8.27

Open Terms Archive publicly records every version of the terms of digital services to enable democratic oversight.

Over the past five decades, the venture capital industry has become a notable force in fueling the start-up, growth, and impact of many innovative tech companies that have changed the world. Though the majority of startups do not receive funding from venture capitalists, in Silicon Valley they have invested in and helped launch and grow companies like Intel, Apple, Google and Uber, profoundly changing how billions of people live, work, and play.

Electricity maps.

Fourteen major American cities are part of a globalist climate organization known as the “C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group,” which has an “ambitious target” by the year 2030 of “0 kg [of] meat consumption,” “0 kg [of] dairy consumption,” “3 new clothing items per person per year,” “0 private vehicles” owned, and “1 short-haul return flight (less than 1500 km) every 3 years per person.” C40’s dystopian goals can be found in its “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World” report, which was published in 2019 and reportedly reemphasized in 2023. The organization is headed and largely funded by Democrat billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Nearly 100 cities across the world make up the organization, and its American members include Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Seattle.

By my count, there are currently 8,291 different vehicle license plates offered by the 50 states and the District of Columbia. States now offer a vast menu of personalized plate options for a dizzying array of organizations, professions, sports teams, causes and other groups.

The problem—whether or not you accept the premise that climate change threatens civilization—is that carbon-removal technologies are ineffective, and solar and wind power are nowhere near able to replace fossil fuel-based energy. The only way to achieve net-zero is by dramatically reducing carbon emissions, which would punish the American economy and destroy the capacity to develop technologies that might reduce the need for fossil fuels. “Think about the year 1970,” Mr. Huntsman says. “That’s the year we hit a trillion-dollar GDP, and the year Jimmy Page and Robert Plant wrote that great song ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ A great year, right? Well today we’re emitting roughly 6,500 million metric tons of CO2. Same thing we were emitting in 1970. And look how much more electricity we’re using, and look how many more transportation and miles we’re driving. We’ve expanded the economy 30 times over, nearly, and core CO2 has stayed flat. We should be celebrating this achievement, shouldn’t we?”

Four weeks ago, I was feeling guilty for spending so much time inside playing Tears of the Kingdom, so I took it on myself to plan something for the National Day long weekend. That something turned out to be a hike from the westernmost point to the easternmost point in Luxembourg.

Archaeologists affiliated with the University of Chicago discovered the tablets in the 1930s while excavating in Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire. However, the institute has resumed work in collaboration with colleagues in Iran, and the return of the tablets is part of a broadening of contacts between scholars in the two countries, said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.

Garg has personally guaranteed any losses the Japanese conglomerate may suffer if it chooses to sell the debt. Meeting the terms of the guarantee could force Garg to sell his Better shares and drive down the stock price, a filing warned.

I have been on the boat – submarines are always called boats, never ships – for less than 24 hours and am writing this log at a depth of 60m. Sorry, I spoke too soon. We are just rising to periscope depth – 18m below the surface – and the tall desk on which I am typing has started to list. At least I’m not in the toilet. I joined HMS Triumph in Crete for the final week of its 10-month deployment. I had never been on a submarine before and don’t especially like confined spaces. I plan to get off at Gibraltar six days from now, though the captain warns me this may not be possible if there is fog as the launch can’t come alongside.

The origins of baklava date back to ancient times. Around the eighth century B.C.E., people in the Assyrian Empire, which spread across parts of modern-day Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Syria and Turkey, arranged unleavened flatbreads in layers, with chopped nuts in between, to be enjoyed during special events. Centuries later, the Ancient Greek and Roman “placenta cake” (the Latin placenta coming from the Greek word plakous, or “cheese cake,” not the unsavory afterbirth) was a dish consisting of many layers of dough, filled with cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves. However, the earliest versions of baklava as we know it today came around 500 years ago, during the Ottoman Empire.

