REPORT: How AARP Makes Health Insurance Unaffordable.

Subsidized debt drives up prices, sucks up wealth, and makes it hard for millennials to buy homes

But <output>? Most have never touched it. Some don’t even know it exists.

Toyota said that its new batteries could significantly enhance driving range, charging times, and output, potentially transforming the future of automobiles. Compared to current liquid-based batteries, which use electrolyte solutions, Toyota’s all-solid-state batteries utilize a cathode, an anode, and a solid electrolyte. According to Toyota, the next-gen battery tech “offers the potential for smaller size, higher output, and longer life.”

For both hiring and promotion, decision-makers have a legibility problem. This problem will inevitability lead to a focus on details that are easier to observe directly precisely because they are easier to observe directly. This is how fields like graphology and phrenology come about. But just because we can directly observe someone’s handwriting or the shapes of the bumps on their head doesn’t mean that those are effective techniques for learning something about that person’s personality. 

Instead, state inspectors documented nearly 100 alleged new violations of the agreement. The letter also accuses the company of failing to hire an independent environmental manager to regularly inspect its construction sites. State regulators counted 689 missed inspections. The Boring Co. is disputing the violation letter, a state spokesperson said.

That’s because for decades, May and his family have managed May Ranch near the Arkansas River — a major tributary of the Mississippi River — to encourage native habitat to thrive alongside their cattle. This region is part of a swath of grassland that sweeps from central Canada to northern Mexico, vital to many species of birds that migrate across North America.

He managed to leave Saudi Arabia and was attempting to build a new life for himself in Virginia. All he wanted to do was write— and writing for the Washington Post, especially when we translated his work into Arabic, meant the world to him, even as he came under great pressure.

I started wondering: for the Free Texting service, could I bypass the messaging app restriction and access other websites freely?

Geosynchronous (GEO) satellite links provide IP backhaul to remote critical infrastructure for utilities, telecom, government, military, and commercial users. To date, academic studies of GEO infrastructure have focused on a handful of satellites and specific use cases. We perform the first broad scan of IP traffic on 39 GEO satellites across 25 distinct longitudes with 411 transponders using consumer grade equipment. We overcome the poor signal quality plaguing prior work and build the first general parser that can handle the diverse protocols in use by heterogeneous endpoints. We found 50% of GEO links contained cleartext IP traffic; while link-layer encryption has been standard practice in satellite TV for decades, IP links typically lacked encryption at both the link and network layers. This gives us a unique view into the internal network security practices of these organizations. We observed unencrypted cellular backhaul traffic from several providers including cleartext call and text contents, job scheduling and industrial control systems for utility infrastructure, military asset tracking, inventory management for global retail stores, and in-flight wifi.

What emerged is one of the most complete pictures to date of the modern surveillance industry. The tracking archive is unprecedented in scope, and reveals how the company and its clients surveilled all types of people from all over the world. Reporters interviewed more than a hundred victims, as well as former employees and industry insiders. A trove of confidential emails and documents provide a detailed inside account of how First Wap’s tech was marketed to authoritarian governments and accessed by corporate actors. Behind closed doors, First Wap’s executives touted their ability to hack WhatsApp accounts, and laughed about evading sanctions.

So John Kerry is back, lecturing us that agriculture—the very foundation of human civilization—is a climate villain that must be “front and center” to be “solved.”. Let’s translate the globalist grift. He isn’t talking about Chinese coal plants or private jets. He’s talking about YOUR food. What John Kerry is really saying: “We’ve calculated that independent farming and ranching are incompatible with our centralized control model. Your steak is a symbol of sovereignty. Your local dairy farmer is a node of resilience we cannot monitor or manage.

Erebor was granted “preliminary and conditional” approval by regulators on Wednesday, just four months after its application for a national bank charter in June — a sign of the Trump administration’s initiative to lower regulatory hurdles and encourage new banking entrants focused on digital assets and services. The administration has encouraged new entrants to the banking sector including from technology groups, prompting a number of fintechs and cryptocurrency companies to seek bank charters this year.

The Fact Graph is a production-ready knowledge graph for modeling, among other things, the United States Internal Revenue Code and related tax law. It can be used in JavaScript as well as any JVM language (Java, Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, etc.).

The California decision was announced by Space Launch Delta 30 this week. Under the new approval, SpaceX will be able to launch both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets from its two pads — Space Launch Complex 4 (SLC-4) and Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6).

“Almost every reasonable AI company that’s out there is saying, listen, if it’s a fair playing field, then we’re happy to pay for content,” Prince said. “The problem is that all of them are terrified of Google because if Google gets content for free but they all have to pay for it, they are always going to be at an inherent disadvantage.”

The “New Stuff” that you’ll see here is the result of my journey into the world of digital art. Believe me, this has been a bit of a learning curve for me. I hail from a world of pen and ink, and suddenly I was feeling like I was sitting at the controls of a 747. (True, I don’t get out much.) But as overwhelmed as I was, there was still something familiar there—a sense of adventure. That had always been at the core of what I enjoyed most when I was drawing The Far Side, that sense of exploring, reaching for something, taking some risks, sometimes hitting a home run and sometimes coming up with “Cow tools.” (Let’s not get into that.) But as a jazz teacher once said to me about improvisation, “You want to try and take people somewhere where they might not have been before.” I think that my approach to cartooning was similar—I’m just not sure if even I knew where I was going. But I was having fun.

Then one day at a Berkeley community bulletin board “there was a posting that said, ‘I’m driving to Madison, Wisconsin, and I’m looking to split gas with someone.’ And my mother took it.”

GREAT interview with @USComptroller:
?the bias of federal bank regulators “that only the largest banks can do innovation safely” must end (YES!)

This week, Canadian airline WestJet became one of the first to try to switch the ability to recline into a paid “perk” by announcing that it was reconfiguring 43 of its Boeing 737-8 MAX and 737-800  (BA)  planes to have what it classifies as a “refreshed range of seating options.”. In actuality, this means making customers pay for a seat that reclines.

I measured my reputation with mail-testerand got a 10/10 score. The missing PTR record did give me negative points, but those were offset by 2 free points for “trusted relay”. I’m also not on any blocklists, so my IP really is lucky 🙂

NEON CLASSES: BENDING BASICS

The art of neon and the bending of neon tubes is a fascinating craft! Learn the basics of neon and glass bending.

