”

The council is accused of having secret, unannounced meetings, from which no agenda or minutes are ever published, in violation of the Local Government Act 1972.

A one-for-one replacement of the E2 for the E1, allowing a much “greener” airplane is good for the environment and the improved fuel economy is better for the airline’s bottom line as well—which, in theory, helps protect jobs. There are simply routes that do not support mainline jets. Switching to greener airplanes also reduces the ability of the Greta Thunbergs of the world to pressure commercial aviation to the detriment of jobs.

On top of this, construction on the first sub in the class began when design was only 10% complete. Inevitably, design requirements changed as development proceeded, causing further rework, delays, and cost overruns. There were also difficulties finding vendors who could meet the fabrication requirements of the components, forcing the shipyards to fabricate many of them themselves (at increased cost.) The initial submarine in the class (the USS Seawolf) would ultimately take 6 years to build.

Get in the habit of Fermi estimation, looking up key quantities, and using upper and lower bounds. I’ve noticed a lot of the smartest people I know do this: they don’t take any claims at face value, and check for themselves whether they’re plausible. This means, e.g. when they hear a fact, they’ll look it up to assure themselves that it’s true, because often people cite things that are false or partial.

Royal Mail’s stamps are finally entering the digital world, with printed codes that can be used to track letters or linked to videos. Collectors, traditionalists and royalists are not amused

On the campaign trail, Mr. Harden has gotten an earful from voters about maddening and arbitrary restrictions: Why are wineries in Maryland limited to serving only 13 kinds of food? Why does a woman who sells her grandmother’s cobbler have to cough up tens of thousands of dollars to build a commercial kitchen? Why does a federal inspector have to be on hand to watch wild catfish get gutted — but not other kinds of seafood? The short answer is that restaurant associations tend to wield more political clout than wineries, and catfish farmers in Mississippi are more powerful than seafood harvesters in Maryland. Big businesses can afford to hire lawyers to help them cut through red tape and lobbyists to bend government rules to their will. Small businesses, especially in rural places, get slammed.

Ridgely Walsh, according to Department of Justice filings, had not registered, and in response to Vox’s inquiry, the firm said it would change its status. “As a prudential matter, we’re gonna go ahead and register immediately to represent the Government of Ukraine on a pro bono basis,” Juleanna Glover, the founder and CEO of the firm, told me.

To my mind, the two primary accomplishments of the DMA are that 1) it restricts the scope with which platform operators can compete directly with businesses that utilize their platforms, and 2) it forces choice and alternatives for core platform functionality for both consumers and businesses (eg. payments and discovery). The restrictions of the DMA apply to so-called “gatekeepers,” as defined through qualitative and quantitative criteria (eg. “annual EEA turnover equal to or above EUR 6.5 billion in the last three financial years or has an average market capitalization of EUR 65 billion or higher”). Penalties for non-compliance are stiff at 10% of global turnover for initial infractions and 20% for repeated breaches. I outlined the DSA’s impact on digital advertising back in April, but the DMA was the more popularly annotated and interpreted legislation, in part because of the quixotic and, in some cases, impractical or unworkable requirements it imposes on feature interoperability. This article provides a thorough and even-handed interpretation of the DMA and its impact on large consumer technology platforms.

In the past 20 years—and particularly the last 10 to 15—the average age of actors appearing toward the top of the bill in film and TV projects has risen significantly.

“We’re not brain surgeons here — all we’re doing is finding the best spots and washing and delivering the sand,” said Brock, 34. “Frankly, that it took us this long to get here is pretty wild.”

“These are pyrrhic victories. The party’s death spiral is over, the body is there, but it’s a zombie,” Mike Madrid, the former political director for the CAGOP and a longtime Republican strategist, told me about the future of the party.

I posited that these actions by Microsoft bear a striking resemblance to both the “Embrace” and “Extend” portions of the famous “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy that Microsoft has used, in the past, to defeat other competition.

