“If I was Lady McBiden, I’d put on my big girl pants, play the long game and think about my husband’s legacy,” Alexandra Pelosi, the former speaker’s daughter, told me Saturday. “There aren’t that many people left in America who have something nice to say about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi is one of them.” The younger Pelosi made clear she was speaking only for herself.

We have a good idea of what happened:  an extreme/unusual Santa Ana event associated with severe downslope winds.   In this blog, I will show you some early simulations and explain why this event occurred.   I will also describe why climate change did not play a significant role.

Some also saw it as a sign of détente sent by Captain Ibrahim Traoré (nicknamed “IB”), at the helm of Burkina Faso since the 2022 coup. Like his Malian counterpart, General Assimi Goïta, the 36-year-old officer who came to power in a putsch severed ties with France after the takeover. Relations between Ouagadougou and Paris then turned sour with the removal of the French ambassador and special forces – based in the country for over a decade – and vitriolic statements against the former colonial power. 

This Unit 8200-to-big-tech pipeline is global, with former spies specialising in AI based in locations around the world, from San Francisco to New York, Spain to Switzerland, London to Jerusalem. Additionally I found that acclaimed leaders in the field of AI – men and women working for AI start-ups or heralded by corporate media as the next generation of AI – are former unit 8200 members.

RDEL #75: How do interruptions impact different software engineering activities? Certain tasks, and their complexity, change how impactful an interruption is. Research also discovers a disconnect between perception and physiological data.

And while I would recommend, in the spirit of owning your data, self-hosting your own reader, FreshRSS has hosted instances you can use if you don’t know how to setup and host your own application.

The Democratic schmoozing of big tech is still going strong today: When Chuck Schumer convened a closed door Senate hearing on AI policy in 2023, he invited Silicon Valley CEOs like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to take the lead. Biden’s Treasury  bailed out Silicon Valley Bank after it collapsed in the wake of deeply irresponsible risk management practices and VCs demanded cash to save it. Last year, star Democrat Gavin Newsom sided with Google over working journalists and threatened a veto that doomed a bill that would have required tech giants to pay newspapers a small share of the ad revenue for hosting news on their platforms. The Democratic congressman Ro Khanna argued on CNN that Democrats have simply been *too hard* on Elon Musk, not showering him with enough praise and thus driving him into Republicans’ arms. He has also offered to work with Musk’s DOGE to eliminate federal jobs.

Building anything of value around a proprietary platform is very risky. Whether it’s a software application, a brand, or anything that you can categorize as a major revenue source, should be owned and hosted by yourself. Platforms that you have no control over can disappear overnight, or change in ways that would make it impossible to continue using them in ways you’ve anticipated. History shows this happens constantly.

This work is designed as a textbook for a course in software testing or security testing; as supplementary material in a software testing, security testing, or software engineering course; and as a resource for software developers. We cover random fuzzing, mutation-based fuzzing, grammar-based test generation, symbolic testing, and much more, illustrating all techniques with code examples that you can try out yourself.

I think the DC elite is perhaps the only group fully surprised by what happened this election. That it happened with increasing minority support is a big slap in the face that their worldview simply cannot understand.

Perhaps this is why we forget that isolation can be edifying. To that great pioneer of modern solitude, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, time spent alone offered “the pleasure of conversing with my soul”. “It is only in myself”, Rousseau writes in his Reveries of the Solitary Walker, “that I find consolation, hope and peace of mind.” The insight, so compelling to the Romantics, is often lost on us.

Dane Co jail. ICE hold requests. Most weren’t honored

The US tariffs on the EU, including Airbus, and the counter-tariffs on the US, including Boeing, were suspended when Joe Biden became president in 2021. Both the EU and USTR representatives decided (after years of avoiding the issue) that the WTO should examine China’s state subsidies to the state-owned COMAC. COMAC developed the C919, which competes with the A320 and the 737. It’s developing the C929 to compete with the A330neo and the 787. So far, no trade complaint has been filed against China.

Startups often face the challenge of dividing their equity among co-founders and other key shareholders. This comprehensive guide provides a first-of-its-kind data report that offers a detailed approach to solving this problem.

Dysfunctional Delaware: Over the weekend, Vice Chancellor Laster took to LinkedIn to promote an 50-page article critiquing former Chancellor Chandler for his testimony in the DE legislature. After many comments, VC Laster apparently deleted (or limited access to) the post. 1/

The Peppermills of Jens Quistgaard

Farm Equipment editors visited Blue Equipment, Kinze Manufacturing’s new full-service store located on its vast manufacturing campus in Williamsburg, Iowa. Dealership Sales Manager Justin Render provides an overview and tour of the new showroom and modern repair shop for Kinze equipment sold, traded and repaired in Southeast Iowa. The store, which originated after a local dealer’s retirement, also sells Ag Leader, Martin-Till, Lundell Plastics and Yetter.

But despite efforts to help younger scientists, the share of basic NIH funding going to scientists under thirty-five continues to decline. In the 2004 fiscal year, the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program allocated about $200 million to scientists, a moderate decline since 2019. The amount was an almost negligible fraction — less than half of 1 percent — of the NIH’s annual budget for that year.

we now know it’ll be powered by a brand-new turbocharged four-cylinder petrol engine, and could arrive as early as next year.

Trend toward casual office wear nearly claims another Minneapolis business

Last month, I tried a little experiment on X/Twitter: each day, for 28 days, I posted a slide or two about the media business.  Most of these are pulled from long-form posts on The Mediator, but some are new or updated. Some are data-centric, some conceptual; most are proprietary analyses, some aren’t—but collectively they tell a story about the current and evolving state of media, especially the video business. Overall, they show an industry in upheaval, particularly for traditional media:

As 3D-printed architecture continues to mature from niche proposition to disruptive technology, housing developments are beginning to roll out worldwide. Following pioneering projects like Wolf Ranch and the Community First! Village in the US comes another in Ireland, which was printed in impressive time.

The “great man” theory of history lost favor a century ago, and for decades university faculty have found it quaint, vulgar or problematic. Like other ideas that right-thinking people long ago discarded, its disreputable status hasn’t stopped many from believing in it anyway.

Here is one way to measure the Trump administration’s priorities. Rubio’s order of meetings/phone calls
1: India
2: Australia
3: Japan
4: Philippines
5: Israel

What’s notable here is that every type of loss has gotten more expensive, mostly in relatively similar proportions. The average damage cost for wind and hail, water, theft, other property, and bodily injury have all risen by about a factor of 1.5-1.7 since 2005. Fire damage, medical payments and credit card fraud have increased in severity more, with the average payout of the first two increasing by a factor of closer to 3 and credit card fraud seeing a single huge spike.

As we know from the 1990s and early 2000s—under reform mayors like New York’s Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, Houston’s Bob Lanier, Indianapolis’s Steve Goldsmith, Philadelphia’s Ed Rendell, and Los Angeles’s Richard Riordan—good governance can restore urban vitality. Some of these mayors were nominal Democrats, others were Republicans, but all were effective in enacting regulatory reform, restraining taxes, and, most importantly, increasing public safety.

Immediately, five more airborne Huey pilots took advantage of the cleared runway to land and disembark their passengers. Assuming he would be court martialed, Chambers ordered those helicopters thrown overboard as well. He later told interviewers that since he expected to be deposed by prosecutors, he turned away from the action to avoid seeing exactly how many were pushed into the sea. In the same interview Jumper also claimed not to know how many helicopters went overboard. 

By this point, I think it’s clear that HTML elements run the gamut from content to container to logic to edge case. Some elements we can see, others not so much. Some elements are meant to combine with others. Some elements are only meant for your browser to read. Some elements had good intentions but never picked up mainstream use.As an aside, right now, you’re reading an <article></article>.If you’re getting a bit lost, <nav></nav> can help you findthewayOr maybe an <address></address> would be better?

The Conservative Revolution was not merely a collection of abstract ideas but a comprehensive vision for Germany’s future, shaped by countless influential figures—too many to name here—who sought to fuse the ancestral legacy of culture and spirituality with political renewal. Mohler described the movement as uniquely “German,” rejecting the radical internationalism of the 1789 French Revolution. 