It turns out that one simple message to the large and diverse Sun community is actually quite hard to craft. Even for a big mouth who is always ready with a clever quip. The community includes our resellers and customers, our current and former employees, their friends and families who supported our employees on their mission to change the industry, our investors, our supply and service partners, students and educators, and even our competitors with whom we often collaborated.

I made a 800 square feet garden in San Francisco’s Mission District. Planning started in 2015 and we finally planted in January 2017. The process involved tearing up concrete, pouring a new sidewalk, hauling in clean soil, and patiently waiting for the wet season to plant.

Tiago thinks notes should be organized by actionability, and that each note should go in one and only one place in the following categories: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives. Conor thinks that notes should go everywhere, and that there’s no single top-down structure that can encapsulate all note-taking.

In the first interview since his appointment to Aria, Gur told the Financial Times that much of the agency’s success or failure would depend on its eight newly appointed programme directors who will select and fund projects. They will each have a budget of about £50mn. Aria expects to unveil the identities of the directors next month and Gur said: “They are empowered to take bold, not safe bets. We have an opportunity here to create something that could have a world-changing impact for future generations.”

What is this book about? Why is it not very good? Acemoglu and Robinson (AR) argue that countries are rich or poor because of their political institutions, not culture, geography or policy ignorance. I’ll do this as much as possible in AR’s own words. Why Nations Fail was written during the Arab Spring, so the preface begins with Egypt.

All of these people, who spent decades sending the youth of America off to foreign lands to die for ‘democracy,’ when faced with the choice to defend it with their persons, tucked tail and ran. Bear in mind, these were the stakes they themselves outlined in subsequent accounts; Trump was trying to destroy the American government; he was trying to overturn the Constitution. Fair enough, but what did they do when faced with that threat? By their own admission they didn’t know if the country would survive Orange Hitler’s assault and they couldn’t know police would shortly restore order. According to them, they faced the greatest threat a country could face . . . and they ran away. They hid under their desks and the world watched them do it. The hero of the republic was an incompetent diversity hire cop who shot an unarmed woman in the neck. That’s it. There was no insurrection. No one was armed and no one tried to take over. That accusation is idiotic. No less pathetic than the MAGAgeddon, however, was the response, to simultaneously call it the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor and to flee in terror from their posts. Our nation faces a mortal threat and the people charged with meeting it are moral and physical cowards. Trump’s normiecon followers, people who send money to Hannity but wonder if that Matt Walsh is a little extreme, shuffled diabetically into the seat of power and walked off with trophies like Alaric in the Forum. They pushed, and the shell cracked.

The inspector of Abu Ghraib. I first learned of the tortures and other abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib late in 2003 while interviewing an ousted senior officer of the Iraqi air force. He took a dangerous seven-hour taxi ride from Baghdad to Damascus, where we met in an out-of-the-way hotel for three days. He wanted a way out of Iraq for his wife and two children, and I passed his name and contact information to various officials in Washington. One evening he brought up Abu Ghraib, about which I knew nothing, and told me that the US military, desperate to learn about the opposition in Iraq, had taken to seizing mothers and their children and jailing them there. The women were sending messages asking family members in Baghdad to come and kill them because they had been sexually abused by their American guards and interrogators.

8.20

Have you ever asked yourself what happens when you upload your PDFs to one of the many sites that offer PDF modifications on the internet? You should! We modify your PDF files in your browser, no upload required.

I first heard about the rescue of Pisces III about fifteen years ago from a ship’s captain while on a cruise around the Aeolian Islands, off the coast of Sicily. I filed it away and two years ago decided to dust the idea down and explore if it would work as, what I imagined, could be a ‘non-fiction thriller.’ What appealed to me was not only the plight of the men at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean but this international ‘Brotherhood of the Sea’—teams from Britain, Canada and America—who all came together to work on the rescue mission.

The pilot was forced to spend about two hours flying over the desert and the sea to dump around 80 tons of kerosene to enable the aircraft to land safely, prompting questions about the environmental damage caused by the Green minister’s trip.