But the main takeaway—why Linux succeeded where many operating-system startups and projects failed—is: Too much organization leads to fragility. Too little organization leads to ineffectiveness. But the right level of grassroots, distributed community organizing can become unstoppable.

“I wouldn’t want an L.N.G. terminal next to my home,” he told Forbes in 2005.

7.3

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I decided to look into it further, and spoke to Jerome Hoffman, at UCLA. He was one of the few physicians on an American Heart Association lpanel to evaluate tPA who didn’t take any money from Genentech. Hoffman also happened to be one of the few physicians who voted against promoting tPA for stroke. The study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, but the lead author was funded by Eli Lilly, and the NIH wouldn’t give me the data to look at. So I was already aware of Eli Lilly funding that was promoting Prozac, and when I heard this episode of The Infinite Mind, I immediately realized that they had nobody critiquing Prozac. I thought, “This is just was way too rosy a picture, with absolutely no downside.” I decided to look into the financial conflicts of the speakers on the show and found that they had no one who was really independent.

We had lost nearly the entire launch market to the French, Chinese, and Russians in the late ’90s, and winning back that market share by paying [private US companies] to take cargo and astronauts to the space station was a big economic boom for the nation.

A court in Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, has sent artist Aleksandra Skochilenko to pretrial detention for using price tags in a city store to distribute information about Moscow’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

if you want me to care about your brand, you need to care about my use of your product.

A forthcoming article in the Columbia Law Review by Professors David S. Cohen, Greer Donley, and Rachel Rebouché surveys some of the new abortion “battlegrounds” we can expect to see. In this article they write:

In this post-Roe world, states will attempt to impose their local abortion policies as widely as possible, even across state lines, and will battle one another over these choices; at the same time, the federal government may intervene to thwart state attempts to control abortion law. In other words, the interjurisdictional abortion wars are coming. . . .

The article provides a useful overview of many of the legal issues that will arise in these “interjurisdictional abortion wars,” in which the central legal questions will not concern substantive due process, but the scope of federal preemption, the autonomy of federal lands and enclaves, and the ability of states to limit interstate shipment of abortion medications, constrain interstate travel, or otherwise extraterritorialize their abortion laws. As I noted here, the White House has been consulting with academics to examine some of these questions, and I expect we will see the first rounds of litigation on some of these questions quite soon. Perhaps anticipating some of these issues, it is notable that (as my co-bloggers have noted) Justice Kavanaugh made explicit reference to the constitutional right to interstate travel in his Dobbs concurrence. It may also be notable that Court’s conservative justices tend to split on questions of federal preemption (as we saw in Virginia Uranium v. Warren in 2019).

That was the first White House trip to the county in more than two decades.

But nowhere is the shift more pronounced — and dangerous for Democrats — than in the suburbs, where well-educated swing voters who turned against Trump’s Republican Party in recent years appear to be swinging back. Over the last year, far more people are switching to the GOP across suburban counties from Denver to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Republicans also gained ground in counties around medium-size cities such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Des Moines, Iowa

The foreboding image of an Iron Curtain still suggests darkness and tragedy—but from the standpoint of U.S. strategic interests (as opposed to popular American political aspirations), it was for many years preferable to a united, unaligned Germany playing Washington and Moscow against each other. What Walesa understood was that a reunified Germany would once again see itself as a “bridge” between East and West at just the moment the liberated peoples of the former Warsaw Pact were reaching for the long-awaited prize of self-determination: namely, membership in the West itself. Convinced of their own centrality to the drama, U.S. leaders can’t or won’t understand that many U.S. allies can’t and won’t stake their futures on whatever the American position happens to be at any particular moment—because according to the internal logic of American partisan warfare, that position will be reversed every few years.

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That could add to the frustration that Mitchell and others say employers have with the current health insurance system. More might try to contract with providers directly, only using insurance companies for claims processing. “We saw a lot of hospitals that just decided not to post files or make them difficult to find,” she said.