The Space Force is paying SpaceX $714 million for the five launches awarded Friday, for an average of roughly $143 million per mission. ULA will receive $428 million for two missions, or $214 million for each launch. That’s about 50 percent more expensive than SpaceX’s price per mission.

Summary: People often over-engineer solutions, and it leads to them running into problems with their CSS. In this article, we’ll take a look at the least amount of CSS that you need to make a decent looking page.

The book provides enough details to piece together how the early Standard Oil business model worked. The reality seems different than many popular accounts and is much more logically consistent.

That effort turned into the Clinton administration’s first crisis, but over time, what is now called diversity, equity and inclusion won out. President Barack Obama ended Mr. Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in 2010, allowing lesbian, gay and bisexual people to serve openly in the armed forces. He approved women in combat in 2013 and in 2016 opened all combat positions to women, revising some physical training requirements in the process. In 2016 he also opened the ranks to transgender soldiers.

Once the New York Times held out as unconnected contractually to the NFL – free to criticize its public subsidies, billionaire ownership class and bad examples set for young people. No more

Software quality was already collapsing when AI coding assistants arrived. What happened next was predictable.

Doctors say insurers are automatically downgrading their claims and paying less. Insurers say it’s their duty to prevent overbilling.

The 25 most interesting ideas I’ve found in 2025 (so far).

This is exactly my problem. Tech arrives as an option and ends up as an obligation.

But history doesn’t quite bear this out. Galileo was in his forties when he published his most radical works. Thomas Paine was forty when Common Sense reshaped political thought. Susan B. Anthony was fifty-two when she cast her first illegal vote. The assumption that genius peaks young has always been a convenient myth. It flatters the ambitious and terrifies the hesitant. It also blinds us to the fact that many of history’s breakthroughs came from people who had been around long enough to see patterns others missed.

7th edition of the Map of Near and Middle East Oil. Published by B. Orchard Lisle, International Oil Consultant, Pertroleum Technologist, Research Analystd, 1965. Majestic Bldg., Fort Worth Texas

It’s widely accepted that rosin potatoes hail from the South’s turpentine camps, where workers chipped and slashed and scraped pine trees to collect oleoresin (aka resin or gum), the trees’ natural defense mechanism. When a tree’s bark is breached — by a beetle, fungus, or a woodsman’s hack — it oozes gum, not sap, from the wound. When fossilized, oleoresin transforms into amber. When distilled, it yields turpentine and rosin, whose uses range from paint thinner and Vicks VapoRub to rubber cement and chewing gum, respectively.

Did you know we created an Excel chart with drivetrain part prices taken directly from official service catalogs – precisely to stop the misinformation pushed by mainstream media? The truth is that the most expensive vehicles to maintain are actually: 1) hybrids, 2) fossil-fuel cars, and only after that come EVs.

The Software Essays that Shaped Me

An effect that’s being more and more widely reported is the increase in time it’s taking developers to modify or fix code that was generated by Large Language Models. 

If you’ve worked on legacy systems that were written by other people, perhaps decades ago, you’ll recognise this phenomenon. Before we can safely change code, we first need to understand it – understand what it does, and also oftentimes why it does it the way it does. In that sense, this is nothing new. What is new is the scale of the problem being created as lightning-speed code generators spew reams of unread code into millions of projects.

It’s September 2025. We have Claude Opus 4.1. GPT-5. Nano banana. There has never been a better time in the history of computing to build software. Here are a few ideas I wish existed.

The Boat Race ins’t a cocktail party for gilded Oxbridge types. It’s free to watch, pulls two hundred thousand ordinary spectators to the Thames every year, and has always been a working-class London day out. Rowing may have its posh stereotype, but the event is about rivalry, endurance and spectacle – things any nation should be proud to show the world. Yet the BBC’s cultural gatekeepers have a deeper allergy: tradition that isn’t re-branded, rewritten, or apologised for. They can throw millions at “inclusive” events nobody asked for and wall-to-wall virtue TV. But a British crowd on the riverbank waving flags? That’s suspect. That’s “exclusive.”

Second, I speculate that the round circle carved into the stone, the centerpiece of the image, is not the sun but instead represents the North Celestial Pole (Earth’s projected rotational axis) as it appeared at some point in the distant past—based upon our knowledge of the Precession of the Equinoxes. Finally, I presume that the stone’s artist was both skilled in their knowledge of the night sky over their home and bore a desire to communicate an important message to those generations who followed.

After all, the transformation of the microcomputer hobby into a large-scale commercial enterprise came as a surprise to most outsiders. In 1977, the established mainframe and minicomputer makers remained cooly aloof from the microcomputer business. Clearly, computer enthusiasts had found in the Altair and its successors a fascinating gadget to occupy their spare hours. It did not necessarily follow that these toys had anything to do with the “real” computer business, any more than model rocketry had to do with putting a man on the moon. In a la of the leading minicomputer makers, Hewlett-Packard and Digital, were offered ready-made micro designs by computing-loving engineers within their ranks (Steve Wozniak and Dave Ahl, respectively), but both rejected the idea, unwilling to pursue a fringe market that seemed to have nothing to do with their business.[2]

The purpose of this article is to articulate how NASA ended up falling behind China, and more importantly, how the Western world could realistically retake the lead. But first, space policymakers must learn from their mistakes.

The effects of hospital systems acquiring physician practices are hard to determine, because until now, there has been no comprehensive source of data about these mergers and the effects of integration on pricing can be hard to isolate. New research by Yale SOM economist Fiona Scott Morton tackles these challenges, determining the scale of hospital-physician mergers and examining their effects on pricing. In their study, Scott Morton and her co-authors—Yale economist Zack Cooper; Stuart V. Craig and Ashley T. Swanson of the University of Wisconsin–Madison; Aristotelis Epanomeritakis of Harvard University; Matthew Grennan of Emory University; and Joseph R. Martinez of the University of California, San Francisco—found that these integrations significantly increase prices for consumers, because competition decreases.

No details due to encryption.

The guarantee structure (a more accurate way of saying it than “buyout”) is an interesting one, allowing the school some relief based on performance, and only up to 75%.  Of course, head coach candidates with more leverage would fight a clause like that and probably keep it out.