Today, Judge Andrew Macrae reported that he and other judges on the Hong Kong Court of Appeal unanimously overruled the convictions against Hong Kong pro-democracy activists Jimmy Lai, Martin Lee, Margaret Ng, Lee Cheuk-yan, Leung Kwok-hung, Cyd Ho and Albert Ho for organising an unauthorised assembly in 2019. Their convictions for participating in an unauthorised assembly were upheld.

Developer experience is how much your (present and potential) devs want to work on a specific project. Poor developer experience is a byproduct of dissonance between perceived complexity of a project and tangible complexity of the systems and processes related to it.

The origin of this disaster is now becoming clear:  massive amounts of dry, dead fuel (mainly grass), strong downslope winds produced by strong trades interacting with local mountains, and human ignition, most probably from powerlines.

That means she explored the thousands of new food and consumer brands, picked the best ones, and helped them launch and scale their products in Whole Foods stores — a life-changing opportunity for many businesses. Also an incredible experience in data-gathering, deal flow, and network-building for a future investor. 

Last week, CNN announced the hiring of Jamaal Simmons, fresh off his role as Vice President Kamala Harris’s communications director. Her office has yet to replace Simmons, seemingly aware that CNN is taking on that job for Harris. Only two weeks prior to the Simmons hire, CNN announced that former Biden White House communications director Kate Bedingfeld had been hired as an on-air commentator and contributor.

Dennis Giese taught DEFCON attendees how to secure their robot vacuums.

Chang thought the tech companies should focus on designing the microchips, and outsource the actual manufacture to a company that specialises in it. Chang suggested this to Texas Instruments over and over, but they never budged. Eventually, he was shifted sideways into a dead end role, and he quit.

Nearly 6,000 data request orders “complied with” in 2022. To ProtonMail’s credit, the organization publishes a transparency report going back to 2017. In it, we find the following statistics detailing legal orders for user data.

As a result of the crash, a large crowd gathered and multiple people began to obstruct paramedics, firefighters and police, according to MPD.

Judge interjects to reject notion that universities are ‘bastions of free speech’

Courtney McLain

Ninth Circuit Court Judge Milan Smith interjected during attorney Daniel Ortner’s remarks with a jest on the state of higher education in America, as seen in a recent clip uploaded to X.

An attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Ortner is seen presenting an oral argument defending conservative students’ free speech rights against California’s Clovis Community College.

“This court, and the Supreme Court, have repeatedly said that universities are bastions for free speech. They are important places for freedom of expression and debate …” states Ortner 

“Does it matter if that’s not true anymore?” Judge Smith jokingly interrupted.

8.13

Almost 16 million trees have been chopped down on publicly owned land in Scotland to make way for wind farms, an SNP minister had admitted amid a major drive to erect more turbines.

I have followed all the steps for turning off the “login with google” popup window, but it very irritatingly still popping up! How do I make it stop? It’s REALLY ANNOYING!

So instead, we let the ultra-wealthy transfer what should have been a write-down of their private debt onto the backs of the general public. The apparatus of the Federal Reserve was used to buy huge amounts of their bad debt at face value. The monetization of this debt, euphemistically referred to as “Quantitative Easing”, has been going on ever since—to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per month. The Fed’s balance sheet expanded from approximately $4.2 trillion in late 2019, for example, to over $7.4 trillion by the end of 2020.

“I do think that some of the people are going to jump into the race at any time. But that is not my concern,” she said. “Rather than sitting on the couch, watching TV and complaining about it, I want to do something. That is the reason I am running.”

AG was very composed [during the meeting],” an employee told The Post. “He said ‘The Times faced a crossroads years ago and found ways to be innovative.’ He said: ‘We can’t be stuck in amber. We can’t keep trying to pursue this one model.’”