These allegations were submitted to the board by Jacquelyn Lopez of the Elias Law Group on behalf of the N.C. Democratic Party’s deputy get-out-the-vote director, Michael Abucewicz. The accusations — which include that the Green Party misrepresented itself to get some to sign and that they turned in fraudulent sheets of signatures — can be read here.

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6.26

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Khodorkovsky is ambivalent about Alexei Navalny, the charismatic Putin critic who was recently moved to a maximum-security prison. “We have absolutely no differences as far as this war is concerned or the need for regime change. But we disagree quite a lot on the future of Russia, which is normal.” Khodorkovsky argues that Navalny sees himself as a future tsar. “I think believing in a good tsar is a very dangerous idea for Russia today” — because any tsar-like figure needs an external enemy to govern. Instead the next government of Russia “should be put together by the regions, because the regions, unlike the tsar, don’t have any vested interest in foreign aggression.”

It takes mountains of money and many years to even get through the process of permitting and approval to being a project in the US. Furthermore, while these policies intend to protect the environment, they actually don’t. They simply slow down the process and increase costs.

This reality should be a concrete warning to Western countries, who have scaled down military industrial capacity and sacrificed scale and effectiveness for efficiency. This strategy relies on flawed assumptions about the future of war, and has been influenced by both the bureaucratic culture in Western governments and the legacy of low-intensity conflicts. Currently, the West may not have the industrial capacity to fight a large-scale war. If the US government is planning to once again become the arsenal of democracy, then the existing capabilities of the US military-industrial base and the core assumptions that have driven its development need to be re-examined.

Europe on brink of gas crisis as Russia squeezes market

Central banks try to block attempts by poor countries to use digital currency to upend monetary norms.

For example, in my own apartment building, I once asked the front desk if I could leave my dry cleaning with them, so a cleaner could pick it up while I was traveling. They said no. It was too much of a liability. When I told the story to an Irish friend, he chuckled and mockingly replied: “That would never happen in my country.”

This same lack of imagination makes it difficult to understand the primacy of foreign policy in understanding the world on a day-to-day basis. If you lack imagination, you will tend to assume that the current configurations of countries, alliances, and so on are simply going to last.

The second principle of our long-term development is a reliance on entrepreneurial freedom. Every private initiative aimed at benefiting Russia should receive maximum support and space for implementation. (Putin)

Try searching for a product on your smartphone and you’ll see that what was once a small teal barfeaturing one “sponsored link” is now a hard-to-decipher, multi-scroll slog, filled with paid-product carousels; multiple paid-link ads; the dreaded, algorithmically generated “People also ask” box; another paid carousel; a sponsored “buying guide”; and a Maps widget showing stores selling products near your location. Once you’ve scrolled through that, multiple screen lengths below, you’ll find the unpaid search results. Like much of the internet in 2022, it feels monetized to death, soulless, and exhausting.

The US Department of Agriculture estimates that wheat fields statewide will average roughly 39 bushels per acre this year, down sharply from 52 bushels per acre last year. But many farms in the western half of the state will produce far less than that.

In August last year, a friend of Mo’s named Shiu Ka-chun received a letter from her, which he shared excerpts from on social media. Mo said she had been teaching English to other prisoners and that her Christian faith was helping her. She thanked Cardinal Joseph Zen, the 90-year-old retired bishop of Hong Kong, for visiting. “I may be stumbling but not falling,” she wrote. In January this year, Zen gave her Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazovto read. Two months ago, to the shock of many, Zen himself was arrested under the national security law, though not remanded into custody. (He is still in Hong Kong.) Apart from the odd letter, Mo and many other former prominent politicians have ceased talking to the press. In rare cases where activists have been released on bail, they have had to agree to forgo public commentary altogether. Mo was denied bail partly due to WhatsApp messages she sent to international reporters.

Those deliverables might not add up to a big fat bank account. But they create a healthy culture. So the Long Tail does have a role for us—but it should be built on our wisdom and generosity, not our business plans.