To get started, you need to have an Apple Silicon Mac (we support all M1 – M4 series chips) running macOS 15 or newer, with Xcode 16 or newer installed. The version of the Metal Shading Language we use (3.2, AIR bitcode version 2.7.0) needs the macOS 15 SDK, and you’ll get an error about incompatible bitcode versions if you run on an older macOS or use an older version of Xcode that doesn’t have the macOS 15 SDK.

“It dawned on me that it wasn’t going to be a (continuing) business and that it was just going to slide away and somebody would develop it into something else,” Fiege said. “I think the only way we can (keep) traditions is by taking the bull by the horns and making it happen.”

And while Mr. Kirk was building a conservative powerhouse in Phoenix, Ms. Kirk, who had spent her adolescence in nearby Scottsdale, had chosen to live in Manhattan.  Once he had confessed that he wanted to date her rather than hire her, and she recovered from the shock, “he engulfed me into his world,” Ms. Kirk said. “I made that choice. It’s so hard to articulate the beauty of an Ephesians 5 marriage when you actually have a man that’s worth following, to have a true example of a leader to look up to. And I had that in Charlie.” She added, “I’ve had so many people ask, ‘Do you feel anger toward this man? Like, do you want to seek the death penalty?’ I’ll be honest. I told our lawyer, I want the government to decide this. I do not want that man’s blood on my ledger. Because when I get to heaven, and Jesus is like: ‘Uh, eye for an eye? Is that how we do it?’ And that keeps me from being in heaven, from being with Charlie?”

Packers data suite.

Season ticket sales in general seating areas fell 10% from 2024 to 2025, and attendance at the first two home games was the lowest it has been since 1992.

When the family is unable to afford a spot at a campground, which can cost $25 to $45 a night, they park on remote federal lands, which are free for two weeks. But those sites don’t come with water or electricity and have spotty cell service. At times, the family has bathed and washed their clothes in a river and gone to the bathroom in the woods to conserve the water in their RV’s tank.

A collection of (mostly) technical things every software developer should know.

The standard ‘iron bomb’ to which the kits are added to create complete JDAMs raises the full price point by another few thousand dollars. The latest variants of the AIM-120 cost around $1 million apiece, while current-generation AIM-9Xs each have a price tag around $450,000.

Stories like the recent widow whose husband used to mow everyone on the block’s lawn who can’t do it themselves, because of age or infirmity, so now that is how she spends her free day, the one day a week she isn’t working at the plant or caring for her grandkids, pushing the lawn mower, which does tear her up now and then because it smells of her husband, can you believe that, a mower smelling of a man dead for over a year, but it does, and if you had only met him you would know why that brings me to tears, because they don’t make men like that anymore, a man who didn’t have a bad word to say about anyone and only cared about helping and that is who God struck down at sixty-five, which doesn’t seem fair, but he lived a good life and I only wish he would have had a few more years to go to his favorite granddaughter’s wedding, which is next weekend, down at the casino. Have you been? You should go if you haven’t.

A devout Christian, Thiel is expanding on a number of speeches and public interviews he has given about the Antichrist in a closed, four-part lecture series this month in San Francisco. The second lecture happened on Monday, and the series will end in early October. 

The findings appear to point to a program running outside the bounds of statute or oversight, experts say, with CBP officers exercising broad discretion to capture genetic material from Americans and have it funneled into a law-enforcement database designed in part for convicted offenders. Critics warn that anyone added to the database could endure heightened scrutiny by US law enforcement for life.

As a production engineer who has spent the majority of my professional life in manufacturing facilities, I cannot emphasise enough how much the unboxed process is a game changer. If Tesla make this happen, production costs will fall so dramatically that the competition will disappear from the market – wiped away. There is simply no way to compete with Tesla any more as product will remain superior but costs will be way down and with verxy low prices demand will grow exponentially.

Expectation: rapid progress in image recognition AI will delete radiology jobs (e.g. as famously predicted by Geoff Hinton now almost a decade ago). Reality: radiology is doing great and is growing.

For more than a decade, Murkowski has moved in the same Arctic policy circles as Maxwell, Borgerson, and Rogoff.

The other option is to ignore range or depreciation and buy the cheapest car possible and drive it into the ground. This works well for people who only need a car for around town — most people don’t drive more than 40 miles a day — and don’t care about features. This is what Helveston did when he bought a 10-year-old Leaf off Facebook Marketplace for $5,000. It had a remaining range of just 60 miles, but he drives no more than 30 per day.  “The miles are double what I need,” he said, and he doesn’t have to pay for gas or oil changes, either. “If it dies on me, I only invested five grand in it and I’ll buy another one.”

Unified by the VW.os operating system, these architectures aim to support over 40 million vehicles by 2030

There’s a problem with boxed mixes, and it’s impacting grandmas’ most beloved recipes. At some point last year, shoppers noticed Betty Crocker cake mixes shrank (again), this time from 15.25 ounces down to 13.25 ounces. And while few people would ever argue for less cake, the 2-ounce decrease is weighing particularly heavy on grandmas. 

Here he preached his first sermon on the Second Sunday in Advent, December 4, 1524, and on the following Saturday, December 10, was burned at the stake in the nearby village of Heide by a band of drunken peasants instigated by the ecclesiastical and civil authorities.

While marketing glorifies and normalizes complexity, several deeper, more innate forces draw us developers toward it:

Kitchen United raised $100 million in July 2022, including funding from grocery giant Kroger². Fifteen months later, the company shut down all eight of its Kroger locations². That represented 44% of Kitchen United’s entire 18-unit footprint². The company then announced it would sell or close every remaining physical location and pivot to “software only”³. Translation: We burned through $100 million and have nothing left to show for it.

How to self-host a web font from Google Fonts

Thus the naïve reader, who wants to take the printed word at its nominal value, logically infers a common attitude and purpose among the previously named Western politicians and the soviet enemies of perestroika. Common sense could protect the sane man from such an absurdity, but this runs out of answers in the face of the schizophrenia of political vocabulary, proving insufficiently idiosyncratic; he seems to have resigned himself without grumbling. The common retort is that conservatives are defenders of the status quo, whatever that may look like in the particular case, so conservatives living in very different societies, unsurprisingly, advocate very different and even contradictory programs. But if political classifications are not backed by political substance, then these classifications must be grounded in psychological or anthropological factors, common attitudes towards life. 