Hadid’s studio, Zaha Hadid Architects, won the international competition to replace the ageing ski jump in Innsbruck in December 1999. It was the latest in a series of high-profile competitions won by the studio.

A brand-new house in Pacific Palisades designed and built by architect Greg Chasen in summer 2024 could have easily been one of them. None of the other homes around it survived, and a car parked out front by a neighbor was the perfect vector to spread the flames.

A cursed fact of the world is that the most important life lessons you learn are the hardest to communicate to others. They always sound like clichés. In any case, these are a few things I’ve learned from experience and that I try and keep in mind.

1. Think about what makes you ‘imbalanced’ as a personality, & do things where this gives you an edge.
2. Once you are ok with people telling you ‘no’, you can ask for whatever you want. (Make reality say no to you.)
3. Fun is underrated. The best and most creative work comes from a root of joy and excitement. You can feel this in your body.

Significant price markups: The Big 3 PBMs imposed markups of hundreds and thousands of percent on numerous specialty generic drugsdispensed at their affiliated pharmacies—including drugs used to treat cancer, HIV, and other serious diseases and conditions. The Big 3 PBMs also reimbursed their affiliated pharmacies at a higher rate than they paid unaffiliated pharmacies on nearly every specialty generic drug examined.

The guiding company will be sending a group to attempt Everest this winter using Xenon gas. Whereas the fastest commercial Everest expeditions are currently around four weeks, using Xenon could speed things up to one week airport to airport. One session of xenon gas costs $5,000 per person for a 30-minute session. The tour operator said they will have four clients inhale a xenon gas blend upon arrival in Kathmandu, then fly to base camp, then climb to the summit within two hours. They would then spend three days climbing and one day descending. The climbers would not need any acclimatization. Along with the xenon gas, climbers need to pre-acclimatize before travelling to Everest in a hypoxic altitude tent and still use bottled oxygen on the climb. These expeditions also have mountain guides and use Sherpa and porter support.

Madison Just, a 32-year-old change manager for a Los Angeles design consulting firm, has both premium American Express cards that offer Delta lounge access. She’ll get 25 Sky Club visits a year. “I am worried that it’s not enough,’’ she says.



Just visits Sky Clubs on every trip. At Los Angeles International Airport on Saturday night, she stopped in for a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, hummus, veggies and cheese and crackers. The clam chowder at the Sea

Walgreens CEO says anti-shoplifting strategy backfired: ‘When you lock things up…you don’t sell as many of them’

More than 74,000 Canadians have died on health-care wait lists since 2018: report
At least 15,474 Canadians died in 2023-24 alone before receiving various surgeries or diagnostic scans. The true number is likely double

Biden two weeks ago oligarchs.

To understand why it actually makes sense to buy Fartcoin, we turn to the wise words of Caroline Ellison, CEO of Sam Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund Alameda: “Every week or so something weirder than the previous week would happen. . . . I managed to get. away from my initial skepticism and have been embracing the mindset of going out and looking for the weirdest, dumbest thing people are talking about today.”

Of note in the poll, Virginians are unusually pleased under Youngkin. Some 49% said that the commonwealth is headed in the right direction versus 31% who said the wrong direction.

What changed between 1989, when the US was the most technologically advanced nation on earth and built roadmaps for becoming a space faring civilization and today, when people claim that the US must import its technological talent and builds roadmaps for networked panopticons?

Ecclesiastes tells us: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Myrmikan Research applies this principle to the subject of credit bubbles.  The ancient Greeks discovered that debt could magnify wealth. The debtor feels richer from the use of the borrowed property, while the lender feels richer from the compounding interest yielded by his claim. Both indulge in consumption more freely. As long as the accumulating claims remain contingent, the bubble grows. But, eventually, someone asks to be paid, and the expanding claims on wealth must be reconciled to tangible wealth, much of which has been consumed.

SpaceX Earth to Earth Transport will enable: LOS ANGELES TO NEW YORK: 5 hours, 25 min —> 25 min

But PHEV systems have a unit-cost problem, in that they require not one but two complex power systems with a lot of code between them. One component, the battery, is particularly pricey. Legacy carmakers can be counted on to pass those costs on to consumers, who may not have any tax credits to soften the blow.

This is not well thought out. They have 2.2 billion users worldwide. Whatever they would get from the sale of US operations wouldn’t be worth disclosing their algorithm.

In 2016, I covered his campaign stops in Pennsylvania, and I noticed that Trump was visiting parts of the state that nobody else goes to. Forgotten towns like Ambridge and Wilkes-Barre and Johnstown and Butler. Nobody goes to Butler!

The development of the Prius began in 1993 with the G21 project, which focused on fuel efficiency, low emissions, and affordability. According to a Toyota article detailing the project’s history, by 1997, Toyota engineers—including Takeshi Uchiyamada, who has since become known as the “father of the Prius”—were satisfied they had met the challenge of achieving all three goals.

Ten Must-See Museums Opening Around the World in 2025: New institutions dedicated to artificial intelligence, West African art, barbeque and more are expected to welcome visitors this year

The programming language C is 75.88 times more energy efficient than Python and 71.9 times faster

Once I found my sweet spot, though, I started racking up sales. (To this day I can’t talk on the phone without lapsing into my “telemarketer voice,” which sounds like Phil Hartman on ecstasy.) I wasn’t a coaxer, a hand-holder, a persuader; I hit people with my spiel, and if they hesitated or said no, I hung up on them midsentence. On to the next one. Unlike many of my less successful colleagues, I quickly learned to take yes for an answer; though we were legally required to read a long list of mandatory disclosures to all our sales, I noticed that this often broke the spell and gave people an opening to back out or “wait and ask the wife about it.” As soon as I heard a yes, I said, “Great choice!” and transferred them to confirmation. My manager occasionally came by and reminded me that it was technically illegal to skip my disclosures, but he made commission off my commission, and his tone made it clear that I could do as I pleased as long as I kept putting up numbers. Which I did, to an almost ludicrous degree. I hit every kicker, every bonus. I won scented candles, gift cards, and countertop appliances in daily sales contests. I earned the executive parking space in the very front of the lot, even though I took the bus to work. I was pretty pleased with myself. Making $800 in 15 to 20 hours a week when your monthly rent is $300 and beers are a dollar is real wealth.

I haven’t seen Landman yet but this is an all-time speech by Jerry Jones. Probably because he’s not acting. That’s his real life.

“It’s amazing to me how much waste is consuming our daily work. It seems like 30% of everybody’s job is fixing something—either the bad quality or late product or something that shouldn’t have happened,” said Ortberg.

The 2024 “winners” of the annual Shkreli awards, given each year to perpetrators of the most egregious examples of profiteering and dysfunction within the healthcare industry, have been released from the Lown Institute, an independent healthcare thinktank. The recipients are chosen by a panel made up of health policy experts, clinicians, journalists and advocates. The awards are named after Martin Shkreli, the infamous “pharma bro” who rose to international notoriety after increasing the price of lifesaving anti-parasitic drug Daraprim 50-fold.

There’s one mistake I see more often than anything else, and it’s absolutely deadly: ignoring the rest of the codebase and just implementing your feature in the most sensible way. In other words, limiting your touch points with the existing codebase in order to keep your nice clean code uncontaminated by legacy junk. For engineers that have mainly worked on small codebases, this is very hard to resist. But you must resist it! In fact, you must sink as deeply into the legacy codebase as possible, in order to maintain consistency.

I agree that foreign billionaires should not meddle in British politics, but I strongly believe in their right to free transparent speech & that they can say whatever they want to their audience on X. Those two are separate issues. When Bill Gates has direct access to Keir Starmer & we are not allowed to know what they discussed it is much worse than open public posting on X. At least there is transparency on X.

In this century’s first decade, investors had the opportunity to participate in – and lose money due to – two spectacular bubbles. The first was the tech-media-telecom (“TMT”) bubble of the late ’90s, which began to burst in mid-2000, and the second was the housing bubble of the mid-aughts, which gave rise to (a) extending mortgages to sub-prime borrowers who couldn’t or wouldn’t document income or assets, (b) the structuring of those loans into levered, tranched mortgage-backed securities, and consequently (c) massive losses for investors in those securities, especially the financial institutions that had created them and retained some. As a result of those experiences, many people these days are on heightened alert for bubbles, and I’m often asked whether there’s a bubble surrounding the Standard & Poor’s 500 and the handful of stocks that have been leading it.