6.19

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But inherent in the focus-on-upgrade customers is this: your target customer ages over time.

Now, an important disclaimer. This post does not represent a doxxing of anyone. It will not include any private information about any of the indexed Good White Men. I will link only to the publicly-available social media accounts and publication pages of the offenders and include photographs culled from professional sources. I insist that you not do anything to facilitate the harassment or doxxing of these Good White Men in response to their inclusion here, and if you engage with them on social media I hope that you will be respectful.

Musk said he has voted for Democrats “because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.”

With 6 kilowatts of solar capacity and 30 kilowatt-hours of battery storage, the system can typically meet the center’s power needs. Occasionally, members cut the lights and fans during the day to save electricity for an evening dance class. Still, Robles says it’s better than running expensive, polluting diesel generators or depending on the island’s electric grid — which, despite years of post-hurricane repairs, remains prone to routine outages, sweeping blackouts and frequent voltage surges that fry people’s appliances. In early April, the entire island lost grid power for three days after an aging electric breaker caught fire on the southern coast.

Sixty-eight congressional Republicans voted against the latest round of Ukraine funding. Sure, it was partly an anti-Biden play—but much more is going on.

A hot-headed coder is accused of exposing the agency’s hacking arsenal. Did he betray his country because he was pissed off at his colleagues?

This article has been amended since publication to clarify the ACLU’s position was in a tweet rather than their statement

“No one emptied the bank accounts,” he says. “The fact that no one has screwed it up in 500 years is impressive, and I will work hard not to screw it up in my generation.”

The audio analyses of the gunfire that likely killed Abu Akleh point to one person shooting from an estimated distance that nearly matches the span between the journalists and the IDF convoy. Based on video The Post filmed in Jenin, Abu Akleh and other journalists identified as press would likely have been visible from the IDF convoy’s position, which was roughly 182 meters (597 feet) away. At least one soldier in the convoy was using a telescopic scope, the IDF said later in a news release. A live stream on TikTok filmed seven minutes before the shooting shows a relatively calm scene with people milling about. Distant single gunshots are heard on occasion but there are no signs of a firefight.

There’s a lot of work to be done across the imaging industry to boost support for true HDR stills. We need editing tools to let us fine-tune Raws into HDR stills, just as we’re used to doing when produce our own JPEGs. But above all, we need wider support and cross-compatibility so that we can share and view 10-bit files without having to connect our camera to the display. Until this is resolved, the ability to shoot 10-bit stills is of disappointingly limited use.

6.12

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Arcades, Churches and Laundromats: A Trucker’s Haven on the Precipice of Change

Political donations from the sector surged to more than $26 million during 2021 and the first three months of this year. That influx of cash is outpacing spending by internet giants, drug makers and the defense industry — providing a fresh pool of financing for candidates heading into November’s congressional elections.

Before dropping out, Resnick had already done internships at McLaren, the Formula One race car company, chaperoned in England by his parents; then at Elon Musk’s Tesla; and at the Silicon Valley office of the world’s leading commercial drone-maker, DJI Technology of China — now his main competitor.

Meanwhile, Apple has stepped into advertising in a bigger way, filling the data void it created. Apple has a measurement platform called the SKAdNetwork, which apps use to pull some data from iPhones to track ad performance. Apple also is developing its own ad products, particularly in search advertising. Apple helps app developers place ads when consumers browse the App Store, showing ads in results similar to how Google and Amazon return ads in their search properties. Apple’s critics have even accused the company of leveraging privacy concerns to benefit its own advertising ambitions. Apple does not reveal how big its ad business is, but a recent report from Toni Sacconaghi, a Bernstein analyst, estimated Apple’ ad revenue grew from $300 million in 2017 to $4 billion in 2021. That’s only 2% of Apple’s total yearly revenue, which mostly comes from device sales and services.