How big a battery would we need in order to be completely self-sufficient?

Chinese President Xi Jinping in July gave his clearest warning yet against “involution” — extreme price competition stemming from industrial overcapacity — when he pointed to reckless investment plans and questioned whether every province needed EV factories. Stella Li, the executive vice-president of BYD, China’s dominant EV maker, last week said Beijing’s crackdown on aggressive discounting could see as many as 100 carmakers out of more than 120 being “pushed out”. She was speaking on the sidelines of the Munich motor show.

Roll is the co-author of a new report, titled “Redshift,” on the acceleration of China’s commercial and civil space activities and the threat these pose to similar efforts in the United States. Published on Tuesday, the report was sponsored by the US-based Commercial Space Federation, which advocates for the country’s commercial space industry. It is a sobering read and comes as China not only projects to land humans on the lunar surface before the US can return, but also is advancing across several spaceflight fronts to challenge America. “The trend line is unmistakable,” the report states. “China is not only racing to catch up—it is setting pace, deregulating, and, at times, redefining what leadership looks like on and above Earth. This new space race will not be won with a single breakthrough or headline achievement, but with sustained commitment, clear-eyed vigilance, and a willingness to adapt over decades.”

But many of these beloved settings weren’t born from pure imagination. They were inspired by real places across Japan – some sacred, others endangered but all profoundly cherished. As Studio Ghibli celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, we’re exploring the real-world places behind some of its most iconic films.

Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of All Demos” at SRI showcased interactive computing innovations, including the mouse debut, hypertext, real-time editing, and collaborative tools, envisioning augmented human intellect.

The intricate model features what Macken says are hundreds of thousands buildings, landmarks and geographic elements across the five boroughs and their surroundings, including bridges, airports, the Hudson and East rivers, New York Harbor, Central Park, One World Trade Center and the original World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building. The work consists of 350 handmade sections that are pieced together and can be taken apart and moved.

IBM Tethnology Atlas

Elon came up with a new genius trick to beat rivals at time-to-market. Colossus 2 will be an even more impressive achievement than xAI’s first cluster. Let’s dig in.  The first half of this report will dig into the Colossus 2 prowess. The second half will discuss Grok models, our mid-to-long term thoughts on xAI, and the unique RL method xAI is using that may lead them to leapfrog OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.  More.

While that’s troubling, some law enforcement experts are more concerned that the accused man was able to stand directly next to the state’s most powerful executive despite having outstanding warrants in four states.

Today in Wisconsin we introduced Fairwater, our newest US AI datacenter, the largest and most sophisticated AI factory we’ve built yet. In addition to our Fairwater datacenter in Wisconsin, we also have multiple identical Fairwater datacenters under construction in other locations across the US.

“When you play blackjack, you play the odds, and every hand, there’s a right [or] wrong answer?.?.?. that wasn’t so dissimilar here, where the hand that we’re dealt by the FCC was one that there’s only one logical path that we’re going to be able to take.”

The actual design of the building is also spurring disgust over how ugly it is. Many are blasting the design as a “monstrosity” and an eyesore. Some have even said it looks like something the evil empire in Star Wars would build for the movies. But perhaps more concerning, the center has become a threat to the residents in the area.

Launch sites of the future need to be fully operationalized like an airport. That means multiple launches a day from multiple providers, able to launch when ready to support a variety of vehicles and missions. SpaceX is committed to working collaboratively with federal regulators, the federal ranges, and industry partners to realize this vision, including making significant investments in scientific research on blast and acoustics, physical infrastructure, and operational techniques and modern tools that foster dynamic, safe, and high-cadence spaceports in the U.S.

The Federal Trade Commission filed a bombshell lawsuit against Ticketmaster on Thursday, accusing the online broker of raking in profits through exorbitant fees and turning a blind eye as bots illegally resell millions of tickets to customers.

If people are uneducated and foolish, you can’t do much about it. People like to be foolish, but don’t make it easy for them. Argue with them.”

“The Imperial needs to be a destination, so a restaurant without a drive-thru should be there,” Sanford said. “Sadly, Imperial Garden cannot be the restaurant there because Chinese food is prepared over high heat and generates smoke and cooking aroma, which is problematic with residential units above.”

Days after someone revealed the news on social media, Samsung confirmed today that it is showing advertisements on some US customers’ smart fridges. Samsung said the ads showing on some Family Hub-series fridges are part of a pilot program, but we suspect that they may become more permanent additions to Samsung fridges and/or other types of screen-equipped smart home appliances.

It strikes me that no matter the service charge, or the quality of the restaurant — which John chides as “more like a backstreet cafe” — or whether privately owned or council-housed, you may still end up defecating onto your shoe in the middle of a bistro. No amount of ground rent can protect your dignity when there is an intrinsic lack of it in ageing. That’s the part The Thursday Murder Club glosses over. You don’t see Pierce Brosnan shuffling down a hallway in stained joggers, unsure where he’s going. Helen Mirren isn’t seen denuded of dignity, lying on her back and promising she won’t sue.

As California AG, Kamala Harris raided the home of journalist David Daleiden and dragged him through the court system for years after he exposed Planned Parenthood was illegally selling fetal body parts.

The VW Transporter has been in production in its various forms for 75 years in 2025, having first appeared way back in 1950. It’s won countless accolades and many more fans over that time, and plenty of those have been paying tribute in what is yet another notable anniversary year for the bus/van.

I agree that her role is less direct and, unlike with McIntosh/Fickell I’m not necessarily calling for her termination. With that said, I’ll direct your attention to this:

So, what’s the danger? If something on Starship fails, it could disintegrate in the atmosphere. Surviving debris would rain down to the ground, as it did over the Turks and Caicos Islands after two Starship launch failures earlier this year. Two other Starship flights ran into problems once in space, tumbling out of control and breaking apart during reentry over the Indian Ocean.

“In some ways it was a complete success,” Tim Barnes, who leads the CCCBR’s methods team, told me about the reform. “Allowing people to do what they wanted to do within a framework for what they could do.” For his part, Earis is happy with the revisions. Stedman Jump Triples can finally be found in the CCCBR’s official library.