Amazon has confirmed it now plans to launch the first two test satellites for the company’s Kuiper broadband network on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket as soon as next month, shifting the payloads off of the inaugural flight of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket.

“The attorney general’s deliberative approach has come to frustrate Democratic allies of the White House and, at times, President Biden himself. As recently as late last year, Mr. Biden confided to his inner circle that he believed former President Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted, according to two people familiar with his comments. And while the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6,” the paper reported.  

City Brewing Co. announced Monday the beer will once again be brewed in La Crosse starting in November as part of a long-term deal with Pabst Brewing Co., which now owns the brand.  Pabst, based in San Antonio, Texas, owns multiple beer brands, including Pabst Blue Ribbon, which are made under contract by other brewers. Old Style is brewed currently in Milwaukee.

I still don’t get the draw of Whataburger, however, until late in the week, when I realize I’ve mistakenly focused on the food and not the Idea of the Food. Throughout my adventure, I invited colleagues to dine with me, but most refused, which I took as a tacit admission of distaste for the chain. Then, one day, I ask one of the bigger Whataburger partisans in our office, who declines my invitation but, in doing so, gives me a breakthrough. 

A petition has been created, calling on senators and members of Congress to block the visas needed to bring in their foreign workers …

Schmitt is coming to Tesla from Bosch, where he had a more than 25-year career in engineering and manufacturing. The doctor in physics led several factories in Germany, China, and Mexico.

The typical reasons for the Chinese government imposing an exit ban that prohibits a foreigner from leaving China is for allegedly committing a crime, allegedly owing money to a Chinese company, or being in some other sort of dispute with a Chinese company or individual.

Scotus remains a polarising figure, but his humanist detractors would be horrified to learn that here in the 21st century we are witnessing a Scotus revival. Philosophers, theologians and intellectual historians are once again taking Scotus seriously, sometimes in a spirit of admiration and sometimes with passionate derision, but seriously nonetheless. Doubtless this is due in part to the progress of the International Scotistic Commission, which has in recent years completed critical editions of two of Scotus’s monumental works of philosophical theology: Ordinatio and Lectura. As these and other works have become more accessible, Scotus scholarship has boomed. According to the Scotus scholar Tobias Hoffmann, 20 per cent of all the Scotus scholarship produced over the past 70 years was produced in the past seven years. This explosion of interest in Scotus offers as good an occasion as any for introducing this brilliant and enigmatic thinker to a new audience.

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OpenStreetMap is the largest open-source geospatial project of all time. There are 18 formally established OSM chapters and dozens more local communities, collaborating on hundreds of communication channels, in more than 50 languages, in most of the countries of the world.  The map and its data is world-recognized as an essential source of geospatial ground truth. The API is used by millions of people, and the community is motivated,  multi-talented, and culturally and geographically diverse. OSM even welcomed its first paid site stability engineer a year ago in recognition of the size and scope of the project.

Except it doesn’t. Just look at the future line-up that Fisker, an ev startup, unveiled on August 3rd. It included: a souped-up, off-road version of the Ocean, which Henrik Fisker, the carmaker’s Danish co-founder, said would be suitable for a monster-truck rally; a “supercar” with a 1,000km (600-mile) range, and a pickup truck straight out of “Yellowstone”—complete with cowboy-hat holder. Granted, there was also an affordable six-seater called Pear. But though Fisker says sustainability is one of its founding principles, it is indulging in a trait almost universal among car firms: building bigger, burlier cars, even when they are electric.

“We said sure, but how do we make fritters?” Brown said. “Farm Trails arranged for us to get together with a couple of well-known local chefs at the home of one of them, and he had a bunch of recipes. … We practiced and tasted and picked a recipe, and so that was where it originated.”