Yet amid a malaise that afflicts much of the city, entrepreneurial energy remains evident. Central Avenue’s sidewalks crowd with the brightly colored booths of street vendors, selling a broad range of food, clothes, and other products—more like Mexico City or Mumbai than the South L.A. of the past. Some new apartments are rising to replace the decrepit ones, and the street-level liveliness seems more Washington Heights than car-centric Los Angeles. Despite its troubles, Central Avenue does not exhibit the deathly sense of abandonment of places like the South Side of Chicago or other inner-city communities, where the spirit of enterprise has all but disappeared.

“We still have potential,” insists 63-year-old Rick Caruso, a billionaire running what once seemed a quixotic campaign for mayor. On June 7, Caruso will be a candidate in the city’s open mayoral primary, facing off against, among others, the race’s early frontrunner, long-time congresswoman Karen Bass. (The top two finishers will meet in a run-off general election in November if no candidate wins a majority of the vote.) Without any press, but for me, Caruso spent a recent morning at the Beehive, a new Southside business incubator located amid the detritus of the city’s industrial past. The youthful activity of the startups seemed to energize him. “I want to get on the phone and get investors to come back here—but they won’t if they see instability, the homeless camps, and the crime. That has to change.”

Though he has discarded his designer suit, Caruso cannot help but appear natty with his coiffed hair and monogrammed white shirt. The grandson of Italian immigrants, and son of an entrepreneur who founded Dollar Rent a Car, he started his real estate business here in 1987 and made a fortune worth more than $4 billion by developing shopping complexes, most notably the Grove, adjacent to the iconic Farmer’s Market. A key Caruso theme is restoring the promise that made L.A. the premier urban growth center of the last century, during which the city’s population grew from barely 100,000 in 1900 to nearly 4 million. Now, Los Angeles’s populationis in decline and its appeal has faded. The city peaked at a population of 3,983,000 in 2019, and fell 134,000 to 3,849,000 by 2021, with a 41,000 loss in the last year.

They argued that an upgrade to the crew alerting system would have triggered additional pilot training on simulators and Boeing would then have had no reason to minimize and hide MCAS as it did to avoid extra pilot training. If MCAS had been subject to such scrutiny during certification, the report suggests FAA engineers could well have flagged its design flaws. “The additional training would have likely removed the incentive for Boeing to limit disclosure of the MCAS system, thus making its existence part of the pilot training process and possibly identifying and removing MCAS’s dependence on a single angle-of-attack indicator,” the report states.

Perhaps the biggest impact from the Boudin recall — both politically and practically — is the loss of the most popular scapegoat for frustrations over crime in San Francisco. Removing an easy target of blame could lead to more scrutiny of the San Francisco Police Department, which “solves fewer crimes despite larger staffing per city resident and costs per area patrolled” compared with other California jurisdictions, according to a March report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Boudin repeatedly argued during the campaign that district attorneys can only bring charges when police make arrests. The San Francisco Police Department’s arrest rates have been decreasing for years.

“Were the alliance similarly tested, nato armed forces could find that they, too, have many of the problems Russia has had in Ukraine. It follows that the alliance should not take a dismissive attitude towards Russia”

These patent licenses need transparency. The NIH doled out $32 billion in government grants last year alone, understanding how those grants benefit patent holders, including the NIH itself, is a critical next step in untangling the complicated nexus between pharmacy companies, research institutions, and the federal workforce. 

6.5

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A disaster and a metaphor. What is presented by the government as “controlled” goes wildly out of control.

In a hilly city like Hong Kong, as Cheung points out, the class hierarchy can be literal: “the higher the altitude, the more expensive the apartments”. Both Lim and Cheung struggled with finding affordable housing in the city. The real issue is not how much land there is in Hong Kong but who owns it: the city’s real estate, as well as key sectors such as transportation and telecommunications, are controlled by a handful of family-owned conglomerates. The oligarchical system originated under British rule. Now Beijing relies on the tycoons to advance its agendas, and in turn provides policy conditions favourable to their businesses.