All software construction involves essential tasks, the fashioning of the complex conceptual structures that compose the abstract software entity, and accidental tasks, the representation of these abstract entities in programming languages and the mapping of these onto machine languages within space and speed constraints. Most of the big past gains in software productivity have come from removing artificial barriers that have made the accidental tasks inordinately hard, such as severe hardware constraints, awkward programming languages, lack of machine time. How much of what software engineers now do is still devoted to the accidental, as opposed to the essential? Unless it is more than 9/10 of all effort, shrinking all the accidental activities to zero time will not give an order of magnitude improvement.

In recent years, OpenStreetMap has emerged as the de facto standard for global electrical grid data. However, many developing countries are still lagging behind. This gap limits rural energy access and slows down climate action:

In our paper Extracting Profits from the Public, we explain how utilities are forcing regular ratepayers to pay for the discounts enjoyed by some of the nation’s largest companies and identify ways policymakers can limit the costs to the public. 

The Submarine Cable Map is a free and regularly updated resource from TeleGeography.

“The term ‘they aren’t listening’ typically means the council didn’t agree with them,” Guequierre said. He added the council considered the neighbors’ concerns about stormwater runoff and added traffic from the apartment complex but said sometimes people “arrive at different conclusions.”

SpaceX especially wants Apple to cooperate instead of pursuing the C-3 constellation because the H-block and AWS-4 spectrum, that SpaceX is now acquiring from EchoStar, is not supported by any current phones (EchoStar’s Band 66 and Band 70 used different frequency pairings). Thus support from device manufacturers will be needed to get the new capabilities enabled by this spectrum into consumers’ hands in the near term. Of course if Apple doesn’t come around, then there’s always the possibility that SpaceX will announce a “Starlink phone” as Apple executives worried about in the May article.

Porsche is using Apple Vision Pro to showcase the internals of the new 911 Turbo S.

The study found 95 percent of the world exhibits “no statistically significant acceleration of the rate of sea level rise.” The researchers projected that observed sea level rise will work out to about six inches by 2100. That’s not insignificant. Six more inches of sea level could cause problems in many places. But they’ll be manageable problems, not calamities the instant-doomsday crowd says are coming. Bear in mind there’s money in crying doomsday – government grants, foundation funding, tenure, book contracts.

Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) is the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort, spanning half a decade, that combines the unique strengths of Apple silicon hardware with our advanced operating system security to provide industry-first, always-on memory safety protection across our devices — without compromising our best-in-class device performance. We believe Memory Integrity Enforcement represents the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems.

The inescapable crop math of sustained crippling commodity prices and high input costs has many growers screaming for immediate relief. However, bailouts are Band-Aids over bullet holes, contend farmers desperate for fundamental change.

We provide a first?of?its?kind dataset of 5?D blur fields—for smartphone cameras, camera bodies equipped with a variety of lenses, etc. Finally, we show that acquired 5?D blur fields are expressive and accurate enough to reveal, for the first time, differences in optical behavior of smartphone devices of the same make and model.

Oracle’s new market cap, near a trillion dollars, up nearly 50% this week, driven largely by this one apparently non-binding deal with a party that doesn’t have the money to pay for the services, seems more bonkers than most.

One of Britain’s largest stocks of second-hand books ever amassed can be found in the unlikeliest of locations: a vast former youth hostel in a pretty corner of the Yorkshire Dales. Meticulously sorted into subject areas, from naval history to 19th-century literature, architecture to zoology, over 150,000 volumes fill some 25 high-ceilinged rooms spread over four floors. To withstand the sheer weight of all those hardbacks, the building, which began life as a prep school in c1878, must surely be as strong as a Romanesque church.

Just like none of the buildings captured by F.A. Schwartz survived beyond the end of the nineteenth century, neither did the above Straßenmöbel make it for much longer. You might occasionally stumble upon one or the other gaslight but if so, cherish the sight – they are as good as gone, too.

It was a turbulent century of ideological struggles; the aristocracy survived by adapting to new political structures and by the absorption of an emerging bourgeoisie.

Can the biggest biotech outcomes come from repurposed drugs? “The most fruitful basis of the discovery of a new drug is to start with an old drug”, James Black (Nobel Laureate). Perhaps you can refuse to spend any money on early R&D and safety studies, and instead weaponize ChatGPT to index all the possible mechanisms in all the possible diseases and drugs that can potentially target those. I’ve heard this pitch from at least 4 different friends in the past 3 months, so I suspect many people are pursuing this avenue now, or some other approach to repurposing.

AdBlue is a diesel exhaust fluid used to reduce harmful emissions from diesel-powered vehicles. It is a legal requirement for heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) over 7.5 tonnes and diesel engines fitted with selective catalytic reduction (SCR). The use of AdBlue became more widespread with the introduction of Euro 6 emission standards in September 2015, which imposed stricter limits on nitrogen oxide emissions. As a result, diesel cars produced from this date onwards are subject to these laws and are typically fitted with AdBlue tanks.

Roughly a year and a half later, after what Wall called “a long, drawn-out battle” over lighting, city departments finished reviewing the project, moving it closer to construction. Wall said he needs a building permit — which has yet to be issued — to move forward with demolishing the parking garage as part of the new development.

Trader hired one of the builders featured on “Container Homes” but now thinks the company, MODS International, never really intended to build the home. It was supposed to cost $165,000 and be done by the end of 2021. Ultimately, all the company did before walking away was pour a foundation and plunk the five containers — two 40-foot-long ones for the first floor and three 20-foot-long ones for the second — on top of it.

Elizabeth Warren, Sept 16, 2024: “Fed must cut by 75bps on Sept 18” (the Fed cut by 50bps two days later).

Elizabeth Warren, Sept 4, 2025 to Stephen Miran: “What you are doing (by pushing for lower rates) will take an axe to Fed independence”

Vector Tiles are small files that also represent geographic features, similar to GeoJSON. The key difference is that they represent a specific sector, a tile (thus the name), at a specific zoom. That means if I want to display a map of the world with Vector Tiles, it will actually be a collection of square tiles pieced together. Imagine taking a globe and cutting it up in multiple squares – that’s what vector tiles are (we’ll ignore distortion and projections for now, that’ll be a post for another time).