Their absurd policies have turned Seattle into a playground for anarchists and criminals, and they seem utterly unconcerned with the devastating consequences of their actions,” wrote Jessica Taylor, who joined the force in 1998 and resigned last week. “If you haven’t noticed, the criminals are running this city.” Taylor refused to fill out a standard exit form and instead submitted the 15-page letter to chief of police Adrian Diaz, who she says “has brought this department and this city to its knees,” adding that the department “has transformed into a cesspool of corruption.”

Clarion Partners last purchased the building in 2014 for $107 million. It formerly included a ground-floor Walgreens that closed in Feb. 2022.  Sixty Spear St. joins a slate of office buildings exemplifying the struggling San Francisco office market. The 13-story 180 Howard St. building, known for being the headquarters of the State Bar of California, sold for about $62 million after being expected to sell for about $85 million.

This the thoughts and recountings of events that transpired during and after the release of information about the United States National Security Agency (NSA) by Edward Snowden in 2013. There are four perspectives: that of someone who was involved with sifting through the information to responsibly inform the public, that of a security area director of the IETF, that of a human rights expert, and that of a computer science and affiliate law professor. The purpose of this memo is to provide some historical perspective, while at the same time offering a view as to what security and privacy challenges the technical community should consider. These essays do not represent a consensus view, but that of the individual authors.

But don’t just consider the implementation cost. The real cost of increased complexity – often the much larger cost – is attention.

I fixed a bug that was in production for 2 years the other day. My boss said thank you, the UX researcher that called it out two years ago and was told it was not possible to do on our end said thank you. The product manager that had tried to tackle the issue a few times but gotten nowhere with their devs said thank you. It turns out that it was one of the biggest customer complaints and for some reason it had been neglected? ignored? idk. The change was about 20 lines of code, as they usually are, but had an outsized impact on customer satisfaction ratings. Why?

Still, LTCM seemed an unlikely candidate to spark a global financial panic, managing just $4.8 billion at the beginning of 1998. But it had also “amassed an amazing $100 billion in assets, virtually all of it borrowed,” Lowenstein writes, with most of Wall Street’s and Europe’s biggest banks on the hook. What’s more, thousands of derivative contracts—“essentially side bets on market prices”—added up to more than $1 trillion in market exposure, according to Lowenstein.

America’s strong populist tradition and distrust of “monied interests” has produced critics from Andrew Jackson to Donald Trump. Why should wealthy corporate executives and shareholders be rescued while the rest of the nation gets no relief from financial turmoil they create, they ask? “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon is said to have told President Herbert Hoover—according to Hoover, anyway—after the Crash of 1929. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system.…enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

FIVE MINUTES before we boarded the plane to Africa, Al Sharpton called the group into a circle to pray. It struck me as a fine idea. Sharpton’s plan to lead a delegation of American civil-rights activists into the middle of the Liberian civil war clearly was going to require some divine support. And that was assuming we even got there. A man in the departure lounge at JFK had just finished telling me a long and disturbing story about Ghana Airways, the carrier we had chosen for the eleven-hour flight over. Apparently, much of its fleet was in Italy at the moment, impounded for debt. The rest was aging, creaky, and, given the virtually bankrupt condition of the company, spottily maintained. “Ghana Airways probably won’t even exist a month from now,” the man said. I was all for praying.

NIH Secret Third-Party Royalty Database Uncovered

The officials also wanted to know why DuPont would agree to a deal with Huafon despite earlier misadventures with Chinese partners, including intellectual-property disputes involving Sorona that prompted Chinese authorities in 2017 to raid DuPont’s Shanghai offices and demand passwords to its research network.

8.6

But it’s one thing to build a good product; it’s entirely something else to get users to try it — especially if they have to quit the easiest and most ingrained thing on the internet to do so.