Near-term risk reduction through weapon procurement will provide a significant cost advantage to U.S. and allied forces. An Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyer costs approximately $2 billion to build, not including its weapons or operating costs.12 It could be damaged, disabled, or sunk by a range of Chinese antiship cruise missiles or ballistic missiles. Conversely, a Chinese Type 52 or Type 55 destroyer could be disabled or sunk by a U.S. Long-Range Antiship Missile (LRASM) or a Naval Strike Missile costing approximately $2 million. The math for mines and torpedoes is of the same order of magnitude. While delivering these weapons requires costly assets, surface vessels are among the most cost-ineffective options.13

The time on pilot Norman Schwartz’s Rolex read just before midnight. He had slowed to just above stall speed, and was flying as low as possible over the pitch black forests of northern China, north of the Korean border at the Yalu River. On board his C-47 were CIA officers John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau. Their mission that night: pick up Li Chun Ying, a CIA agent. The CIA was then recruiting agents from anti-Communist guerilla forces, and training them in the use of small arms, radio operations, and demolition, and then sending them into the field to sow as much mayhem as they could.

In the early ’50s, China didn’t have radar-controlled anti-aircraft weapons. This gave covert operations pilots like Schwartz a big advantage because, on a dark night, their planes were largely undetectable. Pilots like Schwartz were accustomed to performing reconnaissance overflights, in addition to dropping propaganda leaflets, using the darkness of night as cover, but this recovery operation was by no means a routine observation mission. 

The C-47 was completely unmarked aside from the tail number, B813. This was a civilian plane. The tail number would identify it, to casual observers, as an everyday airplane, but everyone on board knew exactly who they were working for. Downey and Fecteau were on the CIA payroll, while Schwartz and co-pilot Robert Snoddy were hand-picked out of a crop of civilian pilots recruited to fly for the CIA. The pilots indeed had day jobs, ferrying cargo around Asia for Civil Air Transport (a civilian airline) but sometimes the cargo happened to be anti-Communist guerrilla units or nationalist agents. And you wouldn’t find the landing sites on any commercial aviation map.

The world’s cargo ships, which transport around 90% of global trade, do not always make it to their destination without incident. According to the Safety and Shipping Review by insurance company Allianz, 27 cargo vessels were lost in major incidents during 2021, and 357 during the past decade. They catch fire. They hit rocks, reefs and sand bars. They malfunction. But they don’t always sink. Whenever there’s a chance to rescue a large ship, their owners almost always take it because these vessels can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Italy Is Held Back by 2.6 Million People Who Have Given Up on Work

XEROX PARC’S ENGINEERS ON HOW THEY INVENTED THE FUTURE—AND HOW XEROX LOST IT

Court upholds $573,000 penalty against East Sacramento homeowner who worked on cars in yard

Statistics Norway wants to receive several million daily receipts from food stores, signalling a new era in state data collection. Privacy advocates and the supermarkets themselves are unhappy.


Doug Hitchcox, the staff naturalist at Maine Audubon, gets dozens of emails a day asking him to identify birds: What’s this bird? Can you tell me what this is? “And they’re robins. They’re almost all robins,” he says.

5.29

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Parmigiano Reggiano Makers Are Embedding Tiny Trackers in the Rind to Fight Cheese Fraud

Shortly thereafter, he formally brought one of his top political aides from the campaign onto the DOT payroll. …..But recent federal filings show that Klobuchar, Booker, and Warren are all still spending heavily on digital investments or fund-raising consulting. ….whose associates launched a second political nonprofit for him in February but remain wary of the Chris Christie precedent of overinterpreting state-level success.