Starmer’s denunciation of Musk for ‘spreading lies and misinformation’ about Muslim child-rape gangs is an orchestra of discordant duplicity

In contrast, GPU cores are like a hundred line cooks who excel at repetitive tasks – they can chop an onion in two seconds, but they can’t effectively run the whole kitchen. If you asked a GPU to handle the constantly changing demands of a dinner service, it would struggle.

The proposed conversion to a PBC would also mean the non-profit entity will relinquish governance over OpenAI’s business and operations. One person familiar with the situation said those powers could themselves be worth billions of dollars. 

So we talk about a market of 0.0001% of the car industry, with cells with a different build-up and, therefore, with a different production. There is no way these cells’ prices can be compared with the car industry’s prices.

Despite losing hundreds of millions of dollars and control of her own company, Martha doesn’t give up and in 2015, now in her mid 70s, she creates a new image and a new career starting with, of all things, a shockingly hard-assed roast of Justin Bieber. The Bieber roast leads to a succesful colloboration with Snoop Dogg. Legendary.

Trump is now at the zenith of his power. The moment he’s sworn in on January 20, he’s just the plain, old president of the United States.

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.

Just a reminder that Juan Merchan’s daughter, Loren, is the co-owner of a very lucrative Democratic consulting firm. Here is a list of her clients. Receipts coming:

FEC reports show Loren Merchan’s Democratic consulting firm raked in at least $7.3 million between the end of May 2024 (after Pres Trump was convicted) and Election Day. Top clients during that time include Tammy Baldwin, Gretchen Whitmer, John Tester, Cory Booker.

Still, the Apps strategy was confused between DOS, Windows, OS/2, and Macintosh. The team was not particularly organized for success as a combination of product units and job functions.

Before we talk about SpaceX, let’s talk about every single other private rocketry company ever. It’s easy to do, because they all failed (or are in the process of failing, or are likely to fail in the future). There’s an old joke in the rockets business: “How do you become a billionaire in the space industry?” “Easy, you start with two billion dollars…” Okay, I’m not actually going to talk about all of them, but here are some of my favorites. When I was young I was really into Masten Space Systems which pioneered vertical takeoff/vertical landing rockets, and won the NASA/Northrop Grumman lunar lander challenge. Now bankrupt. And then there was Armadillo Aerospace, founded by none other than John Carmack, a man who built a career in pushing hardware to its absolute limits. Seriously, read that link about the fast inverse square root algorithm (or watch a video explainer here).2 Carmack is built different. Didn’t matter. Bankrupt.

“It’s unclear when the reservoir first went offline”

Prior to that ruling, nominees typically would step down at the end of their term, the governor would nominate a replacement, that person would start serving and the Senate would vote to confirm or reject the nomination.

“I had lived through the destruction of Douglas Aircraft and I saw the same thing about to happen at Boeing,” Hart-Smith explained in a 2019 interview.

This advance is the culmination of two decades of work that has gone largely unnoticed to the outside world, according to researchers involved in the project. The electronic warfare equipment used by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is evolving rapidly. For example, the multi-band antenna used in the new phased array radar has “complex structures such as curved surfaces, multilayer dielectrics, metal conductors and thin dielectric layers”, wrote the project team led by Professor Li Bin from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in a paper published in November.

Alternatively, if you assume the $600 billion will be borne by just the world’s 100 million wealthiest and most intensive users of digital services, they or their employers would need to come up with a much larger $6,000 per year. Again, it’s not an impossible figure, but not one that can be found in next year’s budget. Meanwhile, planned capital expenditures by tech titans has continued to increase, so the required annual revenue per user keeps increasing. So, while it’s clear that AI is set to be truly transformative, it could still take a decade to justify current levels of investment. What that means is that there are two possible futures: One in which capital markets are happy to allow the hyperscalers to keep throwing money at AI in the expectation of future market leadership (and blowing out their balance sheets in the process), and one in which they are not.

• Elon’s 100,000-GPU data center in Memphis currently runs on gas:When Elon Musk rushed to get x.AI’s Memphis Supercluster up and running in record time, he brought in 14 mobile natural gas-powered generators, each of them generating 2.5MW. It seems they do not require an air quality permit, as long as they do not remain in the same location for more than 364 days.

The ONLY question in healthcare should be “How should care for people who can’t afford to pay for their care be paid?”

As one watches the videos of contractor owned and operated aircraft please realize the stark contrast in competence between teams that modify and maintain aircraft up to 60 years old flying in combat like conditions verses government bureaucrats that fail to maintain the basics of full reservoirs and fire hydrant maintenance.

Taxing these flows judiciously could raise revenue and improve the tax system, but transfer taxes have been eviscerated in recent years.

Now, I’ll finally get around to reading the NYT article. Before, I simply made assumptions based on the headline, and enlisted 2 different robots to read it for me and fill in what I thought was probably lacking, Elon Musk’s longstanding avoidance of owning a house in the normal sense of a personal domicile — what the humans call “a home.” Then I was set free to envision a movie — and brought down to earth by the utterly dull plot summaries written by robots.

we finally get Google-Facebook contract (aka Jedi Blue) alleged as bid rigging (yes, press was misled, it’s still part of the claims). /1

What a stupendous, momentous, foundational, and unpardonable con

“CBS Sunday Morning” segment from 1986 featuring #Packers PFHOF guard Jerry Kramer. Includes interviews and several rare CBS broadcast clips from “The Ice Bowl” 1967 NFL Championship — played December 31, 1967.

Tyler Send them to read the Henriad before they get started. The complicated nature of power: that the king never has the power that he needs to claim he does is quite significant. The ways in which power cannot be delegated, Shakespeare is extremely wise on. And yes, the DOGE people absolutely need to learn those lessons.

I want to also give special props to Andres Freund for discovering the xz backdoor in 2024 while working on Postgres at Microsoft. This attack was a two-year campaign to inject malicious code into an important compression library widely used in computing. Although the backdoor targeted SSH and not Postgres directly, it is another example of why database engineers are some of the best programmers in the world.

Chang throws himself into learning more about transistors and semiconductors. He begins studying William Shockley’s textbook about them, working through it one painstaking page at a time. He has a colleague who’s an expert on semiconductors, who spends every night drinking at a bar; Chang sits at the bar with him asking him questions about semiconductors, going home to study more, then going back to the bar if he has more questions.

If you were making a list of the most important companies in the world, you’d find Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, somewhere very close to the top. It’s one of a tiny handful of companies, along with Intel and Samsung, that can make the most advanced microchips, and it has a commanding lead in that market. TSMC makes the microprocessors and 5G chips for Apple’s iPhones and Macbooks. It makes chips for both Intel and AMD. And it makes the chips for Nvidia, Meta, and Amazonthat are powering the AI boom. TSMC is so important that it’s sometimes called Taiwan’s “silicon shield”, the idea being that fear of damaging TSMC might dissuade China from trying to invade Taiwan.

“With every generation in France we see the change. If the grandfather drank 300 litres of red wine per year, the father drinks 180 litres and the son, 30 litres,” said CIVB board member Jean-Pierre Durand. French red wine in sharp decline as tastes change among young drinkers

The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area, better known as the DFW Metroplex, is the leading U-Haul Growth Metro of 2024. Charlotte, Phoenix, Lakeland and Austin complete the top five U.S. growth metros, meaning they saw the largest net gains of U-Haul^® customers taking one-way equipment into and out of metro areas last year.

Here are the 158 Democrats who opposed the deportation of illegal immigrants for sex offenses:

There is an element of clubbiness about the T, insofar as owners must be proficient with a stick shift. It’s a vanishing skill set; only about one in five U.S. drivers know how. “sports-car autotune”

Bugsy Sailor has spent six years photographing daily sunrises over Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, capturing its beauty and building an online following.