You are NOT counted as “vaccinated” until 2 weeks after your 2nd shot. For the first 6 weeks, the vaccine is ineffective. Infection & death rates rise. But all those deaths are attributed to the “unvaccinated” group.

Now imagine if SpaceX could’ve had the freedom to not worry about flying customer payloads to get data during Falcon 9’s reusability campaign. Imagine if they could’ve tested engine out procedures or push booster reentry profiles, or try hot staging, or what have you.

Biden officials raised concerns with how he issued pardons, used autopen.

Can this vehicle save the German Auto Industry?

Over the past three decades, it has become arguably the most high-profile purveyor of — and flag-bearer for — architectural salvage. Today it is both a retail business and an interior design studio, headed up by Speake, that reimagines how reclaimed materials can be used. 

There are so many controls in macOS that sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees. This can leave uncertainty over essentials, such as whether your Apple silicon Mac really is properly secure, or maybe there’s something sinister going on with it? This is a question I’m asked not infrequently, usually when someone has been spreading disinformation or FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). So how can you check that your Mac is properly locked down and boots securely?

People threatening and throwing items at passersby, fights and other disturbances led residents and business and property owners in the area to reach out to the city to respond, Kipp Hartman, police captain for the Central District, told the Wisconsin State Journal. “We started to see some of the larger things being set up, kind of the bigger pieces of furniture, bigger things of property, tarps and stuff like that, which is kind of out of the norm,” Hartman said.

Funeral directors are increasingly asking the relatives of the deceased whether they would prefer for AI to write the obituary, rather than take on the task themselves. Josh McQueen, the vice president of marketing and product for the funeral-home management software Passare, said its AI tool has written tens of thousands of obituaries nationwide in the past few years.

Once again, we need to go back in time to understand how we got here. In the early days of computing, color was not a priority. Monitors were monochrome and most applications were text-based. The first color displays were developed in the 1970s, but they were expensive and not widely used. It wasn’t until the 1980s that color became more common, with the introduction of the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh.

A 2019 federal rule that went into effect in 2021 created a federal requirement for the prices of many hospital services to be posted but a November report from PatientRightsAdvocate.orgshowed that just 30% of Wisconsin hospitals are fully compliant with the requirements.

“It was the money magnet that attracted these people. It wasn’t a crisis—it was the money magnet that brought them here.”

Use the interactive map below to explore every one of Paul’s stops along his journey, the roads he traveled, and the stories that came about.

„Wenn Sie mich das Wort ‚Verhandlung‘ nicht haben sagen hören – das liegt daran, dass es keine war.“ Mit diesem Satz beschreibt Sabine Weyand den geopolitischen Preis, den Europa für Stabilität bezahlt hat: Die Generaldirektorin für Handel und wirtschaftliche Sicherheit in der Europäischen Kommission sprach ungewohnt offen über das neue Abkommen mit den USA – es ist ein Deal, der den USA den Zollvorteil lässt und Europa wenig zurückgibt.

Politics in the Trump era.

While the nationwide increase in massive data center projects has been seen in several other states, such developments in Wisconsin didn’t begin in earnest until July 2023, when Gov. Tony Evers signed the state’s 2023-25 budget, which included sales and use tax exemptions specifically for data center projects.

I’m now in the possibly-unique position of having (a) publicly opposed Lisa Cook’s appointment to the Fed board and (b) publicly opposed Lisa Cook’s removal from the Feb board, absent an actual finding of guilt.

The growing postal boycott of the U.S. is the latest proof that eliminating the de minimis tariff exemption on goods valued $800 or less is a shortsighted policy. As Taxpayers Protection Alliance Chief Regulatory Analyst Juan M. Londoño noted in a recent piece for The Baltimore Sun, “Under the executive order [ending the de minimis exemption], international suppliers will have two options: either pay the tariffs as a percentage of the package value or pay a simplified flat fee that starts at $80 and can go as high as $200 per package, depending on the effective tariff rate of the country of origin. Suddenly, [a] $17 bag of Colombian coffee could cost you a whopping $97. Justifiably, you go back to the lesser-quality option that you could find at the grocery store, which will also likely be ebhigher in price (and probably not from the U.S.).”

Removing human excrement was, however, a secondary purpose of Rome’s vast sewer system. There are very few examples of private latrines in Rome, which carried the risk of pipes becoming blocked, bad smells, vermin, and built-up gases causing explosions. Instead, historians have assumed that most Romans used the limited public facilities, though “there is abundant evidence showing that many people relieved themselves in streets, doorways, tombs, and even behind statues.” 

The core problem was the inability to turn abundant resources into a clear vision backed by political will. Federal dollars were funneled into a maze of state agencies and local governments with clashing priorities, vague metrics and near-zero accountability. Billions went to contractors and government consultants services such as schools, transit, health care and housing were neglected. For example, one firm, ICF International, received nearly $1 billion to administer Road Home, the oft-criticized state program to rebuild houses. More.

It’s unclear what Meta’s long-term retail strategy is as it scales its wearables business. Maybe we’ll hear more at Meta Connect 2025 in three weeks. But this much is obvious: if VR is ever going to move beyond its niche, we can’t leave the magic of the first demo to chance. Someone – Meta or otherwise – must give the right demo to hundreds of millions of people.

I was disappointed they chose to serve hot dogs over brats at the tasting, but executive chef Jacob Moss told me that hot dogs are more popular than brats at Camp Randall by a 3:2 ratio.

“When an insurance company becomes both health care provider and insurance payer, questions arise regarding potential conflict of interest,” according to a statement issued by the American Dental Association.  “From a business standpoint, dental insurance companies seek to minimize cost and maximize profit,” the statement continues. “As a result, patients may find their treatment options limited to what is most cost-effective for the insurer, not necessarily what is most effective for their oral health.”

As de Mero said: ‘The medieval streets in Salamanca, Siena and Heidelberg haven’t changed dimensions in 20 years. And [there’s no space] to make the garage bigger.’ He also pointed out that the proportion of cars under four metres built by European makers has shrunk from 50 per cent in the 1980s to five per cent now.

as usual, this post is a self-contained html file with no javascript, images, or other external resources – everything on the page is handwritten html/css, weighing in at around 49kB gzipped. it was really fun creating all the little interactive widgets and visuals this time around, i think i’ve improved in css a lot since the last time i posted.