Walmart expands its drone-delivery service to reach 4 million households

There were three restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the permanent war economy that no longer exist. The first was the old liberal wing of the Democratic Party, led by politicians such as Senator George McGovern, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator J. William Fulbright, who wrote The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. The self-identified progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress today, from Barbara Lee, who was the single vote in the House and the Senate opposing a broad, open-ended authorization allowing the president to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else, to Ilhan Omar now dutifully line up to fund the latest proxy war. The second restraint was an independent media and academia, including journalists such as I.F Stone and Neil Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour Melman, author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War. Third, and perhaps most important, was an organized anti-war movement, led by religious leaders such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil and Dan Berrigan as well as groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They understood that unchecked militarism was a fatal disease.

An open source (before people really used the term regularly) kit for building a multitasking operating system. Plus a VMS clone and UNIX clone for IBM compatible PCs.

Have a Beginner’s mind. As the new joiner, you get to play the “I’m new here” card. I would take advantage of it and ask as many questions as needed. It’s cliché but it bears repeating that there are no stupid questions. Your fresh perspective is valuable and your questions may nudge the team into better ways of doing things.

So, if you want to increase your chances at success, remember the advice of the late Patrick Winston: Don’t go into battle without your weapon. Practice speaking, writing, and thinking, and use the process above to help you do so.

5.22

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As far back as 1955, county officials tried to get rid of the community at Waldo Point, passing targeted ordinances and harassing the residents. The most common complaint was that the boats discharged raw sewage into the Bay. In 1959, the county attempted to evict 120 boats, but the community fought back. One unnamed houseboater told the San Francisco Chronicle, “We represent one of the last vestiges of the Sausalito that was. The Hill snobs have always fought the Wharf Rats, but I never thought they would go this far.” But that was just the beginning.

Between 1998 and 2021 prices for “Medical Care Services” in the US (as measured by the BLS’s CPI for Medical Care Services) more than doubled (+132.2% increase) while the CPI for “Hospital and Related Services” (data here) more than tripled (+230.4% increase), see the bottom two rows of the table above. Those increases in the costs of medical-related services compared to only a 66.2% increase in overall consumer prices over that period (BLS data here). On an annual basis, the costs of medical care services in the US have increased 3.6% per year since 1998 and the cost of hospital services increased annually by 5.1%. In contrast, overall inflation averaged only 2.1% annually over that period. The only consumer product or service that has increased more than medical care services and just slightly less than hospital costs over the last several decades is college tuition and fees, which have increased nearly 5.0% annually since 1998 for four-year public universities.

Kevin (KAL) Kallaugher Talks Cartooning With Fellow OPC Best Cartoon Winners Rob Rogers And Patrick Chappatte

What explains record U.S. house price growth since late 2019? We show that the shift to remote work explains over one half of the 23.8 percent national house price increase over this period. Using variation in remote work exposure across U.S. metropolitan areas we estimate that an additional percentage point of remote work causes a 0.93 percent increase in house prices after controlling for negative spillovers from migration. This cross-sectional estimate combined with the aggregate shift to remote work implies that remote work raised aggregate U.S. house prices by 15.1 percent. Using a model of remote work and location choice we argue that this estimate is a lower bound on the aggregate effect. Our results imply a fundamentals-based explanation for the recent increases in housing costs over speculation or financial factors, and that the evolution of remote work is likely to have large effects on the future path of house prices and inflation.

Every day Kaspersky automatically processes over 320,000 new malicious files. Only one percent of these need manual work from a security expert, and only a tiny fraction of that 1% go to the company’s top-notch Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT). Those chosen few samples belong to the rarest, most menacing new APTs (advanced persistent threats). Kaspersky Lab’s Targeted Cyberattack Logbook chronicles all of these ground-breaking malicious cybercampaigns that have been investigated by!

So, you see, Ms. Malik, the Texanist can relate to your footgear fanaticism. And while he has no way of knowing exactly where you choose to sport your current boots, he can tell you that the various occasions and events and undertakings for which he might slip into a particular pair of his own boots are wide-ranging: scooting around a dance floor, striding around out in the field, puttering around the house, sitting in the conference room, attending a football game, or socializing at all manner of informal gatherings and soirees.