Acceptability Threshold. The latest effort by the regulators to prevent new entrants in the industry is the ICAO emission standard that will enter into force in 2028. Think of this as the equivalent of ending ICE and imposing EV in 2040

In Britain today, first screenings of Christmas adverts are treated like film premieres. One-third of us are more excited by that year’s Christmas ads than whatever’s arriving at the movie theatre. Newspapers review and rank them. Topics trend on social media because of them. Links are forwarded, sides taken. When a dog from a John Lewis ad died, it made the news. In an age where Britons feel more divided than ever, arguing about Christmas advertising brings the nation together.

The Trieste model has fascinated the mental health care community for close to five decades. It contrasts starkly with many other parts of the world that make much greater use of psychiatric institutionalisation, even though such confinement is discouraged by the World Health Organization.

What should you read to get to grips with a new job? Employee manuals or classic management titles can be an obvious starting point. But for many professions, a more informal reading list can offer greater insight than official resources. These offbeat classics, picked by people working in key sectors, can act as spiritual guidebooks, revealing the subtler nuances in corporate culture or the artistry of the day-to-day. Crucially, they are often a joy to read, whether you are employed in the field or not.

Sheridan is fond of recalling the visceral distaste shown towards Yellowstone and its likely audience by an unnamed HBO executive who passed on the show. “[He] goes: ‘Look, it just feels so Middle America,’” Sheridan told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023. “We’re HBO, we’re avant-garde, we’re trendsetters. This feels like a step backwards. And frankly?.?.?.?I don’t think anyone should be living out there [in rural Montana]. It should be a park or something.”

Exploring Naples: it would be criminal to miss it!

The China Shock Behind the Honda-Nissan Merger Talks. Potential combination of Japanese carmakers and a $5 billion GM charge show companies dealing with fallout from new rivals

The Unlikely Ingredient That Could End U.S. Dependence on Chinese Batteries

But the math doesn’t work. In 2023, renewable energy sources amounted to only 14.6% of primary energy from all sources. Thanks to massive government subsidies, renewable energy made up a larger but still minority share of global electricity generation at 30%. But about half of this comes from hydropower dams, and this kind of renewable energy is unlikely to increase much in the future. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel share of global primary energy consumption in 2023 was 81.5%.

Here is a short thread about my visit to Anjar, a small village in the Bekaa valley just on the Lebanese side of the border with Syria. Here are the ruins of an Umayyad city from 709, some 80 years after the death of the prophet Muhammad. But Anjar itself is now Armenian. How is that possible? Interesting story:

As I learned, Stammtisch (“shtom-tish”) means “regulars’ table”. It’s an age-old German tradition where a group of like-minded people — traditionally men — meet up at a bar or a restaurant at a regular time to have drinks and chat. 

“I have become a Christian because the way it leads to a more well-rounded, fulfilling family life is so self-evident that there must be something more to it, something that can overcome our modern doubts.” A wonderfully cheering Christmas essay by @Ayaan.

Michigan Enjoyer recently got her itinerary and discovered that Big Gretch might just be the new Anthony Bourdain!

The Monreale mosaics were meant to impress, humble and inspire the visitor who walked down the central nave, following the fashion of Constantinople, the capital of the surviving Roman empire in the east. They span over 6,400 sq m and contain about 2.2kg of solid gold.

Back home in America, I’ve called for a bunch of changes to make our cities better places to live. Most importantly, we need more housing density and better transit. These are the two main goals of the YIMBY movement. I also want more commercial density— lots of shops in walkable downtown areas — which is something YIMBYs should focus on more than they do. I don’t think American cities are going to become like Tokyo — or Paris, or Singapore, etc. — anytime soon. But I think places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Miami, and Philadelphia can move enough in that direction to make a big difference in America’s quality of life, and probably in our economic productivity as well. 

One way to make the media more honest is to make it more painful to the reporters and editors who get it wrong. When stories are proven false, corrections must be made promptly and carry as much visibility and views as the original piece. A third party, likely based on @X should build a platform tracking these inaccuracies and highlighting the reporters and editors involved. One could imagine an Academy Award style event annually highlighting the worst reporters, editors and the publications they work for.

Despite this paradigm and in the face of the prevalent sentiment, customers generally own their own data (aside from some cloud based EHRs). The challenge is not ownership. It’s access, control, and extensibility. Systems of record (in this case EHRs) haven’t invested into APIs for every possible function (choosing instead to prioritize new core functionalities). Where they have, they may have rate limits or cost tiers. RPA isn’t allowed. Direct database access is limited.

I posted my picks for core readings on permitting reform about a month ago, and a number of people have since asked for the link. This list is by no means comprehensive—but if you read through every single one of these you’ll be off to a flying start.

John faithfully produced a column every week for nearly 30 years. Sometimes he would fret over his new computer that managed to delete a column or lose the photos he had searched so diligently for. He always he prevailed and signed his emails “? Luck, John.” I felt lucky to receive every column he penned.

I think the thing I’ve changed my mind most on in politics in recent years is how destructive bad regulations can be and how seriously I take it now when I hear that regulations or rules are ill constructed.

The 0.8-mile ice skating ribbon at Boulder Junction’s Winter Park opened on Dec. 23. Modeled after a wooded skating trail at Canada’s Arrowhead Provincial Park, skaters can glide through the scenery on what had been a little-used cross-country skiing path. Organizers behind the project say they believe it’s the first rural skating ribbon in Wisconsin

Early Christian Writings is the most complete collection of Christian texts before the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. The site provides translations and commentary for these sources, including the New Testament, Apocrypha, Gnostics, Church Fathers, and some non-Christian references. 

The massive downward revisions to jobs data are set to continue: latest from PHL Fed has early benchmark indicating jobs DECLINED in Q2 of this year while the initial monthly job reports estimated gains of 653k – the labor market’s strength is a fiction…

Sales of some smaller, entry-level models, such as the HondaCivic and Nissan Sentra, have taken off this year, rising 23% or more through November, according to research firm Motor Intelligence. Those increases have far outpaced the industry’s growth, which has been in the low single digits. 

This is the last days of the long con. The first six months of the second term is going to be politics like you’ve never seen before.

Hallum is one of the organizers of the Dakota Exiles ride, a journey through frozen fields and open country covered in snow on horseback. They rode once before in 2020. They’ll meet up with another group of riders to commemorate the Dec. 26, 1862 hangings ordered by President Abraham Lincoln that led to a mass exile of Native people from Minnesota.

There, he has burnished his reputation as a cost-cutter and hard-driving boss. Davis has tended to spend more time in Las Vegas than in Bastrop, where he stays in a mobile home while in town, alongside the mobile homes of other workers. During those times, he would appear silhouetted through the window, often talking urgently into his phone until late at night while pacing around the kitchen table, according to people familiar with the company.  more.

Five years ago, the majority of assets were managed inside the agency. As of last year, 55% of assets were overseen by outside managers. External management can cost up to four times as much as internal management, auditors found in 2021.

Beyond Trump here, the fact that it’s proven that Al Sharpton was paid $500k by Kamala’s campaign, then shortly thereafter conducted a worshipful interview on his MSNBC show without disclosing that, and nobody at MSNBC addressed it, shows what a rotted partisan sewer MSNBC is.

In Wisconsin in 2024, the highest employers of immigrants using H-1B visas were:
Fiserv
Universities Of Wisconsin
Milwaukee Public Schools
Northwestern Mutual
Experis (Manpower)
Rockwell
Milwaukee Electric Tool
American Family
Medical College Of Wisconsin
GE HealthCare

always bundle a proposal with a complaint

Chinese hackers used broad telco access to geolocate millions of Americans and record phone calls. The number of telecommunication providers impacted b

I downloaded five years of H-1B data from the US DOL website (4M+ records) and spent the day crunching data. I went into this with an open mind, but, to be honest, I’m now extremely skeptical of how this program works.

Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically. I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.

Infectious diseases killed Victorian children at alarming rates — their novels highlight the fragility of public health today

Search through Rijksmuseum artworks based on meaning

Now that California finally certified election results Friday after 5 weeks, I dove into the 67 page PDF and found some interesting stats between November 2020 and last month’s election. Some were really eye popping

A hypothetical small widebody aircraft for short and medium haul routes may need the rethinking of the way we define the structure of engine thrust ratings. Weneed to offer at least the option of takeoff thrust ratings, climb thrust rating and maximum continuous thrust rating for domestic-regional high cycle utilisation.