Disciplinary eccentricity, and restless work ethic that set him apart. In 1905, after working on a handful of comic properties, he debuted what would become his signature strip, a sprawling full-page color adventure called “Little Nemo in Slumberland.” The series was an elegant fantasy in which the young title character, whose name means “no one,” is drawn from his bedroom into boisterous adventures in Slumberland, where walking beds, Godzilla-sized turkeys, and races through the stars were common fare. Each full-page story ended with Nemo suddenly waking up in his own bed, begging the reader to consider what might be real and what might be a dream. Film scholar Tom W. Hoffer notes that in Nemo, either

Llama 2 is the latest commercially usable openly licensed Large Language Model, released by Meta AI a few weeks ago. I just released a new plugin for my LLM utility that adds support for Llama 2 and many other llama-cpp compatible models.

Headwind #2 is that San Francisco has tried to commit suicide, including out-of-control crime, cost, complacency, chaos, and some would argue communism. A wealthy friend recently told me that the state might as well tax you 100% because anyone who’s still living here obviously doesn’t care about taxes.

 “AS THE PRICE OF MEDICAL CARE MOUNTS, health insurance has become a necessity; but insurance premiums are becoming more expensive too, while benefits dwindle as rapidly as the costs of medical treatment increase. Money aside, the consumer’s major problem is finding his way about an increasingly impersonal, fragmented, irrationally arranged set of health services.” While this could be a quote from today, it was written in The New York Review of Books in 1970, just a few years after Lyndon B. Johnson introduced federal health care insurance for the elderly and the poor. Medicare and Medicaid were necessary, but the new multibillion-dollar programs had few guardrails; doctors and hospitals saw them as guaranteed subsidies.

Through a string of unchecked acquisitions over 30 years, Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS USA Holdings, and National Beef have gained control of roughly 85% of the total hog, cattle, and poultry processing market. For brevity, we’ll call these four meat processing corporations “BigAg” (or “the cartel”).

On the other hand, the long fuselage, with a fineness ratio well over 10, is not structurally optimal (too long and thin). The weight of the fuselage employed in a real aircraft is, therefore, higher than for the shorter and more optimal dual aisle fuselage.

“One thing we added that’s actually pretty unique is we created parking spaces in the shop for our road technicians’ trucks,” he says. “It keeps the trucks out of the weather, and it makes the technicians more efficient, because all their tools are right there with them in the shop.”

Before the pandemic, the vast majority of Chinese households and smaller private businesses relied on an implicit “no politics, no problem” bargain, in place since the early 1980s: the CCP ultimately controlled property rights, but as long as people stayed out of politics, the party would stay out of their economic life. This modus vivendi is found in many autocratic regimes that wish to keep their citizens satisfied and productive, and it worked beautifully for China over the past four decades.

Automation is often a solution in search of a problem. It is a choice people have made, not an inevitability and certainly not a necessity. For instance, the United States faces a scarcity of truck drivers. The American Trucking Association has estimated that in 2021 there were 80,000 fewer drivers than the total needed and that, given the age of current drivers, over a million new ones will have to be recruited in the coming decade. To deal with this deficit, many tech moguls, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, have invested in the research and development of self-driving vehicles, technology that would reduce the demand for drivers. For Bezos, such technology makes corporate financial sense; Amazon relies on low shipping costs to keep its prices down. But it does not make wider economic sense because millions of people would be happy to drive trucks in the United States—they just need to be allowed to work in the country.

All three admitted they flagrantly lied either under oath to Congress or to federal investigators. The three were never indicted for their false and perjurious testimonies.

Three decades ago, James Carville, the American political adviser, quipped about wanting to be resurrected as the bond market because “you can intimidate everyone”. Since then, the market has grown fivefold. Tighter regulations on traditional lenders resulting from the recent rash of bank failures in the US will force even more borrowers towards bonds.

Shall a penny have more weight in my heart and give me more courage than God himself, who holds heaven and earth in his power, who gives us the air we breathe and the water we drink, who makes our corn to grow and gives us all things? It is so scandalous that it cannot be uttered, that God should not amount to as much with us as a hundred guilders. Why not think that God, who has created me, will surely feed me, if he wants me to live? If he does not want this, very well, I shall be satisfied.