Rosero’s ghostwriters — known in the industry as chatters — will act as the model in private messages with the customers who pay to talk to her. These chatters work in shifts, responding to incoming messages and reaching out to new subscribers, trying to coax them into buying expensive pay-per-view videos. They tell particular subscribers that a video was recorded just for them; in fact, the same clip might be sold to dozens of people.

Thursday’s release did not break down by demographic traits how good a job the 2020 census did at the state level, but a national report card released in March showed the Black population in the 2020 census had a net undercount of 3.3%, while it was almost 5% for Hispanics and 5.6% for American Indians and Native Alaskans living on reservations. Those identifying as some other race had a net undercount of 4.3%. The non-Hispanic white population had a net overcount of 1.6%, and Asians had a net overcount of 2.6%, according to the results.

Hailing from an archipelago of 7,641 islands in the South China Sea, Filipinos are historically a seafaring people, and their ties to North America date back to before there was even a United States. In 1587 a Spanish galleon landed in Morro Bay, California, with a party that included “Luzon Indios.” In the mid-1760s, Filipino castaways from the Spanish galleons—called Manila men—established a village in the marshlands of Louisiana; Saint Malo was likely the first Asian American settlement in the U.S. Even today, Filipino men and women are employed as sailors and staff in the world’s cargo ships and cruise liners worldwide, more than any other nationality.

On Thursday the bureau published the results of its post-enumeration analysis, which it does after every Census to identify errors in the count. Its study found that 14 states were over- or under-counted by statistically significant margins. Compare that to 2010 when the bureau’s post-hoc analysis found that all the state population counts were more or less accurate. States with large over-counts include Hawaii (6.8%), Delaware (5.5%), Rhode Island (5.1%), Minnesota (3.8%), New York (3.4%), Utah (2.6%), Massachusetts (2.2%) and Ohio (1.5%). Those under-counted by big margins include Arkansas (5%), Tennessee (4.8%), Mississippi (4.1%), Florida (3.5%), Illinois (2%) and Texas (1.9%).

Instead of following the incessant, anti-science groupthink that became part of a virus-induced political religion, Sweden chose instead to not impose the strict lockdowns that Dr. Fauci recently claimed were not tried in the US. Sweden never mandated masks be worn in indoor public spaces, correctly identifying the lack of evidence supporting their use. They kept schools open in defiance of teacher’s unions and politically motivated “experts” in the United States who advocated for a policy with zero benefits and tremendous harms. Essentially, Sweden followed the actual science and not The Science™, with the requisite trademark and capital letters. That would include the guides that were prepared prior to the panic, inaccurate modeling, political motivations and crisis obsession took over.

Robots Are Writing Poetry, and Many People Can’t Tell the Difference

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Carmine Starnino:

When a book of brazenly surrealistic poetry and prose was published in 1984, attributed to a mysterious figure named “Racter,” it was hard to know what to make of it. The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructedwas a fever vision of weirdness. “I need electricity,” declared the poet in a signature moment. “I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber.?/?I need it for my dreams.” That same tone, at once charming and confounding, charged Racter’s aphorisms, limericks, fictional riffs, bits of dialogue, and odd attempts at nursery rhyme (“There once was a ghoulish sad snail”).

Reviews were mixed. Most conceded that nothing like The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed had ever been seen before. But Racter’s patter didn’t always impress. While the strange skips in logic gave off an idiosyncratic energy, the verse also made readers feel like they were eavesdropping on the rantings of a somniloquist. One critic called the 120-page collection “metaphysical poetry as interpreted by William Burroughs and William Blake, with a dyspeptic dash of Rod McKuen and Kahlil Gibran thrown in.” Another critic insisted that Racter’s inscrutable ingenuity revealed not a literary maverick but a “coffeehouse philosopher who knew a great deal once, but whose mind is somewhere else now.” With its bright-red cover, the volume attracted a cult following. Copies soon became scarce, which only added to Racter’s mystique.