So why might a worker at TSMC be more likely to have a child? I propose that TSMC’s own policies are boosting birth rates at the company in two connected ways. 

The answer: It’s happened because people are fundamentally wired to make meaning, and because having a community you feel you belong to is foundational to who we are. If you provide people with a landscape of banal franchises, they will form communities and make meaning in a banal franchise.

Over a century before Allen and Gates wrote their BASIC interpreter, Ada Lovelace wrote and published a computer program. She, too, wrote a program for a computer that had only been described to her. But her program, unlike the Microsoft BASIC interpreter, was never run, because the computer she was targeting was never built.

Together, these tools provide the state with an enormous capability to gather data both covertly, as in the case of spyware, and overtly, through the unlawful and illegitimate use of Cellebrite mobile phone extraction technology. The authorities in Serbia have systematically deployed these tools against peaceful protesters who are already all too often subjected to unjustified criminalization for their activism. This unlawful digital surveillance and data collection directed against civil society violates people’s right to privacy and personal data protection, and profoundly affects their other rights and freedoms, including the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly.

Pretty incredible admission from Kamala’s digital chief via Semafor’s Max Tani: “There’s just no value — with respect to my colleagues in the mainstream press — in a general election, to speaking to the New York Times or speaking to the Washington Post, because those are already with us.”

The Biden Admin paid Reuters over $300 million in government contracts. 11 different Biden government agencies targeted Elon’s businesses. All 11 agencies paid millions to Reuters. Reuters then won the Pulitzer Prize for “their work on Elon Musk and misconduct at his businesses”

Unfortunately, most of the customers using a camera of any sort, perhaps nearly all of them (>90%), want automagic, a word I invented something like 40 years ago. In other words, press a button and the machine does all the thinking, setting, and rearranging for you. What is really being compared in every one of the smartphone versus dedicated camera comparisons I’ve see to date is “how’s the automagic work?” I’ll give the gold crown here to Apple first and foremost, with Google a step behind, and Samsung, et.al. right there at their tails. Dedicated cameras bring up the rear.

I have a special interest in Alzheimer’s disease. For nearly 25 years, I practiced general neurology in Portland, Oregon, and some of my patients had dementia. In 2012, while doing a genealogical DNA search, I inadvertently discovered that I have two copies of the APOE-4 allele, meaning I had a very good chance of getting Alzheimer’s-caused dementia by age 80.

An existential threat. An unlikely alliance. A massive feat of engineering. Today, I’m going to share one of the most important stories in Rogue Amoeba history. “and you can get started with our apps in under a minute. This major improvement will allow many more people to utilize our tools, and we want everyone to know about it.”

The US liquefied natural gas (LNG) Industry has emerged within the past decade to become an important and growing sector of the US economy, with LNG exports not only contributing more than $400 billion to US GDP but also supporting hundreds of thousands of high-quality American jobs since 2016. However, the industry is facing significant hurdles, from the January 2024 US Department of Energy ‘pause’ to mounting permitting challenges and the shifting regulatory and political landscape. 

But what about the other guy? James Coughlan is an official with the Export-Import Bank, and his views on dumping and IP isn’t clear. So why is he nominated? He’s the husband of Kamala’s campaign chief of staff. That’s it. That’s the reason.

To make this a bit more concrete, let’s focus on the biggest Industrial Revolution in recent memory: the rise of China. (The macroeconomist Basil Halperin has done several great Twitterthreadsdigging into the Chinese miracle.) A very live question is the extent to which China’s rise was driven by agriculture or manufacturing. This has critical implications for other developing countries—if state resources are limited, which should policymakers prioritize?

By July, the story had burst into public view, after a Vulture article resurfaced a year-old item from the trade press claiming that Spotify was filling some of its popular and relaxing mood playlists—such as those for “jazz,” “chill,” and “peaceful piano” music—with cheap fake-artist offerings created by the company. A Spotify spokesperson, in turn, told the music press that these reports were “categorically untrue, full stop”: the company was not creating its own fake-artist tracks. But while Spotify may not have created them, it stopped short of denying that it had added them to its playlists. The spokesperson’s rebuttal only stoked the interest of the media, and by the end of the summer, articles on the matter appeared from NPR and the Guardian, among other outlets. Journalists scrutinized the music of some of the artists they suspected to be fake and speculated about how they had become so popular on Spotify. Before the year was out, the music writer David Turner had used analytics data to illustrate how Spotify’s “Ambient Chill” playlist had largely been wiped of well-known artists like Brian Eno, Bibio, and Jon Hopkins, whose music was replaced by tracks from Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that offers a subscription-based library of production music—the kind of stock material often used in the background of advertisements, TV programs, and assorted video content.

Fast & Efficient Historical Weather Forecast API

On October 15 we started our journey through the book of John. For the last 2 months we’ve looked at Jesus’ birth, life, death & resurrection. We’ve seen miracles & heard Jesus proclaim “I Am” in many different ways. John’s point through all of this has been to help us believe- believe Jesus is the Son of God and the savior of the world.

In 2018, Boeing increased its net debt position by ($4.158bn), year over year, while spending $12.946bn on buybacks and dividends.

In doing so, she quotes a refrain attributed to her father, a film agent who’d sold hair driers before he secured the rights to adapt Ian Fleming’s novels.  “Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.” Broccoli’s response to such enthusiasm, one friend said, is often the same: Did you read the contract? Broccoli was irked in one early meeting when Salke referred to James Bond by a dreaded word: “content.” Using such a sterile term, one friend reflected, was like a “death knell” to Broccoli.   has complained to friends that he couldn’t land a meeting with anyone at Amazon above an “L6,” the internal designation for a senior role that is nonetheless six rungs below Chief Executive Andy Jassy, an L12.  At Amazon, the algorithm often does the work, surfacing shows to Prime users based on their viewing habits. During a company meeting about the second season, an Amazon employee admitted her own misgivings. “I have to be honest,” she said. “I don’t think James Bond is a hero.”. The room went silent.

Apple is close to reaching an agreement with Indonesia to lift the ban on iPhone 16 sales in the country after securing preliminary approval for a $1 billion investment proposal, according to Bloomberg. more.

What follows is an essay on how my thinking on bitcoin has changed since I began to write on the topic starting with my first post in October 2012. Since then I’ve written 109 posts on the Moneyness Blog that reference bitcoin, along with a few dozen articles at venues like CoinDesk, Breakermag, and elsewhere.

Nevertheless, RFK Jr. has failed his first political test regarding the incoming administration. He pushed to have his daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, installed as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The 44-year-old managed RFK Jr.’s presidential campaign and wasn’t an entirely implausible suggestion to be the number two official at Langley, given her service with CIA for several years in her twenties. However, that history is why she won’t be the deputy director.

Will largely get lost in the shuffle, but worth noting that the Biden brass just admitted they misreported the Syria troop count by 2x

Analyzing the average new vehicle sales per dealership location by franchise reveals stark contrasts in growth and contraction since 2019. Here’s a closer look at how some brands have adapted successfully while others face ongoing challenges:

Like I say, Mister, I believe that was the wonderfulest Christmas in the United States of America.”‘

Whitmer & Soros

Banker, princess, warlord: the many lives of Asma Assad How a girl from west London became the unlikely winner of Syria’s war

“Joe Rogan is a symptom of changing media systems, not the root cause.”

TAMPA, Fla. – U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces conducted dozens of precision airstrikes targeting known ISIS camps and operatives in central Syria, Dec. 8. The operation struck over 75 targets using multiple U.S. Air Force assets, including B-52s, F-15s, and A-10s.

Lastly, Levy smartly asks how long Cook sees himself remaining in the role. His answer sounds almost weary. While he gives no hints of imminent plans, it’s clearly on his mind. You have to start wondering when the next obvious point would be. Steve Jobs run as CEO (including his time as ‘iCEO’) was 14 years. Cook is just over 13 years now in that role, he’ll surpass Jobs next year, which is sort of wild.He’ll hit 15 years as CEO in 2026 and then hit 30 years at Apple in 2028.