Three Chinas, one lifetime: I imagine a Chinese family and there’s three completely different Chinas. One was about survival, the second aspiration, and the final one about prosperity.

Fun to look at property taxes in absolute dollar terms (left) and as a percentage of home prices (right).

The corruption is especially deep where employees use their access to receive both paychecks and benefit checks, a situation that was first identified during the COVID Pandemic when federal unemployment benefits were widely available and with little anti-fraud attention, according to the Ernst DOGE Caucus report.

Many of those services are still around in some form—someone who really wanted to could still launch a new blog on LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogger, or WordPress.com. But one of the field’s former giants is shutting down—and taking all of those old posts with it. TypePad announced that the service would be shutting down on September 30 and that everything hosted on it would also be going away on that date. That gives current and former users just over a month to export anything they want to save.

There are two possible explanations: Felicia is just not very smart, and allowed herself to be used by deep state con men. Or she’s in on it, and used her position to willingly participate in a literal foreign influence operation. Either way, it’s disgraceful.

How States and Cities Decimated Americans’ Lowest-Cost Housing Option is an excellent, hard-hitting piece making and extending these points and  significantly it’s not from a libertarian think tank but Pew: [more]

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had 630,000 print subscribers in 2004. After two decades of major population growth in the region, it now has 40,000, along with 75,000 online. It just announced that it will no longer have a print edition.

And a little south in Seal Beach, a scrappy company called AstroForge aims to land a satellite on an asteroid just a football field wide and mine possibly billions in platinum riches.

3. Reversible vs. Irreversible Decisions

This one’s gold. According to Werner, good decision-making starts with this split:

• Reversible decisions (two-way doors): move fast. 70% of the info is enough.
• Irreversible decisions (one-way doors): slow down. Think deeply.

We conducted a retrospective, observational study at four endoscopy centres in Poland taking part in the ACCEPT (Artificial Intelligence in Colonoscopy for Cancer Prevention) trial. These centres introduced AI tools for polyp detection at the end of 2021, after which colonoscopies had been randomly assigned to be conducted with or without AI assistance according to the date of examination. We evaluated the quality of colonoscopy by comparing two different phases: 3 months before and 3 months after AI implementation. We included all diagnostic colonoscopies, excluding those involving intensive anticoagulant use, pregnancy, or a history of colorectal resection or inflammatory bowel disease. The primary outcome was change in adenoma detection rate (ADR) of standard, non-AI assisted colonoscopy before and after AI exposure. Multivariable logistic regression was done to identify independent factors affecting ADR.

Yet, despite adhering to a long list of requirements and city requests, they diverge on everything from the number of buildings and amount and type of housing to what they would offer the public. Those include having no more off-street parking spaces than the 270 the lot has today, benefitting public transit by increasing demand for service in the area, and returning $9 million — a “fair share of revenue” — to Metro Transit. A request for proposals issued in April also outlined a number of city goals and recommendations, like having all-electric and energy-efficient buildings, a low ratio of parking spaces to units, plenty of electric vehicle charging stations and many subsidized units. Three developers responded by the city’s July 9 deadline.

Like Napoleon, Putin needs a settlement that will bring Russia back into the Western fold. Battlefield victory means little if Ukraine becomes a forever war. Like Alexander, Trump needs to find a way to turn Western defeat in Ukraine into a victory for him (as peacemaker) and a new way ahead, in which a losing war is magically turned into a stable and bountiful new strategic relationship.

Litigation is already looming. In the US, technology worker Derek Mobley has sued Workday, alleging an algorithm in its ubiquitous candidate-screening software discriminated against him on the basis of age, race and disability, throwing out his applications for more than 100 posts at different companies since 2017. The potential implications for the whole HR technology industry as it rolls out more sophisticated tools have “got everyone scared”, according to Stacia Garr, co-founder of RedThread Research, an HR technology research consultancy. (Workday has said the suit is “without merit”.)

To figure out who will win any given technology race, just look at the rate of acceleration of innovation & growth.

We’ve now had enough electric cars on the road – and for long enough – to have a good idea of how the battery holds up over time. Here we’ll focus on a metric used to capture the battery’s “State of Health” (SoH). It’s what percentage of a battery’s initial capacity is still usable after a given number of miles or years.

The name Hamna Wakaf might mean little to many readers. The name of its reported owner, however, is much better known. Multi-billionaire London real estate mogul Asif Aziz, who controls some of London’s most iconic properties, has been making quite the name for himself, described variously as “Mr West End” (Aziz owns everything from souvenir stores to high-end hotels in the West End) and, less generously, “the meanest landlord in Britain”.

Remarkably, investigations have found that most end up in one place: Huaqiangbei market in Shenzhen. Demand in China for second-hand phones is huge; those that cannot be unlocked are broken apart and rebuilt. And there is no better place to do that than Huaqiangbei, the world’s largest electronics market. Because Shenzhen is where many of the phones were made in the first place, there is a ready supply of skilled workers. 

Hyperclay returns to a simpler model: your app is a single HTML file you (and your clients) manipulate directly. Edit the file through its visual UI and it persists its own state.

Ed Martin sends letter to Letitia James asking that she resign for “the good of the nation.”

The new FAL building is essentially a copy of the present FAL, doubling the final assembly line capacity for the 787. Boeing has reached rate seven and plans to be at rate 10 per month next year. The expansion is planned to be finished in 2028, after which Boeing will have the facilities to reach a rate of 16 787 per month.

Mark Bertolini is the CEO of Oscar Health. We cover the near-death experience that shaped so much of his life and leadership framework, how a decision to raise wages actually increased shareholder returns, and what Oscar’s strategy for disrupting the healthcare industry has in common with pirate ships.

The ultimate goal of this factory is to build one Starship rocket a day. This sounds utterly mad. For the entire Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s, NASA built 15 Saturn V rockets. Over the course of more than three decades, NASA built and flew only five different iconic Space Shuttles. SpaceX aims to build 365 vehicles, which are larger, per year. Wandering around the Starfactory, however, this ambition no longer seems undoable. The factory measures about 1 million square feet. This is two times as large as SpaceX’s main Falcon 9 factory in Hawthorne, California. It feels like the company could build a lot of Starships here if needed.