“[Chinese customers] will probably take delivery of a few 737s, and maybe some 787s that are currently on order or may have been built already But I think that China, increasingly, for a number of reasons, doesn’t necessarily need all the Boeing planes that it might have thought it would need.” 

“and companies’ increasing use of financial instruments not easily characterised as either equity or debt”.

Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.

“It’s not a conspiracy theory if people really are out to get you.” sums up part of my reaction to this, but only part. There exists some amount of conflation between what private actors are doing, what state actors have de facto or de jure commanded that they do, and which particular state and political actors have their fingers on the keyboard. These create a complex system; the threads are not entirely divorced from each other.

Just 20 months ago I was amazed to see something that felt GPT-3 class run on that same machine. The quality of models that are accessible on consumer hardware has improved dramatically in the past two years. My laptop is a 64GB MacBook Pro M2, which I got in January 2023—two months after the initial release of ChatGPT. All of my experiments running LLMs on a laptop have used this same machine.

All of us agree the original Russiagate conspiracy continues even today. The Russia hoax was created by Hillary Clinton aide Jake Sullivan, who carries on with his lies today as President Joe Biden’s national security advisor. Christopher Steele, the British spy hired by Clinton to create the dodgy dossier, and his Fusion GPS co-conspirator Glenn Simpson are still doing the same work for similar clients. Andrew Weissmann, Peter Strzok, John Brennan, and more still peddle their lies. Elements of the original conspiracy were woven into Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 American election, then bogus Trump impeachments, January 6th prosecutions, anti-Trump lawfare, and Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Mar-a-lago raid.

Of these bonds the only surviving one is a 1,200 guilder bond sold on December 10, 1624, to a wealthy woman in Amsterdam called Elsken Jorisdochter. In return for her money, the water board promised Jorisdochter, her descendants or anyone who owned the bearer bond 2.5 per cent interest in perpetuity. Remarkably, this bond is still alive and pays €13.61 of interest a year. Yesterday, the current owner — the New York Stock Exchange — collected £299.42 of owed interest for the bond’s 400th birthday, which FT Alphaville was able to attend.

Every year, researchers from American University measure the percentage of parts originating in the United States or Canada in every car sold in the U.S. The result, the school’s Made in America Auto Index, is an excellent tool for exploring how interconnected the global auto industry has become. Telsa took the top two spots last year and the top four in a list filled with ties in 2024.  

We see a “waterbed effect” where squeezing prices in one area causes costs to bubble up elsewhere. When we eliminate the ability to charge for network services directly, the costs don’t disappear – they transform into other types of charges, fees, or inefficiencies that are harder to track and regulate.

“These small towns just really come through,” said Jeffris, sitting on a piano bench on the Opera House’s stage. “It’s really terrible what we’ve done, generally as a nation, in tearing down things. I’m a great believer in preservation and for improving the quality of life. Financially, for the community, it’s better.”. The list of projects touched by Jeffris Foundation includes some of the most well-known historic structures in the state. They include Villa Louis, the estate constructed in the 1840s by Hercules Dousman in Prairie du Chien; the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Seth Peterson Cottage on Mirror Lake; and the nearby Al. Ringling Theatre in Baraboo.

Health Data, Technology, and Interoperability: Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement

Turn-of-the-century high society is a hard place to get comfortable in. Few Sargent sitters seem completely at home there, though not so distressed as to up and leave. Few seem at home in their own clothes, even. The jewels pull, the gowns prickle and squeeze. Everyone seems to be breaking in a brand-new costume. Their only way out, since they refuse to walk out, is to acknowledge the charade and no longer try quite so hard to impress. Which is why the most comfortable-seeming Sargent figures are those like the actress Ellen Terry, who is dressed in the literal costume of Lady Macbeth, or the two children in “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose,” who are still young enough that any article of clothing is a kind of costume, or Ena Wertheimer in “A Vele Gonfie” (1904), whose billowing cloak Sargent told her to hold up with a broomstick, “simulating the volume and motion of her original entrance.” You can see the stick toward the lower right side of the painting, and Ena sees it, too, since this time her gaze points down and over instead of up and out. She has nothing she feels a need to hide, which isn’t the same as freedom but is in the vicinity.

The effort to tank Hegseth’s nomination is one of the most coordinated smear campaigns I’ve ever seen in DC.

If Pete Hegseth hasn’t kept a letter for almost 30 years, the biggest story today would be about West Point.

All stories feature Elena, a 42-year-old marketing executive whose healthcare providers participate in AcmeConnect, a Health Information Network (HIN)

My experience here has been extremely positive. We’re very fast in decision-making, more so than in some of the other cultures in Asia Pacific that may be more hierarchical or resist change, so that it will take longer to provide the kinds of services we would like to. But Hong Kong, because of its compactness, its agile mentality, and receptiveness to working with people from different cultures, has worked very well for us.

One very important change was quickly made: the name Vulcan was dropped as there was an operating system by that name made by Harris Computers in Florida. The name dBASE II was suggested, and there was no objection. Around the same time as the name change, Ratliff felt that it was time to abandon accommodations made for teletypes within the interface, and he moved the interface to being completely oriented toward screens. The retail price of dBASE II was $700 (around $2000 in 2023).

Timemap history: old maps online

President Biden commuted the sentence of Rita Crundwell, the woman who embezzled over $53 million from a small Illinois town and spent it on luxury goods, real estate, and a horse breeding business.

“The first sign an empire is failing is when its people question the institutions the empire was built on. The structure of government, the churches, the schools. They reject God because the emperors believe they are God. And the people become so rich, everyone believes they are an emperor as well. And too good to do the jobs that built the empire in the first place. So they outsource those jobs. And they open their borders to allow people desperate to do all the other jobs the other people are too rich to do. Then comes the guilt for all this wealth. But still the empire thrives. And now everyone questions their wealth. Then they question themselves. And then they reject everything that built the empire to begin with. They destroy their own symbols, attack themselves like a cancer, attack the people who protect the empire, attack you for protecting it. Then the wolves come. And all the people who lived like emperors will know the suffering they blamed themselves for creating. And they will be slaughtered. And a new empire will rise from its ashes. Then the cycle begins again.”

Further, we are supposed to believe that only twice as many FBI informants were in DC (26) on Jan 6 as there were in Whitmer fednapping (at least 12)

Born Gwynne Rowley in Illinois in 1963, Shotwell grew up in Libertyville, a suburb of Chicago, where she was a straight-A student and cheerleader. During her teens, her mother dragged her to a Society of Women Engineers conference — an event that changed her opinion on engineers as “nerds, social outcasts, nose pickers”, she said in a 2012 interview with the alumni magazine for Northwestern University, where she studied mechanical engineering and applied mathematics.

Her first professional role was at Chrysler, before joining The Aerospace Corporation and then rocket company Microcosm. In 2002, an ex-colleague introduced her to Musk, who offered her a job the same day. She joined as the seventh employee of SpaceX — one co-worker remembers her having the nickname “007” — hoping to galvanise space exploration out of a period of “stagnation” and “constipated” bureaucracy.

Syrians are still both shocked & mesmerized by the events of this month. How can a 54 year-old rule have such an abrupt closing chapter? This account was created to help shed light on the key events that led to Dec 8 & the departure of Assad. Key insiders have come forward to help piece together what happened. This excellent thread is by a Syrian fellow who knows what’s going on and does not derive his information solely from idiotic journalists.

After two years away from sportscar racing, Mercedes had returned with a masterfully engineered new machine. One of its drivers at Le Mans that year, John Fitch, later described the 300 SLR as “a ferocious racing car” with “a staggering complexity of parts.” Its body was made of ultralight magnesium alloy; Motor Sport reported that its fuel-injected 3-liter engine emitted an “unholy scream.” One month earlier, Fangio and the 25-year-old English driver Stirling Moss had powered theirs to a one-two finish at the Mille Miglia. In the hands of elite drivers like these, it seemed almost unbeatable.

America’s cows are now extraordinarily productive. In 2024, just 9.3 million cows will produce 226 billion pounds of milk (about 100 million tons) – enough milk to provide ten percent of 333 million insatiable Americans’ diets, and export for good measure.

Nobody’s ever done an audit of AT&T’s fraud, waste, and abuse because AT&T’s a trusted domestic surveillance partner effectively immune from meaningful government accountability. AT&T’s about to get a major chunk of the $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies included in the 2021 infrastructure bill.

Welcome to the age of average.

The visit left me in a pensive mood. As I got ready to continue my walk, I turned around one last time and looked at the little stone church. It appeared forlorn amid the windswept fields of East England. Once, there must have been a small but tight-knit rural community here, and the church was woven into its social fabric.

I’ve reported from inside Syria since 2011 and I live in the MidEast. So, let me explain in this thread what the implications could be for Syria and wider region in case the Syrian regime falls:

What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2025?
A Festive Countdown. 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 2025 will be:

“I complained to anyone who would listen about how archaic the technology was in my day and complain about how dreadful the data was,” he said.

Also can you imagine if your social media posts on Facebook would be the mechanism by which it was determined if you could or could not have a bank account!?

What could possess a respectable Victorian surgeon from York to spend much of his life travelling to remote and challenging parts of the world to study volcanoes and climb mountains? For Tempest Anderson, pioneering new techniques of ophthalmic surgery and inventing photographic equipment was not enough. He decided that his ‘limited leisure’ time could not be filled with reading, writing or socialising, he sought to occupy himself with something more exciting: volcanology. For him, it was a branch of science that did not have too much literature and had the ‘advantage of offering exercise in the open air’: he saw the sides of volcanoes not as dangerous but ‘picturesq

On December 3, 2024, Federal District Judge Amos Mazzant issued a sweeping, nationwide injunction against the enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). The CTA mandates more than 32 million small business disclose intrusive and confidential information to the federal law enforcement. The injunction comes less than one month before the January 1, 2025 reporting deadline after which businesses that failed to file a report, or whose reports contained errors or omissions, would be liable to civil and criminal penalties including fines of up to $500 per day.

Don’t ask agencies to identify every regulation they’d eliminate—a process that would take years and would get bogged down in bureaucratic procedures and legal challenges. Instead require them to justify the rules they’d keep. As things stand now, regulations will stay on the books unless someone acts to remove them, but a sunset rule would have them expire automatically unless agencies choose to keep them.

What is Software Anyways? Where Does it Exist?

6 lessons I learned working at an art gallery:
On agency, doing value-aligned work, and making your job fun

I am fairly confident of where the United Healthcare assassin escaped to. He escaped on an electric Citibike, according to police. I happen to continuously scrape Citibike data every minute, so I can see where individual bikes go. The only northbound Citibike to leave within 10 minutes of the shooting from any dock near the hotel went to Madison Ave & E 82nd St.

Evan:

This chart collection explores National Health Expenditure (NHE) data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). These data offer insights into changes in health spending over time in the U.S. as well as the driving forces behind spending growth. The data specifically show how healthcare spending changed in 2022 after deviating from historical trends in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A related interactive toolcontains more of the latest NHE data.

Excellent discussion w @RealDonaldTrump. I congratulated him on his election victory & we expressed our shared commitment to continue enhancing CY-US strategic partnership. We will work together to further reinforce our relations for the benefit of our countries & the region

I hunted for old annual (reports) when researching Buffett’s Early Investments (amzn.to/3B2SdgF). There are a few resources I’d point to:

1. There is a database called Mergent Archives that many libraries (such as the New York Public Library) have. It allows you to search for company annual reports and Moody’s Manuals and download them to a USB. This was the foundation for much of my book and is the easiest resource to use.

When Calvin and Hobbes hit the nation’s funny pages in late 1985, it took everybody by surprise. A literate comic strip? By a guy who can draw? About a kid who acts like a real kid? And it’s funny? And it’s from a major syndicate!? The cognoscenti of the graphic narrative form thought they’d died and gone to comic strip heaven.

But its true. Against heavy odds, one man with a lot of determination and a fierce sense of his craft may have single-handedly given the strips a new lease on their artistic life. It’s been a struggle, but Bill Watterson, like his creation, is the real thing at last.

In the end, I decided to close on a globally distributed database – CockroachDB. It’s Postgres wire-protocol compatible, and inherits some of the more interesting features discussed above – large horizontal scaling, strong consistency – and has some interesting features of its own.

Diátaxis is intended to help documentation better serve users in their cycle of interaction with a product.

The impact could be significant for commercial aviation—and Boeing in particular. Before its repeated self-inflicted wounds began with the 2018/19 737 MAX crisis, which continues today, Boeing was by far the largest US exporter. Deliveries of its 7-Series airplanes outside the US helped balance the trade deficit the US usually has

Boeing began Monday installing “workplace occupancy sensors” in the main Everett office towers that use motion detectors and cameras mounted in ceiling tiles above workstations, conference rooms and common areas.

Mapping the Podcast Ecosystem with the Structured Podcast Research Corpus

He held his breath. Here was the truth: the Lord had given him the word; and behold, there the word was written, there it rang out, a word that could be repeated and transformed for ever: “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

Examples of premature generalisation are everywhere. As a security and cryptography engineer, I see the same mindset in tools like PGP or JWTs (JOSE): overly-complex and easy to screw up footguns because they try to cover too many use-cases in a single tool. The reaction has been the development of special-purpose tools like Age or minisign, that follow the Unix philosophy of “do one thing well”. 

3) Lastly, @dehenau_ points out that it’s still really hard to get bank financing for any construction biz that isn’t one of the massive players. People often ask him why he doesn’t build homes. He would like to, but getting the loans to make that happen is nearly impossible

I present evidence that firms serve as tax-free consumption vehicles. Drawing on a unique combination of data from an electronic invoicing program in Portugal (e-Fatura), I show that individuals who control firms shift 36% of their monthly personal expenditures to firms and 31% of their household expenditures. The effects are driven by owner-managers of small closely held firms through expenditure categories on the border between business and final consumption but are widespread among business managers across the whole income distribution. My results suggest that the government revenue losses due to consumption through the firm amount to 1% of GDP. Reallocating the tax savings and personal expenditures hidden within firms to the reported household income of business managers increases the Gini by one percentage point and the top 1% income share by half a percentage point.

Glamour is more than a synonym for fashionor celebrity, although these things can certainly be glamorous. So can a holiday resort, a city, or a career. The military can be glamorous, as can technology, science, or the religious life. It all depends on the audience. Glamour is a form of communication that, like humor, we recognize by its characteristic effect. Something is glamorous when it inspires a sense of projection and longing: if only . . . Whatever its incarnation, glamour offers a promise of escape and transformation. It focuses deep, often unarticulated longings on an image or idea that makes them feel attainable. Both the longings – for wealth, happiness, security, comfort, recognition, adventure, love, tranquility, freedom, or respect – and the objects that represent them vary from person to person, culture to culture, era to era. In the twentieth-century, ‘the future’ was a glamorous concept.

Why I like my Model Y

In his second book, ‘Cambridge – Time & Space’, photographer Martin Bond has carefully chosen a picture for every day of the year selected from the period before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Photographs that capture the months before lockdown are interspersed with desolate images of deserted streets and candid moments as a city and its people searched for perspective during the chaos of a rapidly unfolding situation.

Merkel, a one-person case for constitutional term limits, is entitled to look out for herself. “I was the most damaging European leader since 1945,” was never going to be the gist of her book. To her credit, she doesn’t even use her best excuse: that a generic German chancellor of the period would have done the same things — on energy, on defence, if not on asylum — such was the then national consensus. The people I’m keener to hear from are her fans. Why did western liberals fall for Merkel? Because she was a woman? No, they disliked Margaret Thatcher, and mistrust Giorgia Meloni. Because she was of the left? No, her party is centre-right, even if the exchange rate between German politics and the Anglosphere kind isn’t so neat. Because she let in a million refugees, then? She was hailed as the “Queen of Europe” well before that. 

A truly suspended moment with actress Marion Cotillard and cellist Yo-Yo Ma on the poem “Le Pont” by Victor Hugo

The Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel directing the South African soprano Pretty Yende and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, in this pitch-perfect rendition of Amazing Grace at Notre Dame today.