A more apt label would be cash flow before bad stuff. But suppose for argument’s sake that all of Ford’s adjustments are defensible. Ford says it aims for shareholder distributions—including dividends and share buybacks—of 40% to 50% of adjusted free cash flow. It says it determines its first-quarter supplemental dividends based on the previous year’s adjusted free cash flow, suggesting that those payments count toward the prior year’s payout ratio. Calculated this way, Ford could come close to staying within the 40% to 50% range for 2025—if it hit the top of its guidance for adjusted free cash flow, skipped share buybacks completely, and decided not to pay a supplemental dividend in the first quarter of 2026. In that scenario, if Ford kept its regular dividend unchanged, its payout ratio for 2025 would be 53%, slightly higher than its target range. Ford has said it expects adjusted free cash flow of $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion this year, after factoring in $9 billion of capital expenditures.

I’ve written it for decades now: if you’re actually a “systems camera” maker, you need to enable the ecosystem that surrounds your product. Not partially, but fully. Canon is trying to not just control but own the entire EOS ecosystem. Witness the non-licensing and apparently suit-threatening surrounding the RF mount, for instance. I’d tend to say that Canon’s approach here is contradictory to one of their long-stated goals: own the majority of the camera market in volume. 

In an email to Tesla last month, a top NHTSA official asked for more information about the size of the robotaxi fleet, whether company employees can remotely control the vehicles, and the maximum speed of the cars. The official also sought a test drive for NHTSA employees. It is unclear if one occurred. 

Total revenue that SpaceX will receive from NASA this year is ~$1B out of ~$15B total, so ~7%. Moreover, NASA is paying SpaceX for astronaut & cargo transport to the Space Station, launching research satellites and some work for returning to the Moon.

“help build a purely AI software company called Macrohard. It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real!”

A local reporter pressed the Executive Director of Mpls for the Many today with some simple questions about the relationship between the Minneapolis DFL and the State DFL. This came after she criticized the process of overturning Fateh’s endorsement.

Revenue per room is down year on year in all but the most expensive hotels.

Nothing more fun at the Minnesota State Fair than getting super stoned and riding the SkyGlider.

But of the three bubbles he has inhabited in his working life, Clegg said he found Westminster “the most insufferable, partly just because of the living on past glories and the pomposity of it”. “I think what they’ll learn, which I learned, is you only have one crack at it.”

Meanwhile, the war goes on, which is another way of saying the destruction of Ukraine goes on. Talk about an unnecessary catastrophe.

“Drones and smart systems are redefining the modern battlefield,” Yu explained. “Rather than clinging to expensive legacy platforms, we must invest in capabilities that reflect the future of warfare.”

Moreover, this techno-centric narrative overlooks a critical reality: that militaries do not win wars merely by acquiring new gadgets, but by developing the institutions, training regimens, logistical networks, and doctrinal concepts that enable those tools to be used effectively at scale. Technology does not exist in a vacuum; it must be embedded within a structure that can harness it to achieve strategic effects. The belief that the United States can leapfrog its adversaries through agile startups and disruptive prototypes reflects the same flawed logic that plagued earlier revolutions in military affairs. Drones and AI systems may be tactically sound, and in many cases, they are; however, they do not, by themselves, answer the questions of manpower, sustainment, strategic coherence, or political will. In elevating technology to the status of strategy, these commentators and entrepreneurs mistake innovation for “warfighting” and “disruption” for victory.

My view of the collision at sea of China Coast Guard 3104 and PLA Navy 164 in the vicinity of Bajo de Masinloc in Zambales, Philippines. Before this, the Chinese navy and coast guard ships nearly collided twice trying to outmaneuver BRP Suluan of the Philippine Coast Guard.

For SpaceX, this is great business. The company gets to flex its “anti-monopoly” credibility as well as put cash into its pockets. Because the incremental costs of flying a partially reusable Falcon 9 are so low—perhaps as low as $15 million, by some estimates—SpaceX can plow competitors’ cash into further development of Starlink or Starship.

Not anymore. BYD’s new cars are good-looking, powered by world-class batteries, and boasting better overall build quality than most automakers in the West.

We investigate the information content of personal stock trades by IRS officials. We collect transaction-level data on over five thousand IRS officials’ personal investments and document substantial trading activity in individual stocks by officials across IRS departments.

Farmers want California to change its autonomous tractor ban.

Kodak, Olympus and Fujifilm – The Rise and Deep Fall of the Camera Industry.

The largest deciding factor in the application process has been “technical considerations,” Kuntz said. (EV charging) sites must meet needs for accessibility, ADA compliance and lighting, and be outside of a floodplain. No mention of electricity rates….

The effort has moved quickly. Middleton applied Monday for federal Transportation Alternatives Program grant funding after the City Council voted unanimously in support of the plan Aug. 5, said Abby Attoun, the city’s director of planning and community development. If accepted, Middleton’s bid for $240,000 would help it build infrastructure for BCycle docking stations. The city would contribute $60,000 of its own money toward the project.

Ever since I first encountered the medical field, something struck me as off about their relentless focus on blood pressure. Before long, I began to notice that the blood pressures the same acquaintances (e.g., relatives or friends) shared with me varied immensely. As I was pondering this, a long-time Eastern spiritual teacher shared with me their belief that the West’s relentless focus on blood pressure was due to it being much easier to measure than blood perfusion (healthy blood flow). Then, as I became more acquainted with the medical field, I began to notice a consistent pattern—whenever a drug existed that could treat a number or statistic, as the years went by, the acceptable number kept on being narrowed, making more and more people eligible to take the drugs that treated the number.

Trader said she’s in litigation with the company in an attempt to recover some of the nearly $500,000 she said she’s sunk into the project that it “left in a really bad spot,” as well as on other costs, such as rent incurred because the home wasn’t done on time.

“Safety today is a luxury,” writes Giugiaro. “Those who can afford a new car have a better chance of making it home alive.” He goes on to say, “I owe it to the technology I’ve helped, in my own small way, to shape. If I’d been driving a car from fifteen years ago—the average age of vehicles on Italian roads—I probably wouldn’t be here telling this.”