Paying Krebs a visit these days isn’t easy. A recent trip to his home meant leaving behind all smartphones and internet-connected devices, to prevent any kind of digital trail that hackers could pick up. Visitors must navigate through winding Virginia farm country roads using a paper road map. No cameras are allowed.

Yet Ortberg also has “the biggest opportunity,” said Gautam Mukunda, a lecturer at the Yale School of Management. “Because the man who saves Boeing is going to be a legend of American business.”

There was no big CEO smile or swagger as Ortberg addressed the dire situation during the Nov. 20 internal all-hands presentation, delivered to a small in-person group at the Boeing Field jet delivery center and webcast companywide. 

Dressed in a dark Boeing fleece and khakis, Ortberg offered somber realism as he urged everyone in the company to pull together to lift Boeing out of the pit it’s in.

The energy required by AI services can only be fulfilled with Nuclear Plants. The energy requirement of running AI at scale is so huge that Microsoft, Amazon and Google all of them are now buying large amounts of energy from Nuclear plants as reported by New York Times.

The examples revealed here represent only a small portion of what experts say is a pattern of contractors overcharging DoD for a wide range of parts and weapons systems, a practice that reduces military readiness and drives up spending. A recent investigation by 60 Minutes highlighted rampant price gouging in the arms industry, including one case in which Boeing overcharged taxpayers by more than half a billion dollars for missiles used in the Patriot missile defense system.

And manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway. Will just get pilots killed.

It is tempting to want to see the positives of technology disruption as distinct from the disruptive nature of the person or organization causing disruption. As we all know it is pretty easy to be disruptive in meetings, the workplace, or online without being a force for a disruptive innovation. That causes us to wonder if it is possible to lead such change without being disruptive. In practice being disruptive is probably a necessary part of bringing a disruptive change to the world. It is not pleasant for either the incumbent or the protagonist, but it might be a necessary part of getting something done.

For many scientists, election to the Royal Society is the pinnacle of their scientific career. It establishes that their achievements are recognised as exceptional, and the title FRS brings immediate respect from colleagues. Of course, things do not always work out as they should. Some Fellows may turn out to have published fraudulent work, or go insane and start promoting crackpot ideas. Although there are procedures that allow a fellow to be expelled from the Royal Society, I have been told this has not happened for over 150 years. It seems that election as a Fellow of the Royal Society, like loss of virginity, is something that can’t readily be reversed.

One of my early wins was optimizing Uber’s app startup time by 30% a few years ago (app startup is a key metrics for all Android app). I achieved this by using an automated tool I developed to identify slow sections of the code. The tool could then prove (or disprove) that certain code sections weren’t needed “soon” (a complicated question that would need a few pages to answer) and could be moved to run asynchronously.

While this might indeed happen, it is not necessarily true, and understanding why it might or might not be true is helpful for understanding the economic pressures China faces. The basic assumption underlying the claim by Goldman analysts is that U.S. tariffs would force a contraction in China’s trade surplus. This is the part that isn’t necessarily true. This claim assumes that tariffs on Chinese goods would cause a reduction in U.S. imports from China, which, all other things being equal, would in turn force a reduction in China’s total exports and therefore in its trade surplus.

As defense analyst David Alman outlined in a prize-winning essay for the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, the United States simply can’t win a warship race with China. The United States effectively gave up on commercial shipbuilding during the Reagan administration in the name of free trade. In the decades that followed, generous state subsidies helped China dominate commercial shipbuilding, and Beijing’s requirement that the sector be dual-use resulted in an industry that can shift to production and ship repair for the military during a conflict, much as U.S. shipyards did during World War II. The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence estimates that China now has 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. China built almost half the world’s new ships in 2022, whereas U.S. shipyards produced just 0.13 percent.

During the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, Dr. Cheney discovered that “rarely anyone who had been thoroughly alkalinized with bicarbonate of soda contracted the disease, and those who did contract it, if alkalinized early, would invariably have mild attacks.”. While nearly everyone else would quickly succumb to illness, Dr Cheney reported that those who applied his baking soda regimen were not affected.

The former chancellor’s autobiography, Freedom, is unlikely to lend her a Churchillian place in modern German history

Every institutional revolution requires supportive troops on the inside, even if they are only a minority.

Wow, our government employees market is now projecting a new low of just 60k cuts For context, there are a record 23.4 million government employees When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he reduced the workforce by more than 80%

4. Appendix might protect against infection Some research suggests the appendix, which has an uncertain function and is often removed if it becomes inflamed, might be a reservoir for beneficial bacteria.

The rage of the entitled overclass. The elites won’t take Trump’s victory lying down.

The disconnect between policymakers’ housing aspirations and market realities continues widening, with October’s housing starts and permits dropping to recession-level figures despite widespread calls for increased construction.

There is no podcast with a more devoted and loyal DNC partisan audience than PodSaveAmerica. Yet almost every comment is scathing in their contempt for these people.

SWIFT averaged 5 hours to complete each layer of its fabrication process, while the fastest modern fabs take 19 hours per processing layer, and the industry average is 36 hours. Although today’s integrated circuits are built with many more layers, on larger wafers the size of small pizzas, and the processing is more complex, those factors do not altogether close the gap. Harding’s automated manufacturing line was really, truly, swift.

But nobody seems to have thought it odd to avenge the insult so much later, with a war that was to cost thousands of British lives, mainly through disease, and gain nothing. It was the public rejoicing on the declaration of this war that prompted Walpole’s other famous wisecrack: ‘They now ring the bells, but they will soon wring their hands.’

Makary is not obviously an accelerationist. Most of all, he likes to avoid groupthink and give matters a further look. While such a view is hard to disagree with, it makes me nervous in a bureaucratic context. In reality, “groupthink” is how many things get approved as quickly as they do. Just how many public health debates are we supposed to be reopening here? Should that be the priority of the FDA? Or should speeding up clinical trials and lowering their cost be the emphasis? When he thinks about FDA matters, is he willing to have questions of incentives arise first in his thoughts? If so, that would be a break from his writing career so far.

What were the best books you read this year?

Norway’s entrepreneurs are now indeed disappearing from society. In the past two years alone, a staggering 100 of Norway’s top 400 taxpayers, representing about 50% of that group’s wealth, have fled the country to protect their businesses.

The Rasputin of the MAGA movement has big plans for the new world order under Donald Trump—mass deportations, checking China, working with Elon and dismantling McConnell’s Senate—and if it requires a little “smash mouth” to get it done, so be it. In the meantime, he’ll be tuned in to MSNBC, watching the Democratic civil war unfold. More.

One essential point is worth making here. There was no legal or regulatory angle left for the government or regulators to kill the project. It was 100% a political kill—one that was executed through intimidation of captive banking institutions. That was the hardest part of this story for me personally. Not that we had failed, but that America, this country I immigrated to and became a proud citizen of because of its rule of law and value system, behaved in such a way for political reasons. It was a very tough pill to swallow.

The next DNC chair should make two things clear: No super pac money in democratic primaries and not a dime of corporate pac money for the DNC. That is a basic first step to ensure our party represents working and middle class Americans.

Back in the transitional era when the press wasn’t fully aligned with the state, they occasionally printed the truth. Here is what happened to Qwest’s Joseph Nacchio when he resisted NSA surveillance.

Obama came up again and again as one of the major reasons they became disillusioned with the Dems.

Everything David said is true. For example, here is the public letter sent to Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe threatening them with regulatory “scrutiny” to stop them from working with Libra.

BREAKING: The Federal Reserve just reported a $19.9 BILLION operating loss in Q3 2024 up from $16.9 billion in Q2. This marks the 8th consecutive quarter of operating losses for the central bank.

Getting different views helps root out obvious mismatches. It can also do the opposite and discover strengths that are unseen by others. It helps reduce one person bias, and though not perfect, is better than one person deciding on their own

As I nipped at my drink in the English winter rain, I thought about the ‘German Christmas Market’ thing. It’s clearly not enough to simply emulate this German custom or adapt it to existing local traditions. England could have Christmas markets that sold mince pies and other Chrismassy goods. Even the addition of mulled wine and grilled sausages (which I wholeheartedly approve of) wouldn’t have to be branded as explicitly German. After all, many Christmas traditions in the UK have German roots but nobody thinks of them